Escrevivências docentes negras do curso de licenciatura em educação física da UFMA

Abstract

The access of Black women to teaching positions in Brazilian higher education is still marked by historical challenges related to structural racism, gender inequality, and epistemic exclusion. In the field of Physical Education, these barriers become even more evident in the face of an academic tradition guided by Eurocentric standards of body, knowledge, and practice. This study analyzes how the lived experiences of Black female teachers, who participated in the creation and implementation of the Physical Education undergraduate course at the Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA), reveal experiences of confrontation, resistance, and the construction of a teaching practice traversed by race, gender, and class. It adopts a qualitative approach, grounded in hermeneutic phenomenology complemented by lived experience as an epistemology of resistance (a way of producing knowledge from lived experience in everyday relationships, where the personal intersects with the collective) and as a narrative methodology (the act of researching and narrating one's own experience as a practice of constructing and expressing knowledge). The data were produced through a Dialogue Circle, entitled “Black Women Teachers Weaving Memories in Physical Education,” held within the scope of the VI Black Women's July (JUPre) and the V Afrocentric Education Conference (JEAfro), a space for sharing and listening, in which narratives of lived experiences emerged that articulate memory, body, and ancestry. The results reveal that Black women teachers face multiple forms of delegitimization and inequality, but also construct strategies of resistance and affirmation, transforming the academic daily life into a field of struggle and (re)invention of knowledge. Their presence in Physical Education contributes to the recognition of local knowledge and the consolidation of pedagogical practices committed to equity. Their lived experiences constitute a living epistemology, in which the act of narrating oneself is also the act of existing and resisting, destabilizing historical hierarchies of knowledge and affirming the power of Black women as producers of knowledge and social transformation.