Confronting epistemological blindness: Encountering the pluriverse in spaces of teacher learning and inquiry

• In Event: Encountering the pluriverse through Indigenous pedagogies

Proposal

I have a hard time not seeing how the past irrupts (Wilde, 1999) into the present and the memory systems of the present cultivate and curate the past in the ways that serve particular socio-political interests and needs (Jelin & Lorenz, 2004). My research and work with teachers in Guatemala investigated the frameworks, experiences, memories and/or discourses that inform processes of teacher learning about and inquiry into difficult histories related to Guatemala’s 36-year Internal Armed Conflict. Walking with educators (Sundberg, 2014) during a teacher professional development program, we explored the pedagogical openings and foreclosures of weaving disciplinary processes of historical inquiry (ex. Wineburg & Reisman, 2012; Barton & Levstik, 2004) with pluriversal encounters / collisions with violent, controversial, and often conflicting memories and histories of the Armed Conflict. Through collaborative historical inquiry, we analyzed the complicated work of how to pedagogically grapple with the legacies of racialized discrimination, violence, and conflict in classrooms.

The paper centers the pluriverse (Escobar, 2012; de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018), examining the agitating wisdoms of the fantastical, spectral, and otherworldly (Gordon, 2008) in the spaces of learning, dialogue, and inquiry with teachers. The absent presence of the ghostly vestiges of horror and death that continued to startle and scare were woven throughout the processing of investigating the Armed Conflict, transgressing evidentiary approaches to truth-telling and sense-making (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2020). Tracing the agitations of the otherworldly within the research / learning space opens up engagement with the pluriverse and relational ontologies and epistemologies (Escobar, 2012; Querejazu, 2016) that defy the logics of historiography, unveiling alternate ways of knowing and learning about violence circulating in teachers’ worlds. With a decolonial intention to engage with multiple ways of knowing and telling the past and to recognize the epistemological pluriverse (Escobar, 2018b), the paper explores multiple permutations of the otherworldly and what they allowed the teachers to know, feel, and express about power, trauma, fear, and mistrust.

While my research and the teaching training program in which it was embedded explicitly endeavored to address and disrupt violent colonial legacies, the epistemological frames and relational habits of modernity/coloniality (Mignolo, 2000) often proved difficult to dislodge, not just for me but for the participants and facilitators as well. The epistemologies of the North (Santos, 2009) and the access to power they promise remained in constant negotiation and tension with Indigenous cosmologies, Catholic or evangelical dogmas, and hyper localized manifestations of syncretism. Yet, despite the persistence of colonial structures orienting pedagogical practice and content, the educators found ways to transgress Western ontologies and assert the presence of pluriversal beings and wisdoms lingering in the wake of state terror, violence, and Armed Conflict.

As (un)method, I have endeavored to unravel myself from the colonial confines of coding and traditional qualitative methods (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014; St. Pierre, 2019), and taken up quilting (Flannery, 2001; Ortega et al., 2023; Kelsch, 2012) as a decolonial practice of epistemological encuentro (encounter) that allows me to continue to walk alongside educators as I analyze and narrativize the complex interactions between and translations of epistemologies of the North and South within the learning spaces of the research. The narrative practice of quilting multiple knowledges and voices endeavors to performatize an ecology of knowledges (Santos, 2009), explore the pluriverse (Escobar, 2018a) of epistemologies and cosmologies being stitched together and torn at the seams as teachers took up Guatemala’s violent past, and trouble the asymmetrical, power-laden patchwork of knowledges in translation (Costa, 2020) in our inquiry efforts.

Teachers pieced together swatches of memories and stories, creating a pluriversal patchwork that explored multi-dimensional dynamics of power and struggle. The narratives that the teachers constructed traversed epistemological and cosmological worlds, for example, conjoining third-hand stories of political negotiations between warring parties with memories of guerrillas who activated the power of their shape-shifting nahuales to fight against the civil patrollers. The edges of the narrative fragments were uneven and unraveling, and composed of ways of knowing that stitch together about as easily as chiffon and leather. The stories deny linearity, with time and space shifting quickly, as participants recount stories, both as individuals and collectives. The noise and friction when they spoke on top of each other, moved quickly from one speaker to the next, finishing each other thoughts, clarifying or adding on to the story of another, layering on another reading, created a mnemonic patchwork where the pieces didn’t need to have empirical coherence or validity to nestle together and take shape.

The pluriverse reverberated through spaces of teacher learning, opening up alternate readings of the past, present, and future that resonate with the multiplicities of ways of knowing and being circulating in spaces of teacher learning. Despite the pressures of internal colonization to repress and deny the wisdoms or even influence of Indigenous ways of thinking and speaking in Guatemalan culture and Spanish, teachers consistently wove syncretic inflections of Indigenous survival and resistance into their ways of speaking and learning, no matter whether they self-identified as Indigenous, Ladino/a or Mestizo/a. The teachers’ eschewal of “coherent,” stable representations of the past that “make sense” within Western positivist guidelines for telling the past speaks to the urgency of “ontological translation” as a pedagogical practice that explores and “emphasizes equivocations that stem from our multiple realities” (Costa, 2020, p. 175).

Recognizing the pluriverse and paying attention to the multiplicity of epistemological planes in circulation within learning spaces opens alternate modes of collective inquiry and knowledge production. As much as the colonial grammar of schooling (Tyack & Cuban, 1995) might foreclose spaces for relational ontologies, the poetics of Mayan cosmologies (Henne, 2012; Keme, 2021; Yanes, 2014) found their way into the learning space, though I could not always hear them in the moment. I acknowledge my epistemological blindness that encumber(ed) my ability to read and perceive the heterogeneity of Mayan cosmologies and ways of knowing. Nonetheless, the teachers challenged and convinced me of the urgency of recognizing the pluriverse and creating space for it by cultivating ecologies of knowledge within spaces of inquiry and learning.

Author

• Charlotte Haynes, N/A