Introduction

This text is born from the experience of the author of a children's literature book and a teacher, brought together by a student in a meeting that took place during the activities of the Didactics course, taught in the Pedagogy course at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR). This union is in line with what Gilles ^{Deleuze 1} (2002) states, for whom good encounters produce the potency to act. Moreover, Tomaz Tadeu² da Silva suggests that curriculum and education "[...] can be conceived as an art of encounter and composition, in which what matters is not the form and the substance, the subject or the object, but what happens among the different bodies that inhabit a curriculum" (2002, p. 47). In this way, the three women - the writer, the teacher and the student - were approached by the discipline Didactics, by Education for Ethnic-Racial Relations (Erer) and by literature.

We organized the text as follows: in the first part, the author of the children's book problematizes the field of Erer and the contributions of literature. Then, the teacher of Didactics recounts the training paths that resulted in the organization of the work of this subject, which included in its menu the topic: Didactics and Ethnic-Racial Relations. After that, the student of Pedagogy reports her journey in the performance of the academic practices proposed in the discipline in question, which resulted in choices for the evaluative activity discussed here: the preparation and implementation of a lesson plan. Finally, we present considerations about the work for Erer in the initial formation of teachers.

The Didactics classes taught in the Pedagogy course at UFPR in the year 2018 were composed and recomposed from the dialogues provided by the meetings with teachers who work with ethnic-racial relations and students, with whom we had the opportunity to learn. The experience with students in situations of school failure shows that the discussions about the teaching-learning processes need to be accompanied by the problematization of the social markers "race", "gender", "class" and "sexuality", which produce the accumulation of advantages and, in its double, disadvantages materialized in the inequalities of the school trajectory. Therefore, each Didactics class aimed to work on one of these markers. In particular, this experience report discusses "race".

The intention of this text is to produce a theoretical quilt that can be used as a reflective blanket in the field of initial formation. Six hands started the weaving and sewed these considerations in order to stimulate other people to report their formative experiences, just as each one of the protagonists of these experiences presents her own patch. We hope that, in the end, we form a quilt that has just been started, so that more patches can be inserted in it. Thus, the "tone" of the text is autobiographical, as Elizeu Clementino de Souza points out, when he affirms that "Working with memory, be it the institutional memory or the subject's memory, brings out the need to build a retrospective and prospective look in time and on the reconstituted time as a possibility of investigation and teacher's formation" (2007, p. 63) that are connected, as it happens in good meetings.

The Author

The description of the experience lived with Erer in initial training in a Didactics subject starts with me, not because I am the most important person in it, but because it was up to me to explain the concept of Erer, which is the fundamental line of this formative sewing. Since 2003, the Law of Directives and Bases for Education (LDB), nº 9.394/96 (BRASIL, 1996), has included Articles 26-A and 79-B (BRASIL, 2003), which establish the mandatory teaching of Afro-Brazilian and African history and culture, as well as determine that November 20th is on the school calendar, in order to deal with the Day of Black Consciousness. The municipal and state education systems are then required to comply with this determination.

In 2004, this demand was reinforced with the approval of the National Curricular Guidelines for the Education of Ethnic-Racial Relations and for the Teaching of AfroBrazilian and African History and Culture (DCN-Erer). These determinations also involve the Higher Education system in the training of teachers to work with Erer. Although the inclusion of specific disciplines to deal with the theme is present in the curriculum of some universities, especially in undergraduate courses, different disciplines can include the theme in their programs and menus to enable the insertion of this curricular component, which sometimes occurs very slowly.

An example of how slow is the response of higher education institutions in relation to their commitment to the fulfillment of this norm is in the UFPR itself (where the experience to be reported occurred), an institution that, only in 2019, changed the organization of the curriculum of the Pedagogy course, providing a compulsory discipline that addresses the topic in question, motivated by the requirement of the National Curricular Guidelines for Initial Training in Higher Education (which encompass degree courses, pedagogical training for graduates and second degree courses) and for Continuing Education, which provides, in the principles of Training of Teaching Professionals of Basic Education, in item II,

[...] the training of teaching professionals (educators and students) as a commitment to social, political and ethical project that contributes to the consolidation of a sovereign, democratic, fair, inclusive nation that promotes the emancipation of individuals and social groups, attentive to the recognition and appreciation of diversity and, therefore, contrary to all forms of discrimination (BRASIL, 2015, p. 4).

