Teaching and resisting

learning with indigenous students into democratic university’s context

Abstract

This article reports a teaching experience in the initial pedagogues training of indigenous Laklãnõ/Xokleng at a Higher Education Federal Institution into the state of Santa Catarina, between 2018 and 2023. The goal is to problematize the social relationships made in the time and space of university’s erudite culture, mostly eurocentric, related to people education’s whose main objective is qualification to work in their communities, schools and indigenous heritage centers and at the same time as their resistance to occupying them. To this end, the concepts of democracy, civil disobedience and indigenous resistance are discussed as guides for pedagogical practices, in addition to the theory historical-critical pedagogy from Dermeval Saviani. The results from the reported practices indicate that the social reality and the training objectives of indigenous students’ diagnostic knowledge were fundamental for the educational practices construction anchored to the intention of strengthening formative spaces in the indigenous communities, in addition to the indigenous student body at the educational institution. It is concluded that the permanence of economic minorities is still an inconsistency in the Brazilian university and its effectiveness requires collective and institutional intercultural work, in order to strengthen national democracy and the social rights it proclaims.