A boca que tudo come: conversas na cozinha como espaço de formação docente negra

Abstract

In this research, I start from the understanding that black teachers in early childhood education have their teaching practices intrinsically connected to care — not only as an act of looking after, feeding and teaching, but as a deeply racialized and politicized pedagogical gesture. The presence of these black women in the school space refers to the long history of the subordination of care in relation to their bodies, inherited from the figures of the wet nurse and the mammy, colonial symbols that relegated to them the role of caring for the children and interests of others, while their own stories and affections were made invisible. Based on this historical trajectory, I reflect on the physical and emotional impacts of this scenario, based on studies that point to the illness, overload and health complaints of early childhood education professionals. This work shows that, for black women, the care provided in the context of early childhood education can also configure an overlapping of oppressions that permeate body, mind and history. In dialogue with Christina Sharpe (2023), I understand care as a gesture of vigilance, mourning, and reinvention in the face of systematically threatened black lives. Epistemologically, I use the seasoning of writing (1996), conversation in the kitchen and memory from black perspectives as political-poetic-methodological research tools. This is the boiling of the cauldron of my written narratives crossed with three other black early childhood education teachers in which I intend to analyze the experience of being a black teacher in early childhood education from the process of racialization, investigating how this experience influences sensitivity to racial issues in the daily school life of early childhood education. The dissertation is sweetened with multiple languages, including excerpts from my rebellious diary, poems, novels, letters, images, songs, stories, and recipes, which constitute a narrative mosaic in an attempt to contemplate the complexity of the black experience in the context of early childhood education. Thus, this study seeks not only to highlight the tensions and challenges faced by black female teachers, but also to reaffirm care as na ancestral and collective pratice.