Educação popular nas práticas de ensino e aprendizagem da capoeira angola: a práxis educativa do Grupo Capoeira Angola Palmares-PB

Abstract

This work presents a study on popular education in the teaching and learning practices of capoeira angola through the educational praxis of the Capoeira Angola Palmares Group, in Roger neighborhood, in João Pessoa, Paraíba (PB). The group was started in 1998 by Dário Pereira João, Master Dário and I, Maria de Lourdes Farias Lima, Contramestra Malu. This research aimed to analyze how popular education in the practice of capoeira angola contributed to the learning of children, adolescents, and young people who are in a situation of social vulnerability. For this purpose, we seek to identify the principles of popular education in the foundations, tradition, and ritual of capoeira Angola; describe the educational practices and cultural knowledge present in capoeira that dialogue with popular education; and to perceive in children, adolescents, and young people the construction of the cultural identity of these subjects with capoeira and their feeling of belonging to the world of Afro-Brazilian culture. The research methodology approach was qualitative, developed in three stages: bibliographic, documentary, and participatory research. The procedures used were participant observation, the researcher's experience as a capoeira foreman and semi-structured interviews with Mestre Nô, founder of the Capoeira Angola Palmares Group (Salvador / BA), and with four capoeiristas from the Roger Group (João Pessoa-PB). We made a theoretical framework that enabled us to point out the possible dimensions of Capoeira Angola Palmares Group teaching and learning: ancestry/tradition, popular culture, Afro-Brazilian culture, culture of resistance, cultural identity, protagonism, empowerment, collectivity, social network, belongings, the master, education for freedom and popular education. It was also possible to point out with the evidence found in this study that the experience in the Group contributed to the role of capoeirista children and adolescents, as it favored the strengthening of the subjects' community bonds with the group, the family, the neighborhood, and a relationship of ethnic-racial identification with Afro-Brazilian culture. Even with the limits, the practice of capoeira angola in that space-time assumed a praxis of education for freedom, of a culture of resistance which provoked and provokes us to think, to speak, and to swing to overcome the situations of oppression of the periphery and in the construction of another possible world, in which human subjects are respected in their rights, in their diversities in the circle of capoeira and life.