Epistemic challenges and insurgencies: "towards an anti-racist and ethno-racial curriculum in the context of Brazilian Physical Education"

Abstract

For some decades, the Brazilian educational field has been strained by the need to problematize issues historically marginalized in school curricula, especially those related to social markers of difference, such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and territoriality. In the contemporary context, marked by the expansion of debates about social justice, equity, and human rights, education is understood not only as a space for the transmission of content, but as a territory of symbolic, political, and epistemological dispute, in which different projects of society, culture, and humanity are permanently confronted. In this scenario, the construction of an anti-racist education emerges as an ethical, political, and pedagogical imperative, demanding a critical review of historically sedimented conceptions that have reproduced silences, racial hierarchies, and the invisibility of knowledge produced by Black populations and Indigenous peoples. In this debate, it becomes equally indispensable to problematize the historical processes of racialization and dehumanization imposed on Indigenous peoples, frequently represented under colonial, stereotyped, and deficient perspectives. These representations persistently reverberate in the educational field, whether through the reproduction of prejudiced pedagogical practices, the persistence of Eurocentric curricula, or the use of inadequate terminology to refer to the original peoples and descendants of Africans in Brazil.