Abstract
Faced with a globalization process of people, materials, and knowledge, we find diversity as a source of enrichment, but also as a cause of tension, violence, and inequalities. The main objective is to show how decolonial, feminist, and antiracist pedagogies help build critical educational processes. The current state of this socio-educational issue is explored, and an educational experience during initial teacher training is presented which is based on interculturality with a gender perspective. The need to build decolonial, feminist, and antiracist pedagogies as part of teacher training from an intercultural approach stands out among the main conclusions.
TopIntroduction
Nobody liberates anybody else, and nobody liberates themselves all alone. People liberate themselves in fellowship with each other
Paulo Freire
The International Organization for Migration estimates that 271.6 million human beings experienced a migratory process throughout the world in 2019.1 The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) warns that, in that same year, almost 80 million of them were forced to abandon their homes, with 1 million people becoming stateless out of the 26 million attaining refugee status.2 The magnitude of these figures and the multiplicity of migratory flows characterize the international migrations of the 21st century in a context of economic globalization, where these forced displacements are additionally characterized by their feminization compared to other migratory periods in the history of humanity (Solé & Cachón, 2006).
These migratory characteristics from the beginning of the century represent the current state of a series of migratory processes generated by and since the Second World War. From that moment on, societies receiving migrants have developed multiple integration policies giving way to minority categories in the social, cultural, religious, and ethnic contexts (Castles & Miller, 1993) in an inversely proportional way to citizenship recognition and the associated social and political rights.
This sociodemographic change has manifested itself in a sociopolitical environment of liberal democracies where these minorities are seen as a threat to the values that are assumed to be common in the receiving group (Appadurai, 2007). These fears and misgivings have generated a certain level of rejection by creating social margins of exclusion, based on an artificial idea of superiority built around ethnic nationalism. In addition, different manifestations of cultural racism appear that are based on cultural fundamentalism (Stolcke, 2001).
This rejection is fed by a discourse of moral panic (Cohen, 1972) clearly evidenced in Europe by the so-called refugee crisis suffered in 2015 which is yet to be resolved. Refuge, forced displacement, fear and loss of rights are pointed out by Bauman (2005, 2016) as present characteristics that need to be addressed from the different spheres of society.
In terms of the educational sphere, Walsh and Monarca (2020) advocates for an education that opens and widens the “cracks” to provoke changes and insurgencies in the structures that generate inequality and violence. Violence that is racialized, feminized, territorialized and that contributes to maintaining a hetero-patriarchal, racist, classist, capitalist, colonialist, and anti-ecological system. At the epistemological level, this system imposes a single type of white-western-masculine-bourgeois knowledge, which tries to eliminate all knowledge coming from the diversity of experience, origins, cultures, existence, and identities.
In this chapter we ask ourselves, how can we open up paths in teacher training that will help broaden our perspective and build educational models that propose other ways of managing diversity with a decolonial, feminist and antiracist perspective?
TopBackground
Answers are found in the form of decolonial, feminist and antiracist pedagogies which focus on deconstructing the macho, colonialist, militarist, extractivist, neoliberal, individualist system... with acts of resistance and re-existence, that is, with creative and proactive processes and practices that put forward other ways of being, doing, feeling, and living.
Decolonial, feminist and antiracist pedagogies will be treated here as a field of action that can be interwoven with other critical, intersectional, and intercultural pedagogies to transform teacher training. These pedagogical epistemologies seek to unlearn, to then be able to relearn about a common space that is based on different presences, mutual coexistence, and dignity, as opposed to the space of invisible differences, educational commodification, knowledge individualism and materialism, and the imposition of a white, universal, masculine, and western science. Walsh (2018) proposes five keys to developing these decolonial pedagogies that will be discussed in depth in this chapter.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Racism: Ideology that supports the existence of a relationship between belonging to a socially created category (race) and the possession of specific characteristics. The difference between some groups and others can be biological, pseudo-biological, cultural, historical, or religious and it is used to create supremacist hierarchies.
Decolonial Pedagogy: Emancipatory praxis and criticism of citizenship in education. It involves knowledge, experiences, feelings, and diverse bodies and cultures that break with the hegemonic white-western-male paradigm and ethnocentric views.
Culture: A way of social life. A set of rules used by people to shape their social actions and relationships in their social life.
Refugee: Person who has fled their country because their life, security or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order.
Intersectionality: An approach originating from black feminism in the US. It suggests an analysis of social reality from the understanding of the intersection of oppressions and privileges based on racism/ethnicity, gender, sexism, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, class, or disability (ableism).
Feminist Pedagogy: Educational framework based on the radical feminist movement. It questions the patriarchal order as a system of oppression based on gender inequality and seeks to build educational processes aimed at transforming these inequalities.
Initial Teacher Training: The teaching and learning process carried out in higher education institutions, through which the professional competencies are acquired to teach Primary and Preschool children.
International Migration: Movement of people from their usual place of residence and across an international border to a country of which they are not nationals.
Intercultural Approach: Theoretical-applied model used for teaching. Its objective is the understanding, recognition, and coexistence between people of different cultures using a person-centered perspective in which each individual is a holder of Human Rights.
Gender Perspective: Epistemological conception that approaches reality from the perspectives of genders and their power relations. It analyzes the inequalities to which women are subjected, with its effects on the processes of production and reproduction in all areas of society.