The “In-Between” Intercultural Knowledge Production: A Case Study from the Teacher Training Kaingang Ethnicity in Southern Brazil

Abstract

As a reflection of an ongoing research project, whose wider scope of analysis focuses in the expectations and produced stares about indigenous education by students of Kaingang ethnicity enrolled in Graduation Bachelor Courses in Indigenous Intercultural Pedagogy, Mathematics and Sciences of Nature, all three offered by the Universidade Comunitária da Regi ? o de Chapecó (Unochapecó), this study problematizes to what extend the intercultural knowledge acquired over the training process of Kaingang indigenous teachers may be converted into reflections focused on their conceptions of education, (re) signification of their identity and autonomy within a context of an intense multiculturalism emergence as well as cultural hybridism, which characterize contemporaneity. The results indicate that, for those students, the intercultural knowledge may be triggering as an instrument of changes, inside and outside their communities; it strengthens and nourishes the debate around the role of formal education, the school and the indigenous teacher as a mediator between worldviews and cultures, in constant confluence.