This paper examines reflective journals written by pre-service teachers enrolled in a course on Ethnic-Racial Relations Education (ERER) in Brazil as a privileged archive for observing how racial identities are constructed, avoided, negotiated, and reconfigured within teacher education. Rather than treating the journal as a confessional narrative, we approach it as a situated pedagogical technology in which school memory, family genealogy, normative language, and theoretical frameworks intersect. Students are invited to articulate Brazil’s legal framework for ethnic-racial education with their own racial self-location, tracing family histories, silences, migrations, and experiences of racialization.
Drawing from a broader corpus of 113 journals and a curated analytical sample of 18 texts, the study identifies recurring narrative and affective patterns that reveal how the legal mandate for ethnic-racial education is translated—or neutralized—within everyday schooling. Findings show that compliance often coexists with curricular ornamentation, superficial adhesion, euphemistic language, and the transformation of structural racism into administrable “cases.” At the same time, the journals document moments of rupture, pedagogical intervention, and durable displacement capable of reorienting professional trajectories.
We argue that effective implementation of ethnic-racial education in teacher preparation requires more than normative alignment; it demands a precise pedagogical lexicon capable of distinguishing surface adherence from implication, representation from curricular redistribution, and presence from belonging. By naming the micro-mechanisms through which racial hierarchies persist or are interrupted, teacher education can move from performance to structural reconfiguration.
Methodologically grounded in ethical rigor and reflexive analysis, this study contributes to debates on teacher education by proposing that documenting and naming these mechanisms is itself a form of institutional responsibility and pedagogical care.
