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Paper short abstract

How can collaboration act as a methodological experiment of ontology (Maciel et al., 2025) in teaching and learning anthropology? This paper aims to tackle such a question by exploring my experience as a teacher-trainer in a bachelor’s program in Intercultural Indigenous Pedagogy in Piauí, Brazil

Paper long abstract

Brazil has increasingly paid attention to what has been named as “differentiated education”: a

political and pedagogical project that aims to provide contextually situated education to Indigenous and other traditional communities. One initiative has been the creation of bachelor's programs — within the PARFOR framework, a national program to train teachers working in basic education — which are specific to these communities. They operate with specific curricula and timeline; providing scholarships to everyone enrolled; and created in a decentralized format. This paper focuses on my one-year experience being a teacher-trainer in an Intercultural Indigenous Pedagogy program in Piauí, Brazil. Designed mainly by anthropologists, and with a circumstantial part of its curriculum being composed of anthropology-related courses, the program offers its students the possibilities to think about, and act upon, indigeneity and interculturality. This is a major happening, considering Piauí’s long years of colonial struggle to acknowledge the existence of Indigenous peoples and the contingencies of such violent acts. Yet, it also has flaws. With courses having a timeframe of 3-7 days with 8 hour classes; students being from various contexts and age; and teacher-trainers hired in temporary contracts and sometimes being unaware of their student realities, it often feels hard to believe that it can actually work. But precarity and anthropology have generative potentials. Working with other teacher-trainers and with students in arranging courses, classes, and patchy ethnographic research, I found that collaboration can be a way to experience the complexity of anthropology in different, and sometimes conflicting, ontological realms