RURAL EDUCATIONS AND IDENTITY RESISTANCES IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN: VOICES AND CHALLENGES
Rurality in Latin America offers a window onto the resistance involved in situating the practices and knowledges built by communities that have survived as identity elements of each territory. Thinking about this requires deepening and generating reflections starting from diversities and tensions—not to subjugate the past, but to identify the challenges and opportunities for transformation that the first quarter of the twenty-first century brings.
Questions about the use of natural resources, eating habits, the satisfaction of basic needs, ancestral knowledge, peasant knowledges, the role of the school and new technologies, and concerns about Artificial Intelligence are just some of the threads of a pedagogy of the rural that can be problematized and transformed.
From rural knowledges, cultural practices, nature and territory, the question arises: What of all this has there been a willingness to integrate into educational systems and teaching practices? What educational practices from rurality have been recognized within the educational system? What limits persist most? How has rural education been transformed for the benefit of its communities? What happens to young people in new labor and educational settings? To what extent have communities’ own education systems for indigenous, Afro-descendant and peasant communities been strengthened? What presence do new communication systems and technology use have in rurality and the educational system, among other questions.
Guiding questions within the symposium
1. What kinds of tensions are evident in teaching and learning processes in rural contexts?
2. How do external agents impact rural territories and rural education systems and their communities (peasant, indigenous and Afro-descendant)?
3. Has the school-community relationship achieved effective connections within rural curricula, and to what extent, and which experiences have been successful?
4. In what ways does the rural school influence the configuration of rural identities, and how much social participation does it have in government actions?
5. To what extent do teaching, learning and cultural mediations reveal new subjectivities, and to what extent is the traditional being replaced by the modern?
Objectives
A- To understand social, community and formal processes that shape rural education and peace: it is hoped to identify sectors of civil society—cultural and non-schooled—that display their identity dynamics.
B- To identify tensions in the recognition of cultural diversity within rural educational settings: readings of lived experiences, practices, new methodologies and successful processes are of interest.
C- To explore the dilemmas of territorial realities and their impact on the everyday, labor, school and identity life of rural populations in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In this sense, the Symposium puts forward broad units of reflection where rural educations continue to nourish discussion and analysis so that educational systems resonate in everyday life, the classroom and the community, based on the cosmovisions and challenges of each territory and its construction of a Pedagogy of the Rural.
