Decolonizing Pedagogies From an Alternative Curriculum: An Educational Look From an Intercultural Perspective

• In Event: 53.025 - Pedagogical Research Lines at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM): Toward a Dialogic Encounter With UNAM Researchers

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
The purpose of this presentation is to produce a critical point of view that confronts and resists discourses and curriculum practices that affect educational production from a hegemonic imaginary in Mexico. The importance of realizing this lies in enhancing alternatives that decolonize and gestate a change of route that is already inscribed in a new contextualized cartography to attend to local educational needs. The purpose is being able to gestate curricular alternatives that give place and enroll new ways to produce the political, the conceptual and the historical meanings (Escobar, 2007; Arturo Escobar, 1998)

Overall, the purpose are:
• Form a debate community that is able to analyze and reconceptualize curriculum studies from a decolonization and intercultural perspective.
• Produce a comprehensive look at situations from the following ways: interpretative, translational, and explicative so as to have multiple and convergent approaches to evidence into the unity of phenomena and demonstrate their variety and complexity.

Perspective (s) or theoretical framework
The theoretical perspective of decolonization allows us to realize significant performances in speeches and curricular practices that put us, the social scientists, as excavators or archaeologists of knowledge. Since an important aspect of decolonizing approaches is the one of relations (antagonisms, joints, equivalents, inclusions and exclusions), a critical look is always necessary for engaging in transgressive thought that makes it necessary to critically analyze the ways of cultural production, knowledge emergence, and abyssal absences (Boaventura, 2009; Colombres, 1993).

Methods, techniques or methods of research
This presentation draws on the methods of comparative education because they allow to analytically approach different dimensions immersed into the study of problems concordant with the decolonizing project. Through this analytical perspective, following Jürgen Schriewer (2002), we can establish relationships between different histories to radically theorize and question basic assumptions of neo-positive comparative social science. Schriewer suggests that we adopt a reasoning similar to Comparative Law to build on the idea of functional equivalence and relation rather than linear causality. Functional equivalence and relation form an important ethical stance in this decolonzing and intercultural approach.

Scientific or academic importance of study or work
The scientific importance of decolonizing and interculural perspectives provides not only analytical elements for understanding but also proposes alternative visions. In this way, it becomes important to gestate research that will contribute to meeting current needs of relevant contexts, not only from the point of view of understanding, but also from that of critically reading at the same time.

References

COLOMBRES, Adolfo (1993). Latin America: the challenge of the third millennium. Ediciones del Sol. Anthropological Series. Buenos Aires.

DE SOUSA Santos, Boaventura (2009). South epistemology: the reivindica¬ción of knowledge and social emancipation. CLACSO. Siglo XXI Editores. Mexico

Schriewer, Peter J., F. (1993). Comparative Education Manual. Vol 2. Theories, research, perspectives. Barcelona: PPU.

Schriewer, J. (2002). Formation of speech in Comparative Education. Barcelona: Edic. Pomares.

Author

• Micáela González Delgado, La Universidad Autónoma de México -- Facultad de Estudios Superiores (FES) Acatlán