Nossa bússola aponta para o Nordeste: o ensino de inglês em escolas públicas baianas sob orientação dendêcolonial

Abstract

Language is not limited to a code or means of communication; it is a social practice, an instrument of expansion, domination, and power. It is also a device of insurgency, so that through it we can exist, resist, reexist (Souza, 2011) and no longer be excluded or underrepresented. Teaching English, a language anchored in imperialist bases (Pereira, 2019), with the aim of decolonizing education, is an enormous challenge. In a context in which language, languages, and education are in dispute, the political aspect is inevitable, and therefore neutrality is obviously null. In view of this, when proposing the southing (Freire, 1992; 2001; 2007) of praxis and, specifically, in this research, pointing our compass towards the Northeast becomes an urgent demand. It is common knowledge that teaching English is often reduced to the uncritical application of rules, grammatical structures and vocabulary notions (Siqueira, 2011). However, when teaching in public schools, most of whom are young black women and men from poor class backgrounds and who are targets of various forms of oppression, it is required that the teachers commit, ethically, with social political posture and supported by legal bases (Brasil, 2003; 2008) to discuss themes, not only those that certain teaching materials make invisible, but also to reflect the reality beyond the classroom. Discussions pertinent to the field of Critical Applied Linguistics (Muniz, 2016) support this work, whose object – continuing teacher training – was based on dialogues with basic education teachers, who participated in the course Decoloniality and Teaching English in Public Schools, which aimed to deconstruct beliefs about the teaching of the English language and which, methodologically, also consisted of the locus of the research, where the corpora were constituted. The course happened in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and being online allowed teachers teaching English in the public school system in Bahia to enroll. A total of 118 applications were received and of these, 33 colleagues participated in the remote meetings. Thus, the corpora were constituted from the interactions promoted through synchronous and asynchronous activities, in accordance with the methodological assumptions of an ethnographic and netnographic nature (Kozinets, 2014), through questionnaires, recordings and original teaching materials. Crossing and discussion of the data were carried out in the light of decolonial studies, with Critical Discourse Analysis as methodological support, which subsidized the qualitative reading to investigate which paths the teachers took in order to deconstruct beliefs about the teaching of English in public schools in Bahia. The results achieved signaled that decoloniality is revealed in different ways and that being on the path is one of the ways to materialize it.