Defusing Master Narratives: Decolonial, Insurgent, Gentle Moves in a Con-Text of Teacher Education and Educational Research

Maria Marta Yedaide [1], Luis Gabriel Porta Vázquez[2]
[1] Professor and researcher at the School of Humanities and the School of Architecture, Urbanism and Design—Mar del Plata State University (UNMDP), Argentina. Head of the Education Department, School of Humanities, UNMDP; Associate Director of the international Journal Entramados-Educación y Sociedad. English Professor specialized in Higher Education; PhD in Humanities and the Arts, with an orientation to Educational Sciences (Rosario State University, Argentina).
E-mail: myedaide@gmail.com       
 
[2] Professor and researcher at the School of Humanities; Director of the Center of Multidisciplinary Research on Education (CIMED), the Journal Revista de Educación Facultad de Humanidades and CEDU (Post graduate Program for Teaching in Higher Education) —Mar del Plata State University (UNMDP), Argentina. History Professor specialized in Higher Education; PhD in Pedagogy (University of Granada, Spain). Independent Researcher for CONICET (National Committee of Science and Technology).
E-mail: luisporta510@gmail.com        
 

Abstract

This article intends to share a very particular perspective on teacher education and educational research while asserting the inevitability, inescapability, of such local epistemological bias[1]. It discusses the hermeneutic, narrative, decolonial and performative turns and their interplay with the geocultural and political conditions in a con-text[2] which is acknowledged as highly productive (and strongly conditioning) of social meaning. On the basis of teaching and research experience, some insurgent, gentle moves have been designed as ethico-onto-epistemological gestures to experiment on concrete possibilities of fluidity and instability for master narratives. Far from naïvely believing in the “fall”, “end” or “breaking down” of these narratives, defusing them involves instead a positioning on language, narrative and discourse capable of devising provisional and changing patterns of contingent intelligibility which allow for greater exercise of civic sovereignty. Critical, decolonial and queer pedagogies actually constitute the core beliefs which—subjected to the constraints of contingency—are asked to perform this double role of both structuring and shattering grand narratives.

[1] It must be noted that this positioning has implied an explicit rejection of the use of passive voice and the (impersonalized) third person in writing this article. The choice of the pronoun “we” constitutes in itself a political gesture –an exercise of rhetoric prerogative, in the terms Segato (2019), Walsh (2011), and Yedaide (2017) propose—. In addition, we affiliate to the thesis which claims that separating the personal and the political constitutes a modern technology: a culture of the non-culture (Haraway, 1997), that is to say, a maneuver that conceals the necessary political bias present in all social products, even and especially when these are self-presented as merely technical. As to our use of English in writing—though apparently contradictory with the epistemic authority we defend—it must be read simply as a gesture manifesting willingness to engage in productive dialogue with peoples who do not speak Spanish.

[2] The choice of splitting the word “context” as “con-text” aims at raising awareness regarding the decisive influence that any setting exercises in meaning-making (a site should not be taken as merely ornamental or as landscape/ background but rather as an agent, productive in the construction of meaning, we argue.     