African history teaching lacks resources and staff – 04/18/2023 – Education

The municipal education network in Brazil has, for the most part, little or no action to apply a law that establishes the teaching of Afro-Brazilian and African history and culture in basic education. Just under a third of the education secretariats have organized actions, and more than half do not make money available for the theme.

This is what a survey carried out by the Geledés Instituto da Mulher Negra and the Instituto Alana, published this Tuesday (18), points out. The survey gathered information from 1,187 departments that responded to digital questionnaires in 2022. The margin of error is two percentage points.

The law completed two decades in January this year. Its application still depends, in most of the country, on specific initiatives in the classroom or in teacher training. Where there is support, there is still a lack of administrative and financial structure to expand.

This is the case of Lorena Bárbara Costa, 45, who has been a teacher for 17 years in the municipal network of Salvador, Bahia. “Actions are up to professors who are activists and who defend the study of content related to the law”.

In the capital of Bahia, she works in one of the nuclei that supports teachers’ actions. “I’ve realized that the biggest challenge is to do continuing education. As long as we have material to work with and the teacher doesn’t know how to do it, we don’t advance.”

Lorena’s daily life reflects the concerns with the theme among the secretariats that participated in the research. In Brazil, 49% of enrollments of children and adolescents are in the municipal network, according to the 2022 Basic Education School Census.

Most schools teach African and Afro-Brazilian history and culture in the first segment of fundamental education, from the 1st to the 5th year (86%). Next come preschool (68%), second part of fundamental, from 6th to 9th grade (66%), and daycare (58%).

There is no segmentation in the study on secondary education, since it is offered by less than 2% of the municipal secretariats —most of the students in this stage are in the state network.

Among the secretariats, only 29% have ongoing actions to promote African and Afro-Brazilian history and culture in teaching. In 2008, the law was supplemented to include indigenous peoples, history and culture.

More than half (53%) have actions linked to commemorative dates, such as the abolition of slavery, on May 13th, and November 20th, National Black Consciousness Day. On the other hand, 18% reported to the survey that they do not work to comply with the law.

For Tânia Portella, partner and education consultant at Geledés, the survey portrays the 20 years of the law and what still needs to be done.

“When the 10.639 amended the Law of Guidelines and Bases of Education, the expectation was budget allocation, initial and continued training for professionals”.

She says this still needs to come into play. “The big data here is to value those who keep this agenda active, without letting the law fall into ostracism, and demanding those who are not doing it.

The need for investment to fulfill the teaching of ethnic-racial relations is a consensus. The research points out that 39% of the secretariats, according to the managers, invest or have resources for teaching actions. 52% don’t have it, and 9% of managers say they don’t know.

In addition to the resource, only 5% have a coordinator responsible for the area. 7% have one and 14% two or more professionals.

The five main challenges to applying the law are the lack of support from other entities, such as the state and federal government, and organizations (53%), difficulty in transposing the precepts of the law into the curriculum and projects (42%), the lack of of information on the subject in the secretariat (33%), lack of interest and lack of mobilization of professionals (31%) and lack of supervision for implementation (20%).

“The municipal networks claim the lack of support from other bodies, so this is an opportunity to act. It is what we expect from a federal government that says it is concerned with this agenda”, says Beatriz Benedito, public policy analyst at the Alana Institute.

For her, the main mishaps pointed out in the survey require a coordinated policy. For Benedito, reinforcement should come with the return of Secadi (Secretary of Continuing Education, Literacy, Diversity and Inclusion), of the Ministry of Education, and the creation of the Ministry of Racial Equality.

The main themes pointed out by the municipal departments for education are diversity of quilombola, Afro-Brazilian and African cultures (60%), genres, styles and black authors in literature (43%), food and African and Afro-Brazilian food culture (33 %), racism and privileges (32%) and presentation of black artistic references (21%).