Towards a critical and decolonizing interculturality: Theoretical, methodological and analytical challenges in Mexico

• In Event: UREAG Global Village Panel 2

Proposal

The current policies of intercultural education in Mexico are in danger of losing the historical political and social demands gained within the last three decades by indigenous movements. The current educational reform has replaced intercultural education by the term of inclusion, where indigenous peoples were taken out of the educational priorities in order to transform schools into places of educational quality measure by international standards of school performance.

This paper present the experience of the Seminar on Education and Linguistics organized by the Colegio de Mexico with the collaboration of other academic institutions in Queretaro and Guadalajara. The purpose of the research is to find out about the good practices to reinforce the processes of literacy with indigenous populations in urban schools. Phase 1 of the project was concerned with an ethnographic exploration of the educational conditions of indigenous children in relation to their classmates, and teachers, as well as the openness of the school culture towards the presence of diverse indigenous populations. The research team was integrated by professionals of disciplines such as anthropology, linguistics, education and sociology.

The ethnographic research was conducted in four urban schools: two in Mexico City (Barriga, 2008), one in Queretaro and one in Guadalajara (Moreno-Medrano, 2017). The implementation of the research activities was designed collaboratively with teachers, principals and the children themselves. Informal reading during school recesses were used, as well as sociolinguistic surveys and interviews. The results have been socialized with teachers and principals in order to agreeing on the next phase of intervention.

Discrimination and racism within schools is a common topic across schools. Indigenous children and families do not feel welcome and reassured to express their ethnic identities within the school space. This situation is still poorly understood by teachers and educational authorities and there is a great need for developing didactic materials that challenge racial stereotypes and promote the recognition of indigenous cultures as subjects of rights. The absence of critical intercultural educational policies that consider this socio-historical perspective are absent in the educational discourses and practices; moreover, this new administration seems to be completely indifferent to this national reality (Bertely, 2013).

This paper will present the perspectives of parents, teachers and children themselves in relation to the cultural diversity within the schools, the use of indigenous languages, the school expectations and teachers’ demands to improve their educational practices.

In Mexico, there is a great need to develop new models of critical and decolonizing intercultural education approaches. This implies the recognition of other epistemologies (Walsh, 2012) and methodologies that open up spaces for indigenous knowledges to be visible, although the culture of the written literacy of the schools makes difficult to bring into the classrooms the daily activities of the communities in order to be part of the curriculum (Gasché, 2005; J. Gasché, 2010).

Intercultural education from a critical and decolonizing approach should ensure the recognition of indigenous societies and cultures, where literacy in their own terms is an indispensable element. Indigenous children should be able to defend their own interests and rights in order to face the dominant society, and at the same time, non-indigenous children should be able to critically analyze the history of discrimination and different types of racism that have been part the social daily practices; moreover, they would also learn that there are other valid ways of being, of knowing and living. A critical approach to intercultural education should have as a starting point an anti-racist discourse in order to make visible the educational practices that oppresses the expression of cultural diversities of indigenous peoples.

Author

• Luz Maria Stella Moreno Medrano, Universidad Iberoamericana