Persistent educational exclusion in Latin America: At the periphery of a ‘digital society’

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Panel Abstract

Objectives

This panel highlights structural inequities that hinder access to education and leadership opportunities for excluded groups in Latin America by analyzing Indigenous voices in intercultural higher education, gender segregation across academic and leadership roles in universities, and the compounded effects of violence, poverty, and climate disasters on girls’ education. Through different qualitative and quantitative methods, exploring educational challenges in Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Honduras, this panel aims to foster a discussion on the root causes of educational inequality in the region. The paper’s presentations engage recent empirical research from Latin America that applies decolonial, feminist, and human capabilities frameworks.

Scholarly Significance

Scholars in Comparative and International Education, such as Takayama et al. (2017) and Cortina (2019), have advocated for the expansion of theoretical viewpoints and epistemologies in the field; this panel heeds that call by expanding the conversation about ongoing educational inequities in Latin America, applying critical theories to issues across the region. It starts by addressing the relevance of intercultural programming in Indigenous contexts, then analyzes cases of vertical and horizontal segregation within academic institutions from a gendered perspective, and finally, looks at climate displacement and girls’ education.

While Latin America has made progress in establishing legal protections and policies promoting the right to education for all, implementation often falls short. How can Indigenous peoples become active decision-makers in intercultural and bilingual education systems? Why do universities focus solely on gender parity when the increasing number of women accessing higher education in the region does not necessarily translate into more representation of women in top leadership positions across disciplines in academia? What additional measures are necessary for displaced populations to continue their education regardless of where they move to or come from? To answer these questions, researchers on this panel engage decolonial, feminist, and human capability theories, which ask scholars and practitioners to account for not only the individual but also structural factors that perpetuate inequality and to examine how these factors interrelate and unfold, through three different empirical studies across the region.

Human capability theory asserts that individuals must enjoy manifold freedoms to be really capable of living a life with dignity, health, and joy (Sen, 2001; Nussbaum, 2003), and is critical of the reductionist approach to development as merely economic (Sen, 2001). Decolonial theories challenge Western-centric development models further, highlighting how historical power dynamics reproduce oppression against the ‘developing’ world (Escobar, 2012). Decolonial frameworks can unpack power imbalances and the structural roots of educational inequality in Latin America paying particular attention to how Indigeneity, ethnicity, race, gender, nationality, and ideology shape power hierarchies in society. Scholars have discussed how decolonial work also necessitates analyzing and dismantling patriarchal structures (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) to support women’s effective capabilities in Latin American countries. Sociologist Sandra Acker (1999) coined the term “gender script” to explain how the workplace is influenced by cultural and societal expectations about women’s place in work, and education is no exception. Acker (1999) highlighted that there are cultural scripts seen as suitable for women in a given place and time, and that education was no exception. In more recent research, Acker (2010) looked at the efforts of women to occupy managerial positions in universities in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. She concluded that “gendered games in academic leadership” prevent women from building a satisfying leadership career in academia.

CIES is encouraging us this year to envision what we are doing and why we do things the way we do to discover, examine, evaluate, or propose a possible, probable, and preferable future of education. Our panel asks what we are doing to address ongoing educational inequality in Latin America, and why many low-income children, women, and Indigenous Peoples in our region continue to face segregation and discrimination. Taking up critical perspectives and through primary and secondary data, the presenters on this panel explore the ways current educational policy interventions are working and how they might work better, informed by the lived realities of groups historically discriminated against: women, Indigenous Peoples, displaced persons, and low-income children. The panel enables theoretical and practical conversations rooted in localized social, cultural, gendered, and environmental contexts.

Overview & Panel Structure

This session puts into conversation three empirical studies grappling with issues of educational segregation, exclusion, and discrimination in Latin America applying human capabilities, decolonial theories, and feminist frameworks. The first paper examines the challenges and opportunities intercultural education in rural Mexico faces to promote Indigenous languages and ways of being and knowing. Findings are based on nine months of classroom observation and interview data at an Intercultural University in Mexico. The second paper focuses on gender hierarchies in top higher education institutions in Colombia, Chile, and Mexico. It explores segregation in historically feminized disciplines and barriers women face to access academic leadership positions and research funding through quantitative methods. The third paper analyzes the challenges adolescent girls displaced by climate disasters in Honduras confront to remain in education. The research is based on thirty-one in-person interviews conducted in 2024 with girls in and out of school in the Honduran Sula Valley region.

While the three papers vary in topics and methods, they all discuss fundamental issues of inequities and their impact on public school and university education. This panel engages the audience in a generative discussion about how educational exclusion intersects with gender, Indigeneity, displacement, and class in Latin America. After the three paper presentations, ample time will be given to group discussion of the central question: What future of educational justice can we envision when, still, many low-income children, migrants, women, and Indigenous Peoples in our region remain at the periphery?

Sub Unit

• Latin America SIG

Organizer

• Sara M. Pan Algarra, Columbia University Teachers College

Chair

• Regina Cortina, Teachers College Columbia University

Individual Presentations

• Parent and student views of intercultural higher education - Amanda Earl, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Women leaders in Latin American higher education: The cases of Chile, Colombia, and Mexico - Regina Cortina, Teachers College Columbia University; Jonathan Beltran, Teachers College at Columbia University

• Climate disasters, internal displacement and girls’ education in the Honduran Sula Valley - Sara M. Pan Algarra, Columbia University Teachers College