INTERCULTURAL PEDAGOGIES AND TEACHER TRAINING FOR ETHNIC COMMUNITIES IN LATIN AMERICA
Latin America has been the stage for educational, organizational, and knowledge-reclamation processes led by peasant, Afro-descendant and indigenous communities. In this context, teacher training with an intercultural and ethno-educational approach is not merely a pedagogical response, but one of cultural revitalization and survival for peoples in the construction of fairer and more diverse societies.
This symposium calls on researchers, teachers and trainers from Latin America to critically reflect on the models, tensions and horizons of intercultural teacher training on the continent.
The symposium starts from a central premise: teacher training programs cannot be detached from the historical and cultural realities of ethnic peoples. Ethno-education is the process by which the members of a people teach and construct knowledge and values according to their needs, aspirations and interests, projecting themselves with identity toward other human groups. This definition implies that the ethno-educator teacher is an intercultural and intergenerational agent who mediates between forms of knowledge and who has been trained from and for their own community.
Within this horizon, the symposium proposes three lines of discussion:
The first concerns the epistemological and political foundations of intercultural training: From what paradigms are teachers trained for ethnic communities? How are ancestral knowledges articulated with academic knowledge in teacher-training curricula? What does it mean to decolonize pedagogy in rural and border contexts?
The second line addresses concrete experiences and models of intercultural teacher training in different Latin American countries, including in-person, distance, and blended-intensive programs, with special attention to the challenges of access, retention and cultural relevance.
The third line examines the links between teacher training, community life plans, and Community Educational Projects as instruments of pedagogical and territorial autonomy, asking how universities can become allies of these processes.
The symposium falls within the thematic line of Education.
Papers are expected to present theoretical reflections, systematizations of experiences, and research results that contribute to strengthening the field of intercultural education on the continent and to making visible the voices and knowledges of ancestral peoples in the key of innovation and regenerative futures.
