Ensino de história do local a partir das experiências vividas pelos cesteiros na cidade de Araçagi - PB (2020-2023)

Abstract

This is a study aimed at teaching local history based on the memories of black people who worked as basket makers and lived in Araçagi- PB in the first two decades of the 21st century. In this sense, the object of this research consists of surveying the memories of people from a black basket-making family, and investigating the possibilities of using these as a teaching source for teaching History in a high school classroom at Escola Cidadã Integral Francisco Pessoa de Brito (ECI-FPB), from the city of Araçagi. It was between the years 2020 and 2023 that this family produced and sold their baskets in three cities, corresponding to the current Immediate Geographic Region of Guarabira. More specifically, the municipalities of Cuitegi, Guarabira and Araçagi. From these people's memories, mainly about the activity of making baskets, I was able to recognize aspects of these people's ancestry, which remain correspondingly in the present, and bring to light the relationships of these people with local material culture. The memories of the basket makers, obtained through this study, served as a documentary source in the preparation of didactic workshops aimed at teaching local history. And, from them, relationships and correspondences were created with the History of Brazil presented in textbooks. Initially, I raised the memories of black basket-making workers, going through the places where they traveled and focusing on questions related to the basket-making process, what their daily lives and sensibilities were like, and how they worked. To then build a version in this text that tells the trajectory of this black family in these cities in the interior of Paraíba. I mainly use memories about the basket-making couple Antônia Benedito dos Santos and Antônio Mendes Ferreira. In a third moment, I also surveyed and compared the memories with other documentary sources such as newspapers of the time, photographs, maps, geographical studies, seeking to analyze them in a qualitative way, highlighting various results both with regard to the trajectory of this family, the forms the production and trade of basketry, the places of sale, the form of transportation, among other relationships related to the confrontation of exposure to racist practices suffered by these black people. And to understand the teaching-learning process from memories, I investigated how they encouraged high school students to tell other stories, to raise memories of their family members and their own, constantly relating them to local identity. Therefore, I also use the concept of action research, as I was the teacher of this group of students, which allowed me to develop teaching-learning strategies that sought to create meanings between the subjects researched and the documentation produced by this research (Severino, 2013 ). To help me in discussions about the concepts of memory, experience and remembrance, mainly in the school context, I base myself on the writings of Walter Benjamin. And in addition to this author, I privileged as a form of historiographic construction the production of relationships between the researcher and the subject who produces questions about the object of research, which were elaborated by the historian E. P. Thompson.