Mestizo Skins, White Pedagogy: Approximating Indigenous and African Colombian Students in a Foreign Languages Program

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Indigenous Content and Students: Undoing Settler Ideology

Abstract

This paper presents a critical exploration that addresses the conditions and challenges that Indigenous and African-Colombian students face, negotiate, and cope with to succeed in the Foreign Languages’ Program (FLP) at one of the three biggest public universities in Colombia. The study utilizes an overall Decolonizing conceptual framework to analyze, on the one hand, how in the three levels of curriculum (Deng, 2010) Indigenous and African-Colombian students’ cultural, social and political identities are positioned and dealt with and, on the other, to learn what professors in the program do (or do not do) to engage, at the classroom level, with these students. The research design follows a qualitative exploratory design, complemented with quantitative (survey) data.

Author

• Andres Fernando Valencia, Universidad del Valle