Schooling as a regime of equality and reproducing difference in an Afro-Ecuadorian region

Abstract

In this article I compare and contrast curricular, ceremonial and pedagogical practices with how students and teachers make sense of racial identity and discrimination at the Jaime Hurtado Academy in the city and province of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, which is the only region of the nation where Afro-Ecuadorian people comprise a majority of the population. On the one hand, I found that schooling was structured as a regime of equality, where social science textbooks make invisible the concepts of race and Blackness while school ceremonies enforced membership to the nation. In addition, I demonstrate that pedagogical practices reinforce the notion of a culturally homogenous nation by providing little space for students to interrogate important issues in their lives. On the other hand, I show through an examination of how students and teachers make sense of racial identity and discrimination that race was a significant factor shaping teaching and learning at the research site and argue that schooling practices are implicated in this process by attempting to submerge racial and cultural differences.

Keywords:

• schooling
• Latin America
• Blackness
• Ecuador

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the students and their parents and the teachers at the ‘Jaime Hurtado Academy’ in Equador.

Notes

1. All quotations of interviews and of texts spoken and written in Spanish have been translated by the author.

2. The Jaime Hurtado Academy is a pseudonym as are all the names of students, teachers and parents cited in this article.