Investigating Educational Responses to Diversity in Brazil during a Time of Curriculum Change

This article offers findings from a qualitative case-based research study examining the ways educators in central Brazil made sense of diversity, and the extent to which they believed recent policies promoting ethnocultural diversity are being realized in K–12 contexts. The research team also examined the degree to which these educators felt that responses to diversity drawn from the Canadian context could inform Brazilian educational policy. Of note, the research participants articulated productive possibilities for promoting the inclusion of cultural diversity in varied classroom contexts. However, confirming findings from prior research, they saw recent policy shifts in Brazil related to intercultural understanding as unsupported by institutions and thus almost completely reliant on teachers’ personal efforts. Overall, educators in this study had difficulty seeing Canadian responses to diversity as workable in Brazil, and there was a general absence of discussions concerning the teaching of Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous culture and histories.