The Law 11.645/08 and its approach in the textbooks of elementary school

Abstract

The Law 11.645/2008 alters the Law 9.394/1996, modified by the Law 10.639/2003 which establishes the guidelines and bases of the national education, to include in the official curriculum of the educations system mandating of the theme " african-Brazilian and indigenous History and culture". This implies the need to address the issue in question in the teaching of all the subjects in the curriculum of basic education, which includes primary and secondary education. As a result, this issue also appears in the textbook, since it is one of the instruments most used by teachers and students in the processes of teaching and learning. Accordingly, with the present study, we investigate whether this law is being addressed and how this is occurring in the Portuguese textbooks. Our corpus analysis consists of three Portuguese textbooks intended for the 6th year of elementary school, two of them published in 2009, after the law came into force, and 1 of them in 2002, period that precedes both Law 10.639/2003 and Law 11.645/2008. As methodological support, we use the quantitative method to verify the presence of texts whose theme determined by Law is contemplated. Then the qualitative method helped us to examine the texts in relation to the origin and the ways of approaching the topic in question, from mainly the theoretical support of Santomé (2009) and Marcuschi (2005). Thus, we find that the texts in the textbooks examined address superficial and minimally the history and culture of African descent and indigenous.