Alfabetización

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Rethinking Educational Change: Cultural-Historical Analyses of Educational Reforms Across and Beyond National Boundaries

Abstract

From the early 20th century, in the social sciences and humanities, there has been an incessant preoccupation with attempts to solve the ‘indian problem’ in Guatemala. The so-called ‘problem’ of analfabetismo or illiteracy is nowadays a “challenge facing societies and economies.” Literacy or alfabetización and a focus on language have been offered as answers, or rather as problem solvers of indian ‘backwardness,’ for the advancement of the nation, and the liberation of the ‘indian.’ However, the terms and languages of ‘the answer’ have shifted. They have become more ‘scientific,’ more ‘cultural,’ less ‘secular,’ more political, human rights-oriented, and highly globe and ‘Western’ centered. The paper takes on the task to read into these languages to highlight their histories and point to their limits.
The alphabetical literacy or alfabetización curricular project, in its impulse for change in its multiple moments of emergence, retains an aspiration within a logo- and phono-centric worldview that (could be traced to colonial systems of reason? that), in fact, limits change and innovation starting from the conception of ‘the problem’ itself and the logic of problem solving. I draw from Jacques Derrida’s (1993) analytics of phonocentrism and logocentrism as a tool to read the languages of the alphabetization project(s).
Archival methods inform the modes of inquiry. The exemplars selected are statements. They are statements because they relate to what Gilles Deleuze (1969) would call “moments of intensity” in the subject-ification of what is indigenous or when it becomes more noticeable. A statement is, as Michel Foucault (1972) would describe it, a “function that cuts across a domain of structures and possible unities and which reveals them with concrete contents in time and space” (p. 87). The concrete contents of the sources inform ‘practical’ questions on the failures of education meant to serve indigenous peoples. The data sources are teacher journals, policies, speeches, and field-notes from classroom observations.
The textual-phonetic-alphabetical regime that operates at the center of indigenous (s)objects offers every possibility for maintaining the limited current state of affairs for indigenous peoples in educational spaces. What is at stake is dismantling the colonial phonocentric answer to what could be educational aspirations. That is the scholarly significance of this study.

Author

• Ligia L. Lopez, University of Wisconsin - Madison