Latin American Decolonial Thought: Shaping the Terrain of Peace Studies in Curriculum Studies

• In Event: Peace and Nonviolence Into Curriculum Studies: Conversations on Truth-Seeking and Troubling Truths at the Crossroads

Abstract

Since the onset of formal, primarily Western, systems of education, teaching has been informed by a set of social relations that are deeply imbedded in a colonial–capitalist history and legacy. The first schools to emerge in the United States, for example, overtly implemented differentiated and exclusionary curricula and instructional practices to reproduce a stratified social order. An elite pedagogy based on the “classics” was offered to the sons of the noble upper classes whereas young girls, first nations people, immigrants, and the children of slaves were either excluded from education altogether, or forcibly assimilated into their predetermined roles as housewives, domestic servants, or laborers. Such practices were not limited to the U.S. alone, however, they set the foundation for education throughout Latin America altogether.

In many ways, the legacy of coloniality established curriculum and education as an act of violence against the self and communities that did not fit into the pre-established mold of so-called civility. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2016) notes, Western notions of humanity depend upon the subhumanity of those deemed other. He writes:

The Western-centric conception of humanity is not possible without a concept of sub-humanity (a set of human groups that are not fully human, be they slaves, women, indigenous peoples, migrant workers, Muslims). So, when they are provided “humanity” within the dominant culture, it is done so within the confined parameters that they will be warranted humanity – peaceful, nonviolent, accommodating. (de Sousa Santos, 2016).

This paper examines the historical roots of violence in curriculum and pedagogy from a decolonial lens. Decolonial philosophers, sociologists, and educationalists draw our attention to the origins of social stratification in the world system. They indicate that the Spanish conquest of the Americas established the conditions for evolving systems of social differentiation. Christianization, patriarchy, Eurocentric ideas over knowledge and being (epistemology and ontology, respectively), racial constructs, the elimination of indigenous languages and ways of life, and the systems of classification that established acts of inclusion and exclusion (i.e., the civilized versus the savage), set into motion a universal structure of social difference. The Peruvian decolonial sociologist, Anibal Quijano (2000), refers to these processes as the “coloniality of power” which suggests that the racial axis of the global social order has a colonial origin and character, but “it has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established” (p. 533). Ultimately, this paper proposes a new way of thinking of peace studies from a decolonial perspective. Such a perspective is based upon the ideals of reciprocity, an ethic of care, a reconfiguration of the relation between self, community, and society, and an openness to previously silenced knowledge forms.

References
de Sousa Santos, B. (2016). Epistemologies of the South and future. From the European South, 1, pp. 17-29.
Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, ethnocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla, 1(3), 533–580.

Author

• Nathalia E Jaramillo, Kennesaw State University
  Presenting Author