Abstract
Education in the countryside emerges from social movements, and seeks to provide, in addition to specific and qualified training for rural schools, the inclusion of peasants in higher education. Thus, it has an affirmative action character, since it aims to reduce the historical inequality of access to education by rural people. On this study, the focus is on the rural women entering the first group (2014) of the teaching degree in rural education (LEdoC) of the Federal University of Góias, Catalão Unit (UFG-RC), aiming to analyze whether the entry of these women into higher education contributed to the transformation and overcoming of patriarchal social relations. The research is qualitative, and 24 questionnaires were run. The profile of the women is above 30 years old, living in rural areas or rural towns, married, Afro- descendant or white, and mothers. Their insertion in LEdoC has caused great impacts on their lives and the consolidation of their identities, qualifying them and empowering them as women capable of transforming the patriarchal relations of the countryside. The process of insertion in the teaching degree, as well as making these women play other social roles and begin to recognize themselves as agents, from the appreciation of their knowledge and their ways of life, also contributes to the transformation of a cultural mark (the patriarchy) that plagues peasant culture. Therefore, there is a process of cultural appreciation in a critical way, breaking relations of domination, inferiority and subordination of these women.
Popular education; Countryside education; Gender; Empowerment