STATE, ETHNIC-POPULAR SECTORS AND INTERCULTURAL EDUCATIONAL POLICIES IN LATIN AMERICA: CONFLICTS, TENSIONS AND NEGOTIATIONS IN INTERCULTURAL EDUCATIONAL POLICIES AND REFORMS.
We propose to discuss the scope and limitations of the intercultural-focused educational policies and reforms aimed at popular and ethnically differentiated sectors of Latin American societies, implemented across the continent’s different states over the last thirty years.
Within this framework, we are interested in reflecting on the political, legal, epistemic and pedagogical conflicts, tensions and negotiations that arise between, on one hand, the State and official educational institutions, and, on the other, popular and teaching sectors—whether ethnically configured or not—in relation to the implementation of intercultural state educational reforms and policies that often come into contradiction with the projects, processes and experiences generated from popular, indigenous, Afro-descendant, community and/or teaching spaces and organizations.
One of the guiding questions of the symposium will be: is it possible for the State to generate an intercultural educational policy that dialogues respectfully and horizontally with the projects, experiences and processes generated from below and from within by popular and teaching organizations, whether ethnically configured or not?
In the symposium, we propose to reflect comparatively on the processes of creation and consolidation of educational legislation addressing interculturality in different Latin American countries, in order to discuss the advances, setbacks, challenges and local and regional particularities of public policies aimed at promoting cultural plurality and intercultural inclusion in the educational field. This will involve reflecting on the scope and limitations of the processes of dialogical and participatory construction of intercultural educational policies and programs, and also analyzing the challenges of their application in plural, unequal and asymmetric national and regional contexts. In this sense, we will also ask about the processes of institutionalization of educational initiatives generated from below and from within that, as part of alternative and counter-hegemonic political, epistemic, legal and pedagogical projects, collide with the modern-colonial nature of the Latin American Nation-State and with educational policies generated from economistic criteria seeking standardization, efficiency and effectiveness, which generally do not entail an increase in public spending in the educational field but rather its reduction. Based on the experiences and reflections established in different contexts and territories of the Latin American continent, the symposium will address the problematization of institutions and educational models nominally centered on critical and decolonial interculturality that have been implemented by the State and/or by ethnic-popular and teaching organizations. It will seek to reflect on the fundamental importance of valuing other epistemological matrices and of articulating pluri-epistemic knowledge for a true democratization of educational institutions. Likewise, it will discuss the intense and persistent processes of epistemic violence still present in spaces of knowledge linked to the State.
