The African diaspora in resistance: the CIATA Collective in action in the teaching of chemistry

Abstract

Affirmative action rises as a strategy to combat racism and can be put into practice in all spheres of civil society, because it mainly aims to undo the social structure that drives black people to underprivileged economic and symbolic positions. This study presents an affirmative action aiming to discuss and reflect on the following question: how can education for ethnic-racial relations be included in the teaching of chemistry? This research was constructed under the epistemological approach of Afrocentricity, in which the people from Africa and the diaspora must be the center of the study of social phenomena, therefore protagonists of their own history. The work was developed within the bias of action-research along two disciplines planned and performed by the Ciata Collective of Research Laboratory in Chemical Education and Inclusion (LPEQI) from the Federal University of Goiás. The speeches obtained by film recording and, subsequently, transcribed were analyzed through the reference analysis of the conversation. Our results show that planning and executing a Chemistry class thinking about the epistemic displacement demanded knowledge that was suppressed from our curriculum in the initial formation, which demanded, therefore, research and in-service training of both students and teachers.