Postado em: 2 December, 2025
The SETA’s Project Partnership with SMERJ Strengthens Antiracist Education Training
More than 1,500 schools in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro are included in the training program in antiracist education
The Office for Ethnic-Racial Relations (GERER), in partnership with the SETA Project, from the Municipal Department of Education of Rio de Janeiro (SMERJ) is devoted to deploying continued training programs for teachers in the school network, focusing on the implementation of Law 10.639/03, which makes teaching African and Afro-Brazilian history and culture obligatory in schools.
The collaboration consists of an operating strategy for SETA’s Possible Pathways, where alliances are established with the secretariats of education in the project’s prioritized working territories: Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Amazonas, Bahia, and Maranhão.
For Karoline Kass, a specialist in education for Project SETA, the initiative, along with GERER, represents a successful example of coordination with the education secretariats. “From this collaboration, which has been going on since the very first year of the project, we have had the opportunity to develop a working methodology that dialogues with the network’s needs, coupled with the tools for racial equality that we created in the SETA Project coalition”, the professional mentions.
Antiracist education for professionals in the field of education
GERER integrates 1,557 schools in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, and it has close to 53,000 professionals involved. According to Joana Oscar, GERER coordinator, Project SETA contributed to the collaboration with its technical, theoretical, and methodological expertise, in addition to its diagnosis, data directory, and recommendations for civil society and antiracist education in basic education that originate from a specific perspective.
“There was much talk regarding antiracist education, and, discursively, we have already furthered our understanding of the matter. However, our lecturers want to have more direction. Therefore, it was essential that we count on this support, which, together with administration principles and the cultural, historical, and belonging characteristics of the territory of Rio de Janeiro, achieves a framework for public policy for continued training for teachers that incorporates all of the axes of national policies for ethnic-racial equity”, Joana explains.
The partnership between the Project SETA and GERER has already reached a large number of technical professionals at the secretariat through its continued training program. Currently, at least one professional from each school zone is conducting the training. According to Joana, it was for this reason that the Administration for Ethnic-Racial Relations noticed more engagement and maturity in planning the activities, in addition to observing the impacts, which were not previously measured, such as the greater demand for professionals seeking other training courses, characterizing the antiracist stance in schools all the more.
Step-by-step guide to training
The continued training programs for professionals in the field, based on Law 10.639/03, require a rigorous step-by-step process in order for these educators to leave these programs apt to implement antiracist educational content in the institutions of learning where they work. To do this, the SETA Project implemented a methodology that is broken up into steps. The goal was to include these lessons while also monitoring and evaluating the training program.
The first step consists of getting to know the educational network and the territory. From there, the project offers methodological tools to comprehend how to implement Education for Ethnic-Racial Relations (ERER) in the education network: strengths, weaknesses, challenges, obstacles, and backlogs. Next, the Educational Management Assessment is applied in the network. The results are then analyzed jointly with the Secretariat’s technical team and the SETA Project’s team to present recommendations to advance the agenda in the local administration and build the action plan.
In addition to these steps, the project, together with the Secretariats of Education, monitors and evaluates the activities implemented with a focus on producing a report that logs the progress of the ERER and racial equity institutional indicators.
“We have an understanding that the developed activities in SETA’s environment can produce a legacy and best practices for the secretariats, which will boost the process of systemic transformation,” Karoline Kass concludes.
