“FISHING CHANGES”: VESSELS, FISHING ARTS AND INTERCULTURAL EDUCATION IN THE COMMUNITY OF POÇAS, CONDE-BA, BRAZIL
fishing communities; changes; vessels; fishing arts; photoethnography;
intercultural education; teachers’ professional development
Brazil has a continental size and harbors plural communities, with diverse ways of
relating with the environment and the changes in their territories along time. This
diversity, however, is often devalued in school educational processes and one still
finds in science education literature and practice the idea that the knowledge
students share in the classroom should be replaced by scientific concepts in the
teaching process. Nevertheless, the knowledge shared by students in the school are
in part deeply linked to their original sociocultural contexts. Thus, it is important to
understand the specificities of each place in which schools are embedded, in order
to build a teaching that is closer to the realities of students, teachers, families and
other community members. It is equally important to ascribe the due value to the way
they understand the world and situate themselves in it. To the extent that they help
us understand the culturally situated knowledge that students bring to the classroom,
ethnographic, anthropological, and ethnobiological studies bring contributions to
science education practice and research. In the present study, we aimed at
understanding the changes that took place along time in the fishing culture of the
community of Poças (Conde-BA), specially those related to vessels and fishing arts.
We delimited the central theme of the research based on dialogues with community
dwellers about which aspects of the local culture should be present in our research
and collaborative work with the local school teachers, due to their importance. To
elaborate the present research, we used different narratives, such as the
audiovisual, photoethnography, and writing, and qualitative methods, such as
semistructured interviews, participant observations, field notes, and audio
recordings, always with the informed consent of each participant. Based on the data
analysis, it was possible to perceive that the capture of images was mostly restricted
to the research team. We elaborated, then, the proposal “Plural looks: audiovisual
and photographic productions in educational spaces”, in which fisherwomen,
fishermen, teachers and students can be agents in all steps of building these
narratives. Even though the research we carried out was crucial to our
understanding of how vessels and fishing arts changed in the community along time,
it will be important that the narratives presented here also serve as inspiration for
carrying out future studies in which the fishing communities’ dwellers be protagonists
of all the process.