Critical interculturality in the formation of science teachers: a legacy of brazilian cooperation in East Timor

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to bring to the reflection some questions and possibilities for the formation of science teachers, which emerged from the processes of implementation of the Follow-up Project of the Teacher Education Program and Portuguese Language Teaching in East Timor (PQLP), carried out by the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC). These questions point to the importance of recognizing cultural diversity in the classroom, as well as proposing an understanding of culture to guide the importance of critical interculturality and decolonial formative practices. Methodologically, it is a text of a theoretical-empirical nature, based on the analysis of an experience in the scope of Brazilian educational cooperation in East Timor, which are articulated the problematization of educational assistencialism in the teacher education, based on little dialogical and without focus on the intersubjectivities of the participants. The main considerations were the need/opportunity to understand the issues related to the understanding of critical interculturality as a concept associated with pedagogical practices in various contexts, beyond those provided by south-south cooperation. In this sense, the aim is to overcome a naive, and apparently transparent, notion that relationships between cultures isolate themselves from pedagogical relationships. Thus, the contexts of teacher formation such as the PQLP, point to the recognition that the processes of globalization require a transcendence of national or ethnic scope, in order to contemplate intercultural relations in all spheres of knowledge production, among them the school, as an institution.