No. 15 (8): Education in Latin America: historical perspectives. July-December 2017

Educational processes are complex, and that is precisely how we should view them. They are nourished by institutional devices, pedagogical articulations and the practices of individual actors, in the course of specific political, social and cultural transitions.

Seeing education in these terms allows us to acknowledge the places occupied by different actors other than teachers and students, as well as the specific weight the latter have. Weighing thus the place that the history – or histories – of communities has had and still has in the shaping of national and regional identities in the light of these educational processes enables us to delve deeper into the recovery of memory as a pedagogical instrument, a human right, and the support in the creation of educational models or forms that resound in an attentive, driven and active listening. It is a history that restores the timbre of silenced voices, material places and symbolic practices, histories retrieved by individual subjects and placed in the service of educational processes inscribed in their own times and spaces.

In this sense, Latin America emerges as a region that articulates a plurality of similar social and political processes – with, at the same time, local particularities – which must be taken into account. Mapping educational models, locating their re-appropriations, understanding the actors’ experiences, social resistances, and manifestations of agency, allows us to see education as a path that can lead to imagining more democratic spaces, with individuals who are able to envisage more fully lived lives.

Thus, research that, through careful analysis of its own – as well as its shared and nearby – history, enables us to see the value of education as an emancipatory asset, has gained strength in Latin America. These researchers see history – social and cultural heritage, oral tradition – apprehended through theoretical frameworks, as well as specific methods and instruments, as a window for questioning the past, making room for the possibilities of transformation.

Issue coordinators: María Mercedes Molina Hurtado and Yobenj Aucardo Chicangana Bayona