Discourse, in relation to its primary function of communication and interaction, is not only a tool for constructing intersubjectivities and identities, but also a situated process that describes understandings, interpretations, and practices. Specifically, in terms of teaching and learning processes, discourse plays a cardinal role, insofar as students are formed through discourses of various kinds and, moreover, education is constructed/reconstructed discursively. Thus, the analysis of discourses in, about, and for education constitutes a project of critical reflection—social, linguistic, political and pedagogical—that recognizes conceptions, understandings and projections regarding the ongoing history of Latin American education and its possibilities, objectives, obstacles and utopias.
In this sense, discourses about training (oral, written, audiovisual, hypermedial, among others) have historically shaped ways/modes of thought and action that establish the paradigms from which education is thought and practiced, and even the understanding of what it means to educate in the twenty-first century. Conceiving discourse as an “essential component of sociocultural interaction, as a union of linguistic form and language functions, as a communicative event embodied in speech and in sociocultural activity” (Krasina & Perfilyeva, 2021, p. 247), we understand its possibilities as an inter- and transdisciplinary phenomenon, and its implications for everyday actions and for the events and experiences situated within school and social settings.
This symposium, therefore, proposes to analyze the discursivities around training in Latin America in order to recognize within them not only understandings, trends and potentials in relation to the past, present and future of education in our contexts, but also to reflect on how, discursively—through language—reality is inhabited, constructed and designed. By bringing together the diversity of discourses on training in Latin America, a sphere of social life is opened in which the humanities and social sciences engage in dialogue, composing and dismantling narratives of power, of inclusion and exclusion, that create tension in the present while also allowing us to think about the dynamics of the (trans)formation of the contemporary subject.
