The pedagogy-coloniality relationship

We are not visible where we can be found, but where we feel we live

Abstract

From a philosophical-educational perspective, this article addresses the pedagogy-coloniality relationship and its effects on the school. From the analysis of these elements, their coexistence and tension, a living pedagogy that enables the school to be inhabited from and for a practice that delegitimises colonial school forms is recognised. This paper is based on an investigation conducted in two public primary schools in southern Mendoza (2019-2022) using the methods of community of dialogue and community of enquiry. It sought to explore the link between the modern colonial-Eurocentric educational project and the ways of inhabiting the school, based on the assumption that such a relationship limited the construction of worldviews, life projects and contextualised social community ties,holding as valid reduced options for life and social survival. The link implied noticing the school elements present and absent involved, those present in a hegemonic way, imposed by the modern rationality, and those absent, made invisible or not evident from this logic. In the tensions between presence and absence made visible in the study, the pedagogy-coloniality relationship emerges. In order to approach it, it is first unfolded the construction of a theoretical framework that thinks about colonial marks through Aníbal Quijano, the possibility of a critical pedagogy through Paulo Freire and its contradictions in modernity. Secondly, this characterisation is expanded considering the idea of living pedagogy and what it calls for. Finally, it reflects on living pedagogy as a project that recovers social-community ties broken by the modern school project.