This determination reappears in the Common National Curricular Base³, when it explains, in its text, that one of the commitments of integral education is the strengthening of a democratic and inclusive school, which should "[...] be strengthened in the coercive practice of non-discrimination, non-prejudice and respect for differences and diversity [...]" (BRASIL, 2017, p. 14), as well as when it presents the General Competencies of Basic Education, highlighting that education should

[...] Exercise empathy, dialogue, conflict resolution and cooperation, making themselves respected and promoting respect for the other and for human rights, with welcoming and valuing the diversity of individuals and social groups, their knowledge, identities, cultures and potentialities, without prejudice of any kind (BRASIL, 2017, p. 10).

As we can see, the guiding documents of the Brazilian education curriculum foresee the treatment of diversity in a broad way and, consequently, of ethno-racial diversity or, as we prefer to call it, of Erer - a concept that appears in the DCN-Erer opinion coined by its rapporteur, Professor Petronilha Beatriz Gonçalves e Silva. In fact, in the text in question, this author calls attention to the need for a re(education) for this theme, because, for a long time, Brazil has educated its students for ethnic-racial relations based on the racist and hierarchical perspective, which values the cultural repertoire originated in Europe or in the United States of America and disqualifies the knowledge of African and indigenous origin.

This form of racism produces barriers in the teaching-learning processes, such as the feeling of not belonging to the school space and the invisibilization of the knowledge produced by the non-white population, which does not get recognition for its intellectual capacity and its academic-cultural production. These are elements, therefore, that contribute to the production of school failure.

In this sense, Erer is a turning point in the Brazilian curricular perspective, because it aims to insert in basic education and in higher education theoretical and methodological tools that enable people to build reflective contributions to question in and denaturalize the social hierarchization, which privileges white aesthetics, the white body and the knowledge coming from people characterized by these aspects.

It is in this context that the writer in me emerges. I am a university professor, a researcher of childhood and ethnic-racial relations, and I have been working in the Pedagogy course since 2009. I am also an activist in the black movement and I have been a teacher of basic education for 21 years. These multiple experiences that I have lived and still live drove me to write a book, whose title is Each one with his own way, each way is unique! The plot of this work presents a girl who loves everything about her, besides highlighting other characters and emphasizing the particular ways of being of each one. It is about saying subjectivities and how difference can be understood as not only an individual value, but also a social one. This was the motivation to write the book, whose text, before becoming a published work, was tried out in several teacher training courses. The idea was to put these professionals in contact with a literature that contained, at its core, a perspective of rupture with the reiteration of the privileged place of the white population as the only one entitled to be positively represented.

For me, the formative processes that take place during graduation or those carried out by the educational networks need to be connected to a perspective of emancipatory education, because, as Nilma Lino ^{Gomes (2003}, p. 170) alerts us, "School is seen, here, as an institution in which we learn and share not only school contents and knowledge, but also values, beliefs, and habits, as well as racial, gender, class, and age prejudices. School, therefore, is not an emancipatory space a priori, nor is it anti-racist by essence. It is a place of contradiction, and, therefore, if we, teachers, do not problematize with future teachers the values that guide educational processes, we will assume that racism, for example, is a possible conception in the organization of pedagogical work, because, "[...] when one has the opportunity to reflect on the different positions about these terms, the concepts are problematized and there is the reaffirmation of the political commitment to an antiracist education" (SILVA; DIAS, 2019, p. 27).

In this sense, my book is a piece of the quilt that makes up the discourse against the continuity of a racist school and education. What motivated me to write it was the need to sew my piece of fabric and, surely, to compose a broader history of the fight against racism and the institution of an anti-racist education. Thus, from this place of being a writer, it was possible to collaborate with a thread that weaves this narrative, to which I started and whose alignment receives, in the next topic, another part.

The Didactics Teacher

How to organize a Didactics subject to discuss school failure⁴ in populations that have historically been more affected by it? This question regulated the choice of themes and bibliographies selected to work with this subject in the undergraduate courses at UFPR.

The genealogy of abnormality and the production of the incorrigible (^{FOUCAULT, 2001}) produce some problematizations that allow us to understand how educational institutions undertake techniques to correct those who operate outside the norm. If these are unsuccessful, they are in charge of expelling them. With the prohibition to do so officially imposed by the Statute of the Child and Adolescent (ECA)⁵ and by the LDBEN⁶, the technologies used to keep certain populations from attending school become fine, subtle, sneaky, operated by practices of micro-punishment (FOUCAULT, 2009), which make the permanence unsustainable. One of these practices is institutional racism⁷.

Maria Aparecida Moysés and Cecília ^{Collares (1996}) point out how prejudice towards certain populations regulates pedagogical investment in their teaching. The authors called the prophecies made at the beginning of the school year by teachers about their pupils' approval or disapproval a diagnostic tirocinium. The researchers found that these prophecies were selffulfilling, fueled by the beliefs of educational and health professionals who affirmed the inability of some groups to learn. This belief makes the daily investment in the learning of these populations lower, resulting in failure.

Research conducted by Fúlvia ^{Rosemberg (2005}), Rosemeire Brito (2009, 2017), Marília ^{Carvalho (2005}), and Célia ^{Ratusniak (2019}) expand the problematizations about school failure, using intersectional analysis of the social markers race, gender, and social class. These discussions point to a process called "compulsory expulsion" (OLIVEIRA JÚNIOR; MAIO, 2016) or "soft expulsion" (BRITO, 2009), which pushes the black population out of school, masking this expulsion by treating it as school dropout (^{RATUSNIAK, 2019}). This practice is produced by institutional racism, operated by discriminations that destroy the sense of belonging.

Marília de ^{Carvalho (2005}) shows us that this feeling was produced by the practices and discourses of educational professionals who participated in the research she undertook and who attribute less intellectual potential to black students. The author also points to the whitening made by the interviewed teachers of students with good school performance and who self-declare black or black. As for those who had learning and/or behavioral problems, the teachers blackened the students who declared themselves as white, brown, or mulatto. Faced with this reality, the researcher calls attention to the academic silencing of the effects of racism crossed with gender and poverty as determinants of academic performance. One of the effects of this context is to make them doubt their power to learn, making leaving school a way to end the suffering, the feeling of powerlessness, and the revolt produced by this situation of exclusion. For this reason, they are expelled from the learning space, and not evaded.

The data on age/grade distortion produced by the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea) (2015) give us the dimension of school failure in the black population. In the early years of elementary school, the percentage of distortion for white students and white students is 8.1%; and for black girls and black men, 14.8%. In the final years, the figures are 17.7% and 28.3%, respectively. In High School, the difference between the indexes continues to be significant, with respective values of 8% and 29%, according to each ethnic group.

Considering the problem of school failure and racism as a structural element in its production, we understand Didactics as a powerful space for the production of subjectivities. Rosimeri de Oliveira ^{Dias (2014}, p. 416) alerts us that it is "[...] on the border of the constitution of existence, in the zone of indetermination that emerges from it, it is possible to deal with the theme of training as production of subjectivity. From an analysis based on the Foucauldian concept of subjectivity and on the notions of life and resistance, the author points out that formation is not only about giving form, but it is an experience that modifies the self, that makes it possible to displace and transform oneself in the relations with oneself and with other people, an inventive formation, that "[...] makes it possible to displace when it forces thought to derive from what was already placed as truth. It allows formation to happen as "[...] an effort to free life there where it is imprisoned" (^{DIAS, 2014}, p. 416).

These questions made me problematize the relationship between school failure, racism and Erer in Didactics. As a strategy, I planned activities that showed a racist practice: the erasure of black men and women in intellectual production and in the arts. I also worked with Law 10.639/03 (BRASIL, 2003), drawing attention to the need for its operationalization in schools and universities. Finally, we opened a discussion so that the students could relate and problematize situations of racism suffered or witnessed by them.

The way racism operates is very efficient. One of the arguments of those who practice it is sometimes accompanied by expressions such as "it's not like that!", questioning the perception of black people about what acts on them. That is why it is important to discuss race, racism, and discrimination in schools and universities, to denaturalize it, to make it evident, to make it conscious. In order to know how to trigger the instances for denunciation and punishment; and to think of strategies to fight it. This allows us not to reproduce it.

The reports brought by the Pedagogy students showed how racism acts. One student said that she was followed by security guards when she went to the mall. Another student, who worked as a secretary in a school, said that the teacher had asked her to print images for the class on May 13, which showed only black and poor people in subordinate positions. Other students told how they straightened their hair from a very young age to align themselves with an ideal of aesthetics. The "it's not like that!" started to be problematized and replaced by "that's how it happens! Its effects were debated and gained reflexivity. It was possible to collectively realize how the privileges of whiteness, the practices, and the effects of racism were recurrent.

These problematizations denaturalized practices, made us, in class, realize our daily racism. They also tensioned the relationships established in social, educational, and family spaces. A self-modifying experience, which transformed our relationships with ourselves and with others, as Rosimeri ^{Dias (2014}) has already pointed out. We understand that dislocations can produce cracks in structures. In these cracks, spaces open up through which flows flow. The Didactics and Ethnic-Racial Relations class overflowed the classroom, reached everyday life, called literature and broke the chain of repetition that naturalized racism. Moreover, it gained spaces of scientific dissemination and displaced the subjects from their places of knowledge and power. That is why the dialogue established with the student of the Pedagogy course was so productive and composed another piece of the weaving of this theoretical quilt, presented below.

The Pedagogy Student

The compulsory Didactics subject is offered in the Pedagogy course at UFPR. According to its menu, it should be addressed, among other things, the pedagogical relationship between teachers and students; knowledge and the different aspects of teaching and learning; the subjects of education; and teacher training and its specificities in the contemporary world.

It is important to emphasize that the organization of the pedagogical work of Didactics classes is in line with Resolution No. 2 of July 1, 2015 (BRASIL, 2015), which defines the National Curriculum Guidelines for Initial Training at the Higher Level (in degree courses, pedagogical training for graduates or second degree courses) and Continuing Education. In its chapter that deals with the initial training of teachers of basic education in higher education, its structure and curriculum, in paragraph 2, the resolution defines that

The training courses must ensure in the curricula [...] human rights, ethnic-racial, gender, sexual, religious, and generational diversity, Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), special education, and the educational rights of adolescents and young people under socio-educational measures (BRASIL, 2015).

The Didactics course effectively fulfilled the guidelines of the Resolution, which, in Chapter III, Article 8, Section VII, determines that graduates from initial and continuing education must be able to

Identify socio-cultural and educational issues and problems, with an investigative, integrative, and propositional stance in the face of complex realities in order to contribute to overcoming social, ethno-racial, economic, cultural, religious, political, gender, sexual, and other exclusions (BRASIL, 2015).

Finally, the classes met Principle II of the Formation of Teaching Professionals of Basic Education, explicit in Chapter I of the Resolution. The course also complies with what is proposed in paragraph 5, which establishes the commitment to the formation of professionals who are aware of the value of diversity and, therefore, opposed to any form of discrimination. In this context, the problematizations and discussions that resulted from these meetings produced a favorable situation for the development of Erer and the realization of an anti-racist education.

Considering these aspects, one of the activities proposed by the teacher responsible for the Didactics subject was the development and application of a lesson plan by us, undergraduate students, that articulated the themes presented in the subject, the pedagogical action and the discussions held in the classroom, such as the debates about curriculum and diversity, in connection with the perspective presented by Nilma Lino Gomes (2016, p. 23):

The curriculum is not involved in a simple process of transmitting knowledge and content. It has a political and historical character and also constitutes a social relationship, in the sense that the production of knowledge involved in it takes place through a relationship between people.

I have been interested in the issues of ethnic and racial relations since some experiences prior to higher education. The discovery of being black in the academic environment generated in me a need to deepen my studies in this area. In this sense, the Pedagogy course allowed me to have contact with scientific research and anti-racist education. One of the themes that concerned me the most was how race is a determining social marker in the production of school failure. Those who are black or black are much more likely to fail, drop out, or quit, because the belief in the intellectual potential of these subjects is affected by the various forms of racism.

I understand that discriminatory practices manifest themselves daily, sometimes veiled, sometimes quite evident, as reported by the students, producing harmful effects on the individuals to whom they are addressed, and are realized through practices such as the absence of black characters as protagonists in the books. Therefore, the theme chosen by me and a colleague for the lesson plan was African and Afro-Brazilian thematic literature, choosing to explore the work Each one is one way, each way is of one! The lesson aimed to approach Erer, deconstruct stereotypes related to the social positions of black people, and raise a discussion about the contributions of this kind of literature to the production of an antiracist education.

The lesson plan was presented to the teacher during the planning stage. The lesson objectives were discussed, as well as the use of methodological strategies that favored the learning of what was planned to be taught. The elaboration allowed us to reflect about the conception of education that the students are building during their graduation, as well as the role of the teaching professional in face of the challenges of contemporary society.

Our class began with the reading of the book Each one is one way, each way is of one! At this stage, there was no presentation of the images. After that, it was suggested that the students draw the characters of the family. In a second moment, the story of the main character was told again. This time, with the support of the images. The students were then stimulated to compare the drawing they had done with the illustrations in the book. It was very striking when everyone noticed that none of the drawings made by the Pedagogy class portrayed a family or any black character. They were all white.

After this moment some questions were raised to encourage debate: why had no one imagined a black family? Why did neither the black students nor the black students draw characters from their racial group? What impact does being exposed to exclusively white characters in literature have on the construction of people's imaginations? How important is identification with the characters in the construction of children's identity? What repertoire of African and Afro-Brazilian literature do teachers and students have access to?

The students reported surprise when they realized that they had not thought that the characters could be black. There was a discussion about possible memories of other black protagonists, the right of the child to be exposed to stories with ethno-racial variety, the quality of the illustration of black and black characters in children's stories, the importance of finding subjects that are physically similar to each other to build, thus, relations of identification. The issue of the initial training of education professionals for anti-racist education was also addressed. Also discussed was the strong presence of the fallacy of racism as a phenomenon already overcome in Brazilian society, a result of the myth of racial democracy, and that to deny racism in educational environments is to strengthen its institutional manifestation.

After the debate, the students had access to a variety of books with black, black and indigenous protagonists, so that they could get to know and use the works in their educational activities. The proposal fulfilled the objective of expanding the subjects' repertoire with regard to the ethno-racial theme, because several students reported feeling more prepared to approach racism and differences in their practice and to carry out pedagogical actions that value ethno-racial diversity with their students. Some even said that, after the class, they took books with valued black characters to the schools where they work as interns.

The productivity of the debate provoked the teacher of the course to invite the author of the book to a conversation about the construction of the work in question, presenting the importance of African and Afro-Brazilian literature in combating racism and promoting an anti-racist education. This practice reaffirmed Resolution No. 2, of July 1, 2015, which defines that graduates from initial training must be able to demonstrate awareness of ethnicracial, gender, sexual, and generational diversity, among others.

The action went beyond the limits of the classroom and was presented as an experience report at the Teaching, Research and Extension Week (Sepe) of the UFPR Education Sector, in May 2019. It was also communicated at the V Teaching, Extension, Research, and Innovation Showcase of the Colombo Campus of the same university, in September of the same year, for post-medium students of the Administration course. It was also exhibited at the III Black Consciousness Day of the Education Sector of UFPR and is now being published in an international journal.

Promoting a debate like this in different educational institutions and spaces revealed to be of utmost importance for the effectiveness of an anti-racist education, since there are still many racial stereotypes present and reinforced in the school and academic environment. This pedagogical experience has shown that initial training is an essential space in the construction of education professionals to act in a way to create environments free from racism.

Actions that promote the discussion about the importance of Afro-Brazilian and African history and culture in the genesis of the Brazilian society and stimulate the appreciation of ethno-racial diversity through various pedagogical resources used in the classroom are necessary and a right of all students. These are strategies and tactics that produce resistance against institutional racism and produce self-changing experiences, such as the ones I have reported here and that weave a proposal for the effectiveness of Erer.

Final Considerations

Our experiences were interwoven to compose this text. Using as a metaphor the act of weaving, we gathered several threads and fabrics that composed the theoretical production that supported our experience report. Just like the patchwork quilt, which, fabric by fabric, takes shape, the meeting of the writer, the teacher and the student produces theoretical tools to enrich the field of Erer.

Didactics has much to say about the production of school failure and education for equality. Besides problematizing the teaching-learning processes, it is necessary to broaden the discussions about the determinants of inequalities, such as racism. Thus, it is necessary to align the programmatic contents, foreseen in the teaching programs, with the determinations of the National Curriculum Guidelines for Initial Training in Higher Education and Continuing Education, with the DCN-Erer, and with the teaching of Afro-Brazilian and African history and culture. From this perspective, Didactics is constituted, therefore, as a piece that will help in the composition of Erer.

This experience report contains contributions that can add to, encourage, and potentiate other pedagogical experiences in the field of teacher education. We still have a lot to advance in the implementation of the guidelines presented here, aiming for all of them to enter the curriculum of undergraduate courses. We know that there are many barriers materialized in the slowness of the inclusion of Erer in the menus, in the disputes and in the hierarchies of the areas, which delegate these discussions only to specific disciplines, denying the importance of working on such issues in all areas of knowledge and even questioning the legitimacy of the guidelines' orientations. All these conditions are produced by institutional racism. Therefore, we reaffirm that initial training is a space for the constitution of subjectivities, and the non-effectuation of what these guidelines propose is working for the production of a racist subjectivity. Therefore, we brought a didactic-pedagogical possibility that points to diversity and literature as strategies of resistance, which allow the production of subjectivities free of this conformation.

By stitching together our formative experiences, first in that meeting in 2018 and then in the writing of this text, the writer, the teacher, and the student leave materialized this experience report. They are no longer separate fabrics, which each one carried. It is a theoretical quilt, which warms those who read it and allows the following reflection: even in a context in which conservatism incessantly tries to conform us, the defense of an education that is based on the problematization of racial-ethnic diversity and difference produces good encounters and presents itself powerful in the constitution of spaces of resistance, which produce theoretical keys for an antiracist education and a transformative experience of self.