Buen Vivir and Sentipensante: An onto-epistemological framework for language teaching and research

• In Event: Ethnographic and case study methods in language research

Proposal

In this empirically-based presentation, I will explain the emerging framework derived from the evidence and pedagogical experiences from an ethnographic work with English teachers and secondary students in Bogotá, Colombia. The proposed framework serves as an example that can contribute to the current conversations surrounding the shifting paradigms in language research and teaching connected to society and beyond (Macedo, 2019). My relationship with the participants, my time in Colombia and the school, as well as the work that teachers and students do tirelessly daily, taught me that education and research are not disconnected from our realities or different aspects of our lives, identities, and hopes.
This research highlights the relationship between Buen Vivir (Living well) and Sentipensante (feeling/thinking) as concepts for a more humane future for all. First, Buen Vivir as a concept, informs my worldview, as it represents the possibility to mesh humankind with nature from a respectful point of view. It inspires an ethical human coexistence in diversity, and as a counterpoint to systemic violence (Dávalos, 2008). Second, Sentipensate [feeling/thinking being] (Fals-Borda, 2015) as a concept describes a person who seeks to foster a connection between reason and emotion. This means that during my research, teachers and students embrace their emotions, feelings, and reasoning as humans with their hunger for teaching and learning, and also that their actions are geared towards making changes to live well in harmony with each other and other living/non-living beings.
During my research fieldwork, I could not get disentangled from my participants’ lives, as they made me feel I am more human than human. Throughout my ethnographic experience, I reflected critically on my goals a researcher. I came to realize that my role as a researcher is to foster critical beings for a better future forged within the realm of a decolonial praxis (Dei & Lordan, 2016). In this process, I proposed a framework that problematizes and questions the inequalities that teachers, students, parents, and community members in this study have experienced, but also those who might have similar experiences in international contexts.
In this presentation, I will describe the experiences, collaborations and pedagogical actions that teachers and students did to create social justice and peacebuilding activities and projects in their English class. These are represented in what I have theorized as Onto-epistemological Oneness for Teaching and Research. As a researcher trained in the Global North, I could have proposed a structuralist and positivist approach for a theoretical framework, or a model using concentric shapes, arrows, or a Venn diagram to show the relationships of concepts and findings of my research. However, instead, I will present a poststructuralist and decolonial model represented in a living and ever-evolving being in profound relationship with others. My self-conception is that of a socially constructed subject who holds Buen Vivir in one hand and decolonial praxis in the other hand. This subject represents the concept of Sentipensante, balancing emotion and reason, and embodying a cosmovision situated in a diverse, dynamic, and ever-changing historical time and social space (Oviedo Freire, 2020).
This proposed framework embodies an approach to pedagogy and research that is fundamentally rooted in our connections to the land (the community, the schools, the city, the country), others (teachers, students, parents etc.), and the planet/the universe (living and nonliving entities) and our future possibilities. The subject characterized by this framework urges actions to seek mutual benefits to live beyond Western conceptualization of development towards a symbiosis of Buen Vivir and Sentipensante (Acosta, 2013; Araujo Frías, 2013; Fals-Borda, 2015; Galeano, 1992; Gudynas & Acosta, 2011; León, 2008; Oviedo Freire, 2020; Rendon, 2008). In other words, the framework represented by this this subject exhorts us to work tirelessly toward a pedagogy and research of Vivir Bien y Vivir Bonito, which roughly translates as to how our daily actions are geared towards living well, in peace and harmony with each other and everything that surrounds us (Gudynas, 2011; Oviedo Freire, 2017).
This onto-epistemological framework reveals the holistic connection between who we are, where we come from and our relations with others, while engaging in research and teaching practice. This model attempts to promote reflections on how colonial discourses of research and language teaching have separated us from our being, our connections with others and our cultural roots (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010, 2010; Walsh, 2010). This framework can potentially become the entry point for language teachers and researchers to re-imagine and create a possible future rather than a utopian future (Brown & McCowan, 2018; Gudynas, 2011). In this way, praxis leads to transformation and societal change, with our eyes and hands on social justice and peacebuilding, especially in international, under-resourced and marginalized contexts (Dei, 2019; Dei & Lordan, 2016).
Also, I will illustrate how this framework works with specific classroom activities that teachers and students do in collaboration to respond to their neighborhood social problems (unemployment, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy etc.). In the end, their activities and projects are reflected in this framework that seeks is, in the words of Araujo Frías (2013), and paraphrasing Freire (1970), to re-think and re-furbish our obsolete education and research paradigms that consider our students as empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge and our research participants as subjects of study. It suggests making space for an alternative paradigm in which students feel the desire to learn and research participants can collaborate with researchers in close relationship, with their emotions, intellect and reason at the service of humanity (Galeano, 1992; Oviedo Freire, 2017; Rendon, 2008).

Author

• Yecid Ortega, OISE/University of Toronto