This article presents teaching practices developed in the 7th grade of a private school in São Paulo (2019-2024) which, grounded in critical interculturality, challenged hegemonic narratives about colonization and slavery. The pathway unfolds through two axes of critical engagement with the textbook. In the lexical-textual axis, replacing terms exposed racialized common sense and revealed slavery as the foundation of mercantilism. In the visual axis, Primeira Missa (2019), an installation by Denilson Baniwa, and the collage series "Atualizações traumáticas de Debret" (2020-2021), by Gê Viana, repositioned foundational scenes from insurgent perspectives. These practices awakened in students an unprecedented critical awareness regarding the textbook’s imagery. By subverting its normative narrative, the interventions created space for critical reading and the decolonization of historical knowledge.
