The disconnect between conviviality and interculturality: A pending challenge in ethnically diverse schools

Abstract

Given the ethnic diversity present in many Chilean schools, in this article we ask how interculturality and school conviviality respond to the challenges of providing a culturally relevant education for its schoolchildren. We present semi-structured interviews with teachers and staff members from fourteen schools in Santiago and Temuco. Based on an analysis of the data, we propose that a disconnect between both these education policies inhibits the chance to overcome structural racism in school spaces. We recommend that the tools offered by culturally relevant pedagogy be used to transform these school spaces by encouraging critical consciousness about structural inequalities, erroneous conceptual models about race, and nationalist hierarchies of whitened privilege that are reproduced in schools.