Narratives from the Crossroads": The learning of terreiro children before the implementation of Law 10.639/03.
Keywords: Decolonial Education, Religious Racism, Narrative Research, Black Childhoods
This research emerges from personal and professional narratives, seeking in ancestry the epistemological foundations to unveil the dynamics of education. The study proposes to analyze the experiences of teachers from terreiros of African and Afro-Brazilian religions in the Baixada Fluminense region who lived their childhood in a period prior to Law No. 10.639/03. The centrality of the research lies in the premise that terreiros are authentic spaces of knowledge and formation, with their own pedagogies that oppose the Eurocentric and colonial logic of formal education. The methodological approach is based on Narrative Research, which, guided by a decolonial sensibility through the concept of Escrevivência and from a transdisciplinary analysis of the interviews, seeks to understand how terreiro childhoods built their identities and learning processes in a context of a lack of representation. The work investigates how religious racism and epistemicide manifest in school, generating silence and invisibility, and how hegemonic theories of child development, by disregarding the plurality of knowledge, perpetuate a colonial teaching practice. In light of this, the research articulates the pedagogies of axé and orality as a counterpoint to this monoculture of knowledge, and decolonial pedagogy as a path to social and epistemic justice. The study, by valuing the narratives from the crossroads, presents itself as a mechanism for the claim and rescue of memories and knowledge that have been systematically denied.