Indigenous Knowledge and Teachers’ Professional Development in a West Brazil Context

Abstract

This chapter discusses a teacher professional development program experience realized in West Brazil with a group of indigenous teachers of Terena ethnicity living in traditional villages and using Terena’s language. The initial goal was to fulfill the demands of a mitigation implementation plan regarding the construction of the road that crosses the area of more than 15 indigenous villages. The area is a giant wetland of about 250,000 km². The focus was on environmental issues related to the road, especially the bumps on wild animals. The program was built around two major concepts: culturally responsive teaching and resistance, with which we created a professional development program in three steps – (a) understanding teachers’ needs and requirements, (b) addressing teachers’ immediate needs, and (c) empowering and developing teacher autonomy. We start the chapter by presenting the context of the study and the teacher education program with the two concepts and three steps; we show how we used a Terena’s mythical entity of Whistler to interconnect environmental issues, traditional culture, and school topics. Then we discuss some results using Michel Pêcheux Discourse Analysis.