Intercultural education: Mapuche educators in foreign schools. Narratives in eight poems

Abstract

This article deals with the nodes of significance that refer to tensions and difficulties in the current intercultural education. These have been extracted from fragments that traditional educators selected from their own stories recorded in interviews by a “textual transmutation” technique which implies the re-elaboration of short textualities with highlighted contents from the narrations in the interviews. Results show that for Mapuche educators, the school institution, despite being open to the intercultural curriculum, maintains symbolic limits
with the communities and bodies of Mapuche children. It’s also shown that the school’s territory is maintained colonially active, and it exerts control through texts, planning and curriculum constrained by standardized tests. Iit is also recognized that educators perform symbolic and strategic acts to counterbalance the inequalities of this interculturality which appears to be more transformative than it actually is.