Description

The Bilingual Meetings - Clube de Leitura Ubuntu meets twice a year (once a semester) to discuss books on Black writers. This is an ongoing project that started in October 2020 between the Instituto Federal de São Paulo, Campus Matão, and Cornell University, organized by Dr. Valquíria Tenório and Dr. Denise Osborne.

• share and construct knowledge together about the Black communities in Brazil and in the United States

• expand participants knowledge about topics related to race as they revisite their own perceptions and subjectivities

• provide a safe environment for practices of translanguaging for negotiations and reflections about ethnic-racial identities

• promote Black literature among in our institutions

• collaborate to attenuate discriminatory practices and maximize an educational and literary environment that is more inclusive and sensitive to the participants

• promote motivation and engagement to learn Portuguese 

• students of Portuguese from Cornell University

• students from the Instituto Federal de São Paulo - Campos Matão

• Projeto PESCA

• Escola Estadual Joaquim Pinto Machado Junior (Araraquara, SP)

• Escola Estadual José de Anchieta de Queimados (RJ)

"Everyone shared their opinion and experiences and they were highly interested."

"I enjoyed everyone sharing their different experiences and beyond being open and honest, and no one judging anyone else."

"[This is] a bilingual opportunity to engage with those in another nation."

"A troca de experiência [em] diferentes línguas."

"What I like about this meeting is seeing everyone else's perspective on racism and how they deal with it on a daily basis. I always assumed Brasil was a certain way, so it was really educational to hear the guests shared their stories and hear what it is like to live in Brazil as a Black person."

We are grateful to the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning Grants (2022-2023) and the Language Resource Center (LRC) from Cornell University.

We also would like to thank our partners in this project: Instituto Federal de São Paulo (IFSP) at Campos do Jordão; Escola Estadual Professor Joaquim Pinto Machado Júnior (Araraquara, SP); Projeto PESCAR; Escola Estadual Jaceruba (Nova Iguaçu, RJ); and Cornell University (Romance Studies). 

We are very grateful to our students of Portuguese at Cornell University  who have helped with the translation during our metings; and the students in Brazil who have helped organized the meetings.