Weaving Resistance: Multivoiced-Decolonizing Ethnography of/With Indigenous Students in a Colombian Public University

• In Event: 34.038 - Challenging Post-Truth Rhetoric Through Decolonial Frameworks: Learning From Participatory, Ethnographic, and Narrative Research in Education

Abstract

students and me) weave together our learning/teaching/resistance experiences as students and teacher educator in the Foreign Languages (FL) Program at Southwest University (pseudonym) in Colombia.
Since the Constitution of 1991, the Colombian government has enacted a series of laws to protect and grant rights to Indigenous peoples so they can preserve their language, culture, educational, territorial and political autonomy. At the higher education level, the Colombian government by law (Condición de excepción/ Minorities’ Condition, Act 70/1993) allots 4% of quota in every program offered by public universities for Indigenous peoples (positive discrimination [Castillo, 2005]). Indeed, students admitted to public universities under this law do not pay tuition and receive a monthly stipend for lunch, transportation, and educational materials. Now then, particularly at SWU, where the study was conducted, the dropout rate among Indigenous students is the highest (60%) (Meneses, 2011, 2009; Escobar et al., 2006).
This led me to analyze the overall conditions for this population at SWU, focusing on an extreme case: The Foreign Languages’ Program (Valencia-Mafla, forthcoming). This program, unlike other programs in the same university, posits an extra challenge for Indigenous students, namely, to graduate students must become multilingual and multiliterate (not only in Spanish but also in English and French) to become foreign languages teachers.
When analyzing curricula and policy documents as well as the different studies related to students’ dropout carried out at this university, I noticed that SWU assumes that all students are Spanish native speakers and that students share the same cultural referents (capitals, after Bourdieu (1986)) when they enter the pedagogic relationship. This position/omission in policy and curricula fosters and feeds the symbolic hierarchies and violence against these peoples.
To analyze, critique, and seek to transform our learning and teaching practices in the process of becoming foreign languages teachers, we organized a series of focus groups where we discussed the following issues/research questions:
What does it mean to be an Indigenous student in the FL program?
What are their expectations of the program?
What are the difficulties that Indigenous students face at SWU in general and in the FL program in particular?
How are Indigenous students positioned in the FL program? Why?
What they do/have done to resist such framing?
In addition, we wrote (some students preferred to narrate) our experiences in the form of stories to make sense/co-construct/weave our learning and teaching paths in the FL program. Findings/stories unveils, on the one hand, the cultural shock (Usma et al., 2017; Castillo, 2005), the “bloodless” violence (Restrepo, 1996), the affective and cultural illiteracy inscribed in White-mestizo values and practices at the heart of the pedagogical experiences in the FL program. On the other, stories account for the students’ strategies of resistance, support networks, academic and cultural practices not to survive or accommodate but to open a hybrid, translanguaging cultural or Third space (Bhabha, 2016, 1996, 1994, 1991) to exercise new, resisting, decolonized identities.

Author

• Andres Fernando Valencia, Universidad del Valle