kuikuro school

Architecture

date. 2021

location. Kuikuro Village | YOU. Xingu | Mato Grosso | Cerrado/Amazon | Brazil

The Kuikuro People, the Traditional Architectures Group and the Student-led Project Innitiative at Escola da Cidade got together to design the new Kuikuro school in the Ipatse Village. Making use of biodegradable materials, like adobe and thatch, and recycled materials like eco roof tiles made of recycled plastic. The new building will attend to 300 children from Iptase and other villages around it. With a lot of struggle and wisdom, the Kuikuro People have been able to shape and implement a beautiful pedagogical program that bridges the official curriculum and their own cultural values. For more than ten years they have been fighting for a new school building to substitute the decrepit and unsafe one they currently use.

the project

“The Central Carib State Indigenous School of the Alto Xingu serves 354 students from 10 villages. It seeks to provide students with the necessary training to develop their potential in a conscious and critical way, with autonomy and as part of a process of self-esteem, individual and collective self-realization, based on community living, centered on the millenary ancestral bases of the Upper Xingu Carib ethnic groups, with a view to respecting human beings and the environment, maintaining the cultural identity of these ethnic groups, members of a larger system that is Upper Xingu society, valuing the elderly for being holders of knowledge that are being lost, respect for children, men and women, there is no idea of superiority between one and the other and the active participation of the entire community in political, administrative and pedagogical decisions at the School, as we believe in democratic management. ”

Excerpt from the “Philosophical Framework”, an integral part of the document “Indigenous Pedagogical Political Project 2019”, by the School

Central Carib Indigenous State, in the Upper Xingu