BIODIVERSITY: NARRATIVES, DIALOGUES AND TRAINING OF COMMUNITY / SCHOOL KNOWLEDGE IN A KILOMBALL TERRITORY OF THE BAIAR SEMIÁRID
Ecology of Knowledge; Biocultural Memory; Quilombola Education
The main goal of this thesis is to identify and value other ways of thinking and being in
the world that consider the space of possibilities that dynamize the connection of human
beings in symbiotic processes with biodiversity, signaling the meaning and forms that
science/biology teaching can assume in the context of the quilombola territorial
singularity from Barreiros de Itaguaçu/BA. The challenge proposed in this dissertation
is also based on the articulation between quilombola education and science/biology
education, and for this, it is considered the need to think of quilombola education based
on the contexts of territorial use, on the appropriation of nature, on the ethnicity, the
knowledge of biodiversity and the biocultural memory present in the subjects'
narratives, since these elements constitute the daily experience of those who inhabit
quilombola communities and should be articulated to the teaching of sciences in order
to construct methodologies that provide learning, with dialogue between knowledge as a
starting point. These relations go beyond those that formal knowledge, with its
dichotomies and its need for order, perceives and accepts as existing. The field research
was based on semi-structured interviews, participant observations, document analyzes,
conversation circles, photographic records and field journal annotations. I articulate a
decolonial research perspective and envisage the possibility of understanding
biodiversity added to a regional cultural production of territories, valuing the material
and immaterial culture of local communities and demonstrating that biodiversity is not
only a product of nature, but is also a product of humans’ societies and cultures actions,
particularly, of traditional societies. It is from this analytical framework that I maintain
in this dissertation that biodiversity belongs to both the natural and cultural domain and
I consider important to draw attention here that is this biocultural universe, as a kind of
knowledge, that allows communities belonging to the quilombola territories to
understand it, to mentally represent it, and to handle it.