Continuing education of teachers in intercultural education: a case study in educational anthropology

Multiculturalism is present as a cross-cutting theme to be developed in elementary schools, as provided by the Common Core National Base, its foundations being found in a booklet on Cultural Plurality of National Curricular Parameters, which guides that interculturality should also be practiced in the school routine, as a form of intercultural education, promoting an environment of tolerance in schools. The present article is a case study in educational anthropology, investigating the continuing education of teachers in intercultural education and in anthropological knowledge that supports this. The study was carried out with a group of educators from the 4th year of elementary school, from a private school in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo, in order to verify the occurrence or not of changes in their professional culture, after a process of continuing education in intercultural education. Its methodological procedures consisted of participant observation of teachers in the process of continuing education in intercultural education and semi-structured interviews with them before and after training, through the hermeneutic, interpretive and comprehensive approach of Geertz's dense description and Bardin's content analysis. As a result, we noticed that, before continuing education, the group of teachers did not have theoretical knowledge about the anthropological concepts that underlie intercultural education, but managed to develop some practices in this direction. During and after continuing education, we noticed that teachers were able to acquire greater theoretical knowledge on the subject, but mainly, they increased the scope of their practices in intercultural education, abandoning punitive practices in favor of dialogic, cooperative and democratic ones, a phenomenon that was noted in relation to the entire group of teachers, which makes us realize that there has been a change, in this sense, in the professional culture of this group of teachers.