Course aims to combine quilombola knowledge with AI – 11/17/2023 – Education

Digital culture, education and ancestry. This is the tripod on which the QI – Quilombo Inteligente project was built, a distance training course that will promote technological tools for the development of educational and entrepreneurship resources based on the experience and knowledge accumulated by quilombola communities over centuries in Brazil.

Developed in a partnership between Brazilian universities, Quebec (Canada) and Cuba, the Museu das Favelas and companies, the QI will bring together 100 young quilombolas and people from Brazilian outskirts. Based on their questions, students will be able to develop application projects, artificial intelligence, immersive realities, games or podcasts that increase their visibility, job creation, income and value in the contemporary digital sphere.

Certified by USP (University of São Paulo), the course has 80% quotas for self-declared black people. Registration for the selection process opened this week, during the 11th Games For Change Latin America Festival, which takes place at the USP School of Communication and Arts until next Sunday (19).

Created by Gilson Schwartz, professor at USP and QI coordinator, the sustainable digital transformation festival has lectures, workshops and experiences. Registration for the QI runs until February. Classes and meetings take place from March 2024.

“There is an Afro-diasporic design happening, with a lot of good people making apps and games with a racial bias. We came to add to this movement of affirmation, in a collaborative stance”, explains Schwartz. “I’m white, Jewish, a professor at USP, that is, if I were to enter into the debate about the place of speech I wouldn’t even be able to propose this project. But we are starting from the perspective of dialogue.”

According to him, the QI begins with a moment of listening, in which participants will state their demands, agendas and interests to be developed throughout the course with a focus on digital media and culture.

“We discuss what citizenship is based on access to knowledge, employment, income generation, skills training. We have USP’s infrastructure, which is extraordinary, and we want the university to contribute to paying part of this enormous social debt, ethnic, racial and territorial that Brazil has with these populations”, he says.

For researcher Fabíola Morais, who is part of QI, it is important to introduce quilombola content into formal education and bring more technology into these communities.

“Quilombos keep ancestral knowledge around some practices that keep these communities cohesive and strong while, in the urban environment, everything is fragmented and everyone for themselves”, says she, who researches quilombos in Cavalcanti (GO) , a region with a marked presence of quilombola population.

From the meetings and their exchanges, participants will decide which areas they want to work in and the IQ will generate connections for the development of students’ projects, whether individual or collective, using digital tools.

“We want to promote meetings between quilombolas and young people from the periphery, who have some similarity with the same social place and its challenges, to work on research and experiences about our collective relationships”, he explains.

QI is supported by the Francophonie University Agency (AUF), an international cooperation organization that promotes scientific production in the French language and has one of the largest university networks in the world, with around a thousand teaching and research institutions from 120 countries.

“Being part of this network brings the prospect of increasing the impact of the project and making it grow,” says Schwartz. According to him, the focus of the project is to have an impact on more vulnerable social groups and prioritize participants who can multiply this content. “We want the participant to be someone with the potential to multiply, whether in the neighborhood, in the quilombo or at school.”

The Quilombos do Brasil project is a partnership with the Ford Foundation