Freire’s longevity in intercultural education: entangled histories from Colombian and Mexican higher education

ABSTRACT

In this paper we comparatively analyze the transnational migration of Freirean critical pedagogy to intercultural higher education in two plurilingual indigenous regions, the Cauca department (Colombia) and the state of Veracruz (Mexico). Through a case study of the Universidad Autónoma Indígena Intercultural (UAIIN), an indigenous intercultural university created by the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca, in Colombia, and the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI), an intercultural higher education initiative created inside Universidad Veracruzana, we identify a triangle of innovation that involves (1) indigenous community education, (2) Freirean popular education promoted by social movements and (3) academically inspired intercultural and plurilingual education.

En este artículo analizamos de forma comparativa la migración transnacional de la pedagogía crítica Freireana hacia la educación intercultural en dos regiones indígenas plurilingües: el Cauca (Colombia) y Veracruz (México). A partir de dos estudios de caso, la Universidad Autónoma Indígena Intercultural (UAIIN), por un lado, y la Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI), por otro lado, identificamos un triángulo de innovación educativa que enreda (1) la educación indígena comunitaria, entendida como educación propia, (2) la educación popular Freireana promovida sobre todo por movimientos sociales y (3) la educación intercultural y plurilingüe de inspiración académica.

KEYWORDS:

• Popular education
• intercultural education
• indigenous education
• participatory action-research
• Cauca (Colombia)
• Veracruz (Mexico)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Translated from Spanish by Margarita Alcántara Alemán and Beatriz Suárez Méndez.

2 This theoretical framework is based on Freire’s own works as well as on contributions by Roberts (2000, 2010), Shor (1993), Streck et al. (orgs., 2015) and Donoso Romo (2020).

3 Translation in italics in the original.

4 An exploitative form of land rent, imposed on indigenous farmers who had been robbed of their ancestral territories.

5 Initially the Bilingual Education Program (BEP) lacked an explicit intercultural perspective. However, we identify implicitly intercultural actions that can be traced back to the very creation of the program in 1978.

6 Cf. https://uaiinpebi-cric.edu.co/.

7 For more information cf. http://www.uv.mx/uvi/sedes/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) through a Ph.D. fellowship of CONACYT-PNPC and through a R+D project [convocatoria Ciencia Básica 2009].

Notes on contributors

Leonardo Montoya-Peláez

Leonardo Montoya-Peláez is a Colombian social and educational researcher, musician and singer-songwriter. Specialist in public management by Escuela Superior de Administración Pública (ESAP, Colombia), Master in Anthropology by Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia), university teacher on educational anthropology at Universidad de Antioquia, currently PhD student in Educational Research at Universidad Veracruzana (Mexico), developing a thesis on ‘Maps of comparative diversity between Colombia and Mexico and the limits of interculturality in education’. His research topics are intercultural studies, Latin American anthropology of education and indigenous movements in Colombia and Mexico. Email: [email protected]

Laura Selene Mateos Cortés

Laura Selene Mateos Cortés was trained as a philosopher (BA) and an anthropologist (MA) at Universidad Veracruzana (in Mexico) and Universidad de Granada (in Spain); she holds a PhD in social anthropology from Universidad de Granada; currently she works as a research professor in Intercultural Studies at Universidad Veracruzana’s Institute for Educational Research (IIE) and collaborates closely with Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI) and with UVI indigenous, afrodescendent and mestizo student and alumni initiatives. She is a member of the Mexican National Research System (SNI), of the Mexican Council of Educational Research (COMIE) and of the College of Ethnologists and Social Anthropologists (CEAS). She carries out collaborative research projects on intercultural education and particularly on intercultural higher education. Web: http://www.uv.mx/personal/lmateos/; email: [email protected]

Gunther Dietz

Gunther Dietz holds an MA and a PhD in anthropology from Hamburg University. He has been teaching at the Universities of Hamburg, Granada (Spain), Ghent (Belgium), Aalborg (Denmark), Veracruz (Mexico) and Deusto (Spain). Currently he is a research professor in Intercultural Studies at Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa (Mexico), where he works on multiculturalism, ethnicity, interculturality and intercultural/inter-religious education. Web: http://www.uv.mx/personal/gdietz/; email: [email protected]