Tornar-se professora pelo movimento de mulheres que ousam ensinar

Abstract

This memorial, entitled “Becoming a teacher through the movement of women who dare to teach”, follows the requirements for promotion from the Associate Professor IV class to the Full Professor class, describing my training as a woman, mother and teacher. The memories recreated here in words relate to a historical time marked by relations of ethnic-racial, gender and class domination, which constitute me. Therefore, I begin by introducing myself as a racialized white woman, daughter of a teacher and a Physical Education teacher, born in the interior of the state of São Paulo, mother and worker. Restless and curious since I can remember, movement constitutes the most intense way of relating to the world. I do not remember sitting or lying down as a child, but always in movement: running, jumping, singing, spinning, sometimes upside down and, at times, doing all of these at the same time. I grew up experiencing the strength and determination of my maternal grandmother, who educated us with the rigor and austerity that life provided her. I grew up seeing the intensity of schoolwork on my parents’ exhausted bodies. I experienced absence, fatigue, and unity due to work, and I understood that my family’s efforts to ensure that my two sisters and I could study were aimed at ensuring us better paid working conditions. The memories chosen to narrate the transformation of an euphoric child into a young Physical Education teacher say, in themselves, that it is in the body and through the body that the individual is constituted collectively (Celi; Escobar, 1987). I recognize, with Adroaldo Gaya (2006, p. 266), that “nothing can exist in knowledge that has not first passed through the body”. The reading I make of teaching, when remembering my sixteen years as a public servant, is that it involves teaching, the desire to learn and research, the tireless questioning of deciphering inequalities, the constant replanning, and the proposition of transformative actions in society, which go beyond the walls of the university. This means that the formative process of becoming a teacher, researcher, extension worker and manager is inseparable from the act of educating, as it constitutes the essence of teaching. To exist, in these terms, it is necessary to understand the importance of reading the world through words “as a political act and an act of knowledge, and therefore, as a creative act” (Freire, 1982, p. 13), “which is not exhausted in the pure decoding of the written word or written language, but anticipates and extends into the intelligence of the world” (idem, p. 9). The lenses I use to make my teaching practice intelligible involve ethical and academic rigor, loving kindness towards people and hoping for a collective, egalitarian, supportive and dignified world. Becoming, in this sense, means looking critically at the lack of indigenous, black and trans women in academia and, at the same time, continuing the fight for historical reparations for a colonial-modern racial project of oppression, invisibility and violence against their bodies. The issues that have been driving my teaching activity for years are related to gender and sexuality training actions with public school teachers; mapping academic discourses on the schooling of sexuality in Goiás; identifying government and public policies on sexual education; analyzing the absence of discussions on gender and sexuality in Physical Education curricula and the effects of this lack on pedagogical practice; desubstantiating the living corporeality of women in soccer and their absence in positions of power; denouncing gender-based violence against girls and women and the inequalities produced by the social metabolism of whiteness. The continuity of the work that is to come will maintain the rigor of a critical, progressive, secular and affectionate training, which aims to develop projects about women and with women, as well as resuming my work in postgraduate studies, enabling new paths of academic and human training for people who dare to teach.