The perspective of Contextualized Education must seek the meaning of its actions in the unique relationships where human groups daily produce their conditions of existence and learning, crossed by the nuances of our contemporaneity. Therefore, the PPGESA chooses Education, Culture, and Contextuality as its area of concentration, as it understands that the culture of a people participates in the modes of learning, being itself, in many cases, its form and matter. It focuses on the option of plural knowledge, and its validity is determined by the political and ideological criteria of those who have the power to do so. Education based on the principles of contextualization is, therefore, a form of postcolonial education, a type of educational effort that proposes a break with modern narratives about ways of knowing through universality, impartiality, and neutrality. On the contrary, PPGESA takes the semi-arid, as complex and multidimensional realities – with specific nature, with history, society, culture, economy, territorialities, contradictions, oppressions, struggles, etc. – as the basis of its permanent problematization, from its area of concentration, having as its central paradigm the coexistence with the semi-arid region, on which the intention of knowledge, deepening, annunciation, and reinvention of the ways of life, the relationship with nature, culture, economy, and the various modes of production and invention of life.

Research Lines

In this perspective, and to account for the variety of themes that can be unfolded from the trinomial Education, Culture and Contextuality, the set of researches and the reception of students in the Program is distributed among 3 lines, being Line 1: Contextualized Education for the Coexistence with the Semiarid Region; Line 2: Education, Communication and Interculturality; and Line 3: Educational Field, School Culture and Curriculum.