Decoloniality, Critical Language Education, and Resistance: an analysis of the BNCC based on the formative proposals of the Brincadas Project

Abstract

In a country marked by social, racial, and gender inequalities, educational policies such as the National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC) tend to reinforce epistemic hierarchies and limit the recognition of plural forms of knowledge. This article critically analyzes the BNCC from the perspective of Critical Applied Linguistics, taking the Brincadas Project as a case study to understand how formative practices can challenge the (neo)colonial matrix of power that structures the curriculum. The objective is to discuss how the Brincadas Project contributes to overcoming ethical-political suffering in teaching–learning processes. The study is grounded in Critical Collaborative Research and Engaged Multiliteracies, understood through its three actions: immersion in reality, critical construction of generalizations, and production of social change. The video-recorded data were generated during a formative meeting held at the Quilombaque Cultural Community in October 2024, in which participants revisited lived injustices, engaged in dialogue with quilombola knowledge, and produced multimodal performances. The analysis shows that the activities fostered decolonial praxiologies and practices of curricular decapsulation, enabling the articulation of everyday experiences with ancestral knowledge and breaking with linguistic and educational ideologies present in the BNCC—especially those that oppose “well-spoken Portuguese” to pretuguês as a legitimate language of memory and resistance. We conclude that, by promoting critical-collaborative reflection and the development of participants’ agency, the Brincadas Project constitutes an emancipatory formative space that decapsulates the curriculum, expands the power to act, and creates conditions for subjects to produce viable-unknowns oriented toward the transformation of their realities.