“Será que eu fui formada para isso?”: reflexões acerca da formação de uma professora de inglês para crianças atuando numa favela no Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

The interest in understanding how the favela territory is conceived by the teachers who work there and investigate whether this conception is a reflection of the teacher training are the motivating factors of this study, which is guided by the principles of Exploratory Practice of understanding a phenomenon in its context of origin (ALLWRIGHT 2003a; 2003b; MILLER; 2012; COLOMBO GOMES; MILLER, in press), by the constructs of critical language education (PESSOA; SILVESTRE; MONTE MÓR, 2018) and critical race literacies (FERREIRA, 2015a) and reexistence literacies (SOUZA, 2011). It is sought in this paper to answer questions regarding teacher training and how teaching practices, occurring in favela territory, reflect that training. In it, episodes of life (LINDE, 1993) are rescued as a form of reflection and search for understandings about my training as a teacher. This is an autoethnography of a qualitative-interpretativist nature, situated in the paradigm of applied linguistics. The Freirian conceptions of criticism and of education as a practice of freedom, as well as life history as theoretical contributions, are the guidelines for data analysis, categorized in a phenomenological way as themes (MANNEN, 1990), which emerge from the lexical recurrence in the textual texture itself. The understandings point, firstly, to racism as a power structure that is historically related to the formation of the favela territory and produces the violence that impacts the peripheral bodies, crossing their material and subjective experiences and, subsequently, to the need for continued education that supports an anti-racist education. This study develops in the context of the pandemic by COVID-19 and has its writing harshly affected by this episode, as well as by episodes of violence in the favelas that culminate in this period.