“A academia não é o paraíso, mas o aprendizado, é um lugar onde o paraíso pode ser criado. A sala de aula com todas suas limitações continua sendo ambiente de possibilidades.” (HOOKS, 2013, p. 273)

Katucha comes from a family of formal and informal education teachers. In her story, because of a music school founded by her great-grandmother and grandparents, her first experience in the classroom was at the age of 12 when she started helping her mother teach music theory classes. She taught in a bilingual school for kindergarten, children from 2 months to 9 years old and was part of an educational program for young people from 14 to 18 years old teaching about sex education, human rights and sociology. The pedagogical foundation deepened with the Paulo Freire’s theory when teaching in youth and adult literacy programs, where she traveled throughout Brazil training teachers and meeting students who transformed their relationship with education in a liberating way. The main learning compass for anti-racist education comes from the classroom of the Black Consciousness Center at USP, where she took the preparatory course for university with a political and decolonial curriculum. These experiences are the basis for her academic work in Higher Education, where she currently works. To learn a little more about the pedagogical inspirations of Katucha and colleagues with whom she works, visit “Collective and Creative Pedagogies”.

• Katucha is a professor of Race and Decolonial Thought at the School of Social and Political Science and former co-director for Race.ED Network at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
  

• She was a guest professor at the University of Giessen (Justus Liebig Universität Gießen), Germany, where she also spoke at events on black feminism in the Brazilian context (2018 – 2019).

• She was a Teaching Assistant and Teaching Fellow at the School of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Leeds, England, where she lectured on critical race studies, queer and decolonial theories, gender studies, and methodology (2014-2020).

• In the Brazilian context, she taught methodology, development and modernity at the Universidade de Guarulhos (2013-2014).

• As a project assistant, she developed institutional activities at the Fundação Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo, Brasil (2006-2008).