O Aluno Cotista Racial Negro: Possibilidades de Empoderamento por meio da aula de língua inglesa a partir do desenvolvimento da competência simbólica

Abstract

The Law of Quotas or Law of Vacancies Reservation (Law 12.711) provides students to get into the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Rio Grande do Sul (IFRS) through the racial quotas and these are often marginalized for having access to school this way. Because they suffer prejudice from classmates, community and also from teachers, they may have problems to catch up with the class, either because of their previous lack of schooling or because they do not impose their presence in a place they have the right to be. The common sense that nobody learns English at public schools (MOITA LOPES, 1996; LEFFA, 1999; LIMA, 2001), combined with the prejudice that black students suffer keep them apart from the globalized world. I presume that the insertion of these students may occur through the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning if this is taught under the perspective of the Symbolic Competence (SC) development (KRAMSCH, 2010), allowing them to express their subjectivity, bring up their historicity, act in different realities and reconstruct their thoughts and actions taking into consideration the thoughts and actions of others. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate if EFL classes taught under the perspective of SC development collaborate for black quota students` empowerment. Power that arises in the negotiation of communicational symbolic values with the people who are around in the Institution (education managers, teachers, technical administrators and students), mostly white. For this reason, it is also important to verify the sociocultural impact of the Law 12.711 in the IFRS Campus Rio Grande community and understand how the black quota students face the adverse conditions and what is the impact they have in their lives, allowing to identify their level of resilience as they attend to school. In order to achieve the objectives, I considered some themes essential to understand the development of these thesis and are exposed in the Theoretical References, organized as follow: 1) Globalization as a way of exclusion; 2) Racism and Brazilian racism; 3) Law 12.711 or Law of Quotas; 4) School environment and the black student; 5) Black quota student and his resilience; 6) Symbolic Competence and empowerment in the EFL teaching. This research methodology was qualitative and ethnographic, since I analyzed a specific social group – the black quota students – aiming at understanding the sociocultural phenomena of this group empowerment in the English classes. For data collection I used the following instruments: 1) Documents of the Pedagogical Coordination; 2) Survey for the internal community; 3) Elaboration of pedagogical practices and EFL classes observation; 4) Quest_Resiliência – an instrument that allows us to map the black quota students‟ resilience conditions (SOBRARE, 2017); 5) Oral interview with the main English teacher and with the six black quota students. Results suggest that: 1) School environment was not favorable to black quota students; 2) Some racial quota students have been through a whitening identity process in order to make part of that white school; 3) The EFL classes taught under the perspective of SC development awaken the students to a racial prejudice consciousness, prejudice they suffer in a hidden way. Therefore, there are some possibilities of the black quota students to empower themselves through the EFL classes if the teacher keeps on teaching based on the SC development. Thus, students will develop a sense of belonging without losing their identities.