My ethnographic work in the schools included observation of several Nheengatú language classes at both of the schools that currently offer them, among students of different ages (from age 5 up to about 10), taught by three different instructors. A few brief vignettes from classes held during the first two weeks of school in 2012 help to contextualize the above theoretical discussion.
The ‘Escola Infantil Thiago Montalvo’ provides education to the youngest group of students in São Gabriel, from kindergarten (pre-1 and pre-2) until grade 2. The school is located immediately behind the military hospital, and facilities are small and poor, even in contrast to the other schools of the city. There is no outdoor play equipment for the children, most of the classroom air conditioners are broken, and class sizes are quite large, with approximately 40 small children in each one. The director reported that all of the students at this school are Indigenous, since any non-Indigenous children in this age group attend the private ‘Turma da Monica’ pre-school. On the second day of classes among the oldest students in the school (ages 6 and 7), the Nheengatú language teacher started working on literacy skills with the children. She wrote a few words in Nheengatú – kãwéra (bone) and igara (canoe) – on the blackboard and handed out pictures that had been hand-drawn by a former language teacher and photocopied several times, such that
the lines were faded and the images unclear. All interactions took place in Portuguese, and this pattern continued throughout the school year. As the students completed their work, they approached the teacher to show her, and she offered corrections – many of them forgot the diacritic markings, and returned to fix their work. The teacher
emphasized to me that literacy should be the central concern of their language education. She was new to teaching the Nheengatú language, and had been asked at the last minute to take on this subject after the previous teacher had been moved to a school in the rural interior of the municipality. Prior to that year, she taught Portuguese, and she had received no special training in second-language pedagogy. She was not particularly interested in Indigenous language revitalization or Indigenous politics, and was teaching the class only because she had been asked to do so. Although both she and her husband were Baré speakers of Nheengatú, none of their three children (ages 7, 10, and 14) could speak the language, and only the oldest, who had spent time with his paternal
grandmother before her death, could understand it.
The younger students in the school, at the pre-1 and pre-2 (junior and senior kindergarten) levels did not begin their Nheengatú classes until the second week, after they had spent several days adjusting to the routine of being in the classroom in general. This group was taught by a more experienced Indigenous language teacher who is a passionate advocate for Indigenous language education and has been actively involved in the Indigenous movement. From the beginning, the energy level in her classroom was palpably higher. Even in the early days of their classes, the students had learned a few phrases in Nheengatú (e.g. ‘good afternoon’, ‘what is your name’, ‘my name is…’). The teacher used these phrases repeatedly, translated them into Portuguese only when the
students did not respond after several iterations in Nheengatú, and encouraged the
children, and me, to use these Nheengatú phrases. She also incorporated a physical-action greeting song each day; two or three students (out of several dozen) were clearly much more comfortable than the others, and the teacher explained to me after one of the first classes that she knew their parents to be good speakers of Nheengatú who probably used the language in the home. The main focus of the first lesson I observed, however, was around words with the vowel ‘a’ – she would list words containing this vowel, write them on the board, and ask the students to repeat them after her. This form of pedagogy is based on a model of teaching Portuguese language literacy that is frequently used in Brazilian classrooms. Although this teacher’s methodology incorporated more oral language use, then, this strategy demonstrates a continued emphasis on creating literacy (‘alfabetização’), especially among the youngest students.
While there are significant differences in the approaches taken by these two teachers, both classes reveal important information about Indigenous-language teaching in São Gabriel. First and foremost, they demonstrate the complete absence of any kind of pedagogical training in or standards for second language teaching, and the classroom implications of this lack of guidance. All of the current and former Nheengatú-language instructors to whom I spoke highlighted the absence of materials or curricula that they could use in their classes. I spent a long time with Paula, one of the more experienced and involved teachers, going through the notebooks that she had accumulated over the years and the lesson plans that she had developed. These mainly consisted of vocabulary lists, as well as stories, texts, and songs. All of the material was handwritten in a spiral-bound notebook, or photocopied from another teacher’s lessons and glued into the notebook.
The amount of work required for teachers who take on these classes is therefore higher than in most other subject areas, and they receive very little support in doing it. Paula and I discussed the importance of creating materials that could more easily be given to each new teacher, and also of making them look more professional. She was very aware that the poorly drawn handouts – at one point, I even saw a set of exercises that had been copied using a mimeograph machine being used for a grade 5 class – contrasted directly with the hardcover, bound, colourful textbooks that students used in all of their other subjects.
I also talked to several of the teachers about the possibility of deeper changes to the way the Nheengatú classes are approached, including models of second-language pedagogy that encourage greater participation from students and focus much more
substantially on oral conversation skills than on literacy. Denivaldo Cruz da Silva, former director of FOIRN’s department of education and a native speaker of Nheengatú,
observed that most of the teachers in the city who had taken on Nheengatú classes had not been educated in the Magistério Indígena program, and as such had no grounding in Indigenous pedagogy. His suggestion was to encourage the selection of teachers who had received this training, especially since in the city, these language classes were the only Indigenous component of the curriculum, and even they were being taught in a way that was based entirely on non-Indigenous pedagogical principles. For the most part, the teachers were less interested in having these conversations, since the idea of building in more training and more work in order to change their approach to teaching was not viable within their already very busy schedules. Creating pedagogical materials was seen as a
means of both improving the quality of the classes and cutting back on the teachers’ workload.
Related to this lack of training is the relative carelessness with which language instructors are chosen – while some of the teachers who have been selected to teach Nheengatú have been passionate about the issue of language and, like the teacher in the second class described above, bring that energy into their classroom work, others are not even fluent speakers of the language themselves. One former teacher from the Thiago Montalvo pre-school identified herself as having only passive knowledge of the language, but because she needed the work, and because the director of the school at the time was a friend of hers, she was offered the Nheengatú class. This type of story, in which a teacher is offered a contract as a favour to him or her, is not uncommon, and in combination with the lack of pedagogical support and materials for Nheengatú teachers, despite years of complaints from these teachers to the department of education, reflects an overall apathy about the quality of the classes themselves. Older students, who had been taking
Nheengatú classes for several years, told me that they were unable to remember anything that they had learned in these classes – in most cases, the only Nheengatú phrases they could recall were “good morning” and “good afternoon”. Experienced teachers confirmed that they felt that they were starting from scratch every year, regardless of how long their students had been studying the language.
The above examples of how Indigenous languages are taught to the youngest students (those who are most capable of learning language) demonstrate a lack of political will to increase the number of Indigenous-language speakers, despite the discursive role that Indigenous languages play in municipal politics (as discussed in
Chapter 2). These points are further clarified in commentary about the purpose of having Indigenous languages in schools, as the goals of these classes are themselves the subject of an ongoing ideological debate. Some Indigenous leaders believe it is extremely important for students to learn to speak their Indigenous languages, and feel that it is the responsibility of schools to teach them something in these languages. Max Menezes of FOIRN, for example, has been a champion of this perspective, even arguing that people should be required to demonstrate that they can speak (and preferably write something in) one of the three co-official Indigenous languages in order to be considered eligible for scholarships and quotas reserved for Indigenous people. Other educational administrators either implicitly or explicitly stated to me that the value of having an Indigenous-
language class in the school is a matter of valorization, not of actually teaching the language. That is to say, as the educational coordinator for the Thiago Montalvo school put it, having an Indigenous language taught in the schools symbolically demonstrates to students and parents that these languages have a place in formal education and in public. The focus on literacy is related to this ideological perspective, as the possibility of writing in an Indigenous language places the language on par with Portuguese and emphasizes the transformation into ‘civilized’ people and languages (Fleming 2009). Currently, the administrators of schools within the city lean heavily towards this latter perspective, and very little work is being done by FOIRN or other Indigenous political activists to change this way of thinking about language classes in the city.