Did you know that be.Living has a Brazilian Culture team? Indeed we do! be.Living is a Brazilian bilingual school with educational goals aligned with the Brazilian Common Core Curriculum (BNCC) and that transcends any idea of bilingualism that could increase the distance or drive a wedge between the Portuguese and English languages or between different cultures. On the contrary, our proposal is to promote – within a bilingual context – the study of Brazilian culture and other cultures, in order to instrumentalize and strengthen a mindset in children that appreciates multiculturalism and the concept that we are all citizens of the world.
To ensure that children can have access to the cultural assets of Brazil, experiencing their heritages with enchantment and establishing a pleasurable relationship with the Portuguese language, we rely on the work of a very competent and sensitive team of Brazilian Culture teachers.
Children participate in weekly classes that introduce the riches of our culture and learn to value the plurality of the Brazilian sociocultural heritage through the verbal, body, musical, and written languages.
All age groups gain knowledge progressively. In Early Childhood Education, children get to know the country’s popular manifestations through singing games, storytelling, reading mediation, and group songs, which are ever present.
Teacher Mafuane Oliveira, who is part of the team, explains that the Portuguese language and Brazilian popular culture are always the starting point of a variety of activities that have different educational objectives.
“Throughout the year, the classes participate in games with characters from folklore, study popular festivals such as Festa Junina, Carnaval, Boi Bumba, Boi de Mamão, and how each tradition takes place in different ways depending on the region of Brazil. We present biographies of traditional Brazilian artists and masters, as well as African-Amerindian stories to expand the children’s repertoire. Through play, we can strengthen the construction of a national identity with significant experiences, in addition to working on linguistic aspects, psychomotor skills, and ethical values.”
The coordinator of be.Living’s Elementary School, Gabriela Fernandes, explains that the school is, first and foremost, a cultural space. “School is an institution based on the human interaction, and all knowledge is based on those relationships, both with regard to the construction of culture and to the transmission of cultures of different peoples and regions, which justify the existence of knowledge and the search for more wisdom, either from a historical perspective or an individual perspective of each child’s educational process. You can’t educate without culture. You can’t teach to read and write without culture. Reading and writing only exist because they’re a cultural process.”
Gabi thinks that the school is the place where we learn these cultural processes, as well as where we learn to take on significant roles within a society. “We work on this with the children from an early age. When we think of culture, we have to think of everything that makes up a human being. If this school has humans as the center of the learning process, then inevitably these human beings’ expressions will be the background we work on to develop all knowledge in children. In Elementary School, our design from Years 1 through 5 covers the entire constitution of the Brazilian people: the culture of the Amerindian peoples, of the African peoples, of the peoples who came from Europe and the East, of all these peoples who make up the Brazilian people, both in a colonization and in an adaptation process of the land’s native peoples. Within this process, we come to understand the Westernization of our history, and the school is currently making a move towards decolonizing knowledge and learning. Therefore, whether through a social science project, an art and/or music project, children will also understand the resistance in cultural movements and the class struggles expressed in those cultural movements, within the limits of what each age group is capable of reflecting on, expanding on, and expanding further.”
Teacher Vinícius Medrado, who works with be.Living’s children on Brazilian culture through music, says that teaching is being adapted to the children’s circumstances and needs during the pandemic. “The children really need to engage in physical and movement activities: games, dances that move the body, that use the voice freely, that allow them to expand and express themselves, so that they’re not merely sitting down and reducing all their possibilities of existence to moving just their fingers, while interacting with electronic devices. So, right now I’m adapting content and games from Brazilian culture to the Zoom format, seeking to meet this specific need, to let children engage with the totality of their bodies as a form of expression and existence, even in this context. For instance, we do some cacuriás – a traditional dance from Maranhão – and other dances, playing with hiding, ducking, leaving and getting back on the screen… Or the “Bode Pinote” story, sung by a popular culture group, when we dance together from a distance, each in their own home, with a broomstick. Or even practicing the movements of tambourine drumming on ‘tambooks’ or ‘tambonotebooks,’ when we play and sing sambas with the ‘instruments’ that are available at home. These kinds of games have worked very well, they’re having fun with learning.”
Whether in remote or face-to-face teaching, the heart of Brazilian culture continues to beat steadily and strongly in the body of our school. The purpose of our work is to create opportunities for children to experience the enchantments of childhood through Brazilian culture, always remembering that multiculturalism is a fundamental pillar for exercising global citizenship.
