Teaching training in intercultural education in Latin America. The Chilean case.

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the intercultural education and teaching formation in Latin America, specially in Chile. The study of this subject is an analysis of the Team of Senior Researchers of the Research Center in Indigenous and Intercultural Context (CIECII)– “Centro de Investigación en Educación en Contexto Indígena e Intercultural” –  part of the Millennium Scientific Initiative (ICM in Spanish) program by the Universidad Católica de Temuco. We uphold the view that interculturality in Latin America had its origin in the dynamic and complex relationships among the different indigenous communities and in the subsequent sociocultural transformations that resulted from the processes of conquest, colonization and constitution of the nation-states. In this context, bilingual intercultural education has been historically aimed at indigenous people, while formal schooling has been conceived mainly as a strategic tool of the nation-states to continue the dominance processes inherited from the colonial time (coloniality), specially in the school institutions. Thus, thinking about interculturality in a critical manner means to conceive it as an ethical, political and epistemological project to be. A project that  would transform the foundations that underpin the asymmetries and inequities in our society and that are replicated through formal schooling. We can conclude that, for teaching training, interculturality should seek to build a dialogue among subjects belonging to different societies and cultures in order to counteract the single-lined monoculturalism, to overcome the colonial characteristics of the educational actions, based on teaching practices based on critical awareness, as well as to combat racism and discrimination.