Heritage as Friction: Teaching Through Tensions of Curriculum, Identity, and Belonging

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Global lenses in curriculum studies

Abstract

This paper explores how heritage education in southern Chile operates as a site of curricular friction, where identity, history, and belonging are taught through layered and sometimes contradictory pedagogical practices. Drawing on decolonial, critical race, and curriculum theory, the study examines how educators in Magallanes engage with heritage in the absence of formal guidelines, assembling curriculum through memory, local knowledges, and institutional silences. Heritage education does not produce coherent narratives but surfaces tensions: it can reclaim marginalized histories while also reproducing exclusions that reveal the political complexity of teaching heritage in a context shaped by colonial histories and racialized national imaginaries. The paper contributes to curriculum studies by theorizing curricular friction as a condition for pedagogical inquiry.

Author

• Andrea Lira, Universidad de Magallanes