Mingas de Pensamiento: A Research Process With the Embera Chamí Indigenous Community for the Design of Culturally Responsive Early Childhood Education

• In Event: Cross-Cultural Storying of Early Childhood Place Pedagogies for World Sustenance

Abstract

In this paper, the author analyzes some of the causes rooted in Colombian culture that make it difficult to implement culturally responsive education for young children, despite a national public policy on early childhood education and care: From Zero to Forever. While the policy recognizes childhoods as diverse and child development as culturally situated, its implementation stops short of being responsive to local knowledges and traditions. Research carried out from a decolonial perspective with Wasiruma, an Embera Chamí Indigenous community, in a process called Minga de Pensamiento yielded a design of a pedagogic proposal that is culturally responsive to local Indigenous knowledges and practices.

In order to establish an inclusive dialogue among community's knowledges and practices on early childhood, and western knowledge about early childhood education and care (ECEC), it was necessary to challenge hegemonic ideas on ECEC. Therefore, the inquiry ensured room for local ways of being, knowing and doing. For this dialogue, following Kovach's (2010) and Wilson's (2008) conversational methodologies, community members became co-researchers and engaged in a journey driven by Mingas de Pensamiento, a meeting in which indigenous communities discuss and make decisions together about specific local concerns. These Mingas come from Latin American traditions inherited from Inca's culture, they are part of daily life and linked to mother earth. At the end of the process, after several collective conversations the co-researchers decided to paint a mural that represented Embera Chamí identities as well as their ideas about education in line with their conception of life.

The result of the research was a pedagogical proposal based on local traditions that includes the Embera Chamí conception of human development, which is a vital spiral linked to mother earth and community life, spiritual life, Jaibanismo (local customs based on a form of Shamanism) and the Embera Chamí language. These ideas are far from dominant understandings of an individual's life assumed as sequential ages and stages; yet, the recognition of this knowledge - of this form of relationship with the land and the community - is essential to sustain the Embera Chamí culture and language.

During the research process, the investigation confirmed the significance of Minga de Pensamiento as a conversational methodology that is the most appropriate way to conduct participatory research for an early childhood education proposal sensitive to place, culture, and characteristics of communities. This kind of research creates room for a dialogue between different kinds of knowledges. More specifically, it challenges hegemonic conceptions of childhood and education prevailing in the global north. These conceptions often create expectations about education and research that consider knowledge produced from Westernized approaches, thus overriding indigenous knowledges while assuming that child development and education are culture-free and universal (Cleghorn & Prochner, 2010).

Author

• Luz Vivas, Concordia University - Montreal