The creation of universidades interculturales (intercultural universities, UIs) in Mexico at the start of the 21st century was not only a policy response to the need for more accessible higher education for historically underrepresented students, but also to the call for more culturally and linguistically relevant education and development made by the Indigenous rights movement. However, because of the history of colonialism in Latin America and the use of state schooling to assimilate citizens into a homogenous Mexican nation, the goal of supporting cultural and linguistic diversity through public education presents tensions and contradictions. For some, UIs promise the possibility of revalorizing subaltern knowledges, promoting Indigenous activism, and protecting the human and cultural rights enshrined in international and national law. For others, they represent a continuation of top-down polices dominated by policymakers who are not intimately familiar with Indigenous experiences and goals. More research is needed at the level of implementation, where teachers and students make meaning out of policy, to clarify whether and how intercultural higher education models can accomplish the various possibilities they are ascribed in theory.
Research on programs to support Indigenous linguistic and cultural maintenance must attend to the colonial histories undergirding the material and social realities of the communities they are meant serve. As such, this case study used a decolonial lens and ethnographic methods, including interviews, classroom observations, and accompaniment of participants in their daily lives, to investigate how professors, students, and local community members were enacting an intercultural higher education at the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural-Huasteca (La UVI-H), an intercultural university campus created in 2005 as part of an intercultural subsystem of the larger and autonomous state University of Veracruz. The purpose of this study was to critically examine the teaching and learning taking place in and through La UVI-H to find out whether and how participation in intercultural higher education was influencing youths’ beliefs and perspectives about local languages, knowledges, and their views of the meaning(s) and purpose(s) of the bachelor’s degree it enabled them to pursue.
Findings showed that most students initially enrolled at La UVI-H because it was their only accessible higher education option. Yet over time, they found ways to appropriate aspects of their intercultural education, often coming to revalue the cultural and linguistic practices of their local communities, even if they did not plan to or end up staying in them upon graduation, as the UI model expects. A central role of professors at La UVI-H beyond formal language teaching was creating space for students to question the colonial logics of education and development that surrounded them in larger society, including those they had internalized before arriving at university. Community leaders and members in the nearby towns were key to this pedagogical process, sharing their ways of life with UVI-H students through participation in their action research projects, thereby reengaging the cross-generational transmission of knowledge. Finally, students benefited not only from local community-linked interactions but also from interactions with regional and international networks and actors that being a part of the larger UV system afforded them. Together UVI-H professors, students, and local and international community members were enacting intercultural education in decolonial ways that recognized Indigenous languages and ways of living as resources that can and should be used to inform knowledge production and the creation of more desirable and self-determined futures.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/mq23-nj72 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Earl, Amanda |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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