Interculturality between official knowledge of the school curriculum and local knowledge in community classrooms in Chile

Abstract

Critical interculturality emerges as a proposal for interculturality that goes beyond its relational and functional visions, since it seeks to produce structural, institutional, and social relations changes, thereby generating diverse conditions of being, thinking,knowing, learning, feeling, and living. This approach, consistent with the objectives of the network of dialogic community classrooms that have been developing in Chile since 2005, seek to transform the school curriculum through the encounter between local and official knowledge. Through participatory action research, in two community classrooms, one, in a school in mining cultural context and, the other, in rural context, it aims to determine the local knowledge that disputes space and time to the oficial knowledge of the school, and whether these, manage to transform the oficial monocultural curricular structure, from the perspective of a critical interculturality. Through dialogic conversations, collective dialogues and audiovisual records, during three years, it was identified diverse areas of community knowledge that get in the school curriculum, displacing the traditional curricular knowledge. Nevertheless, the status that this knowledge represents in the school curriculum differs in favor of one classroom with respect to the other. These findings, allow discussing the degree of critical interculturality at the curricular level, and offer transformative praxis towards that way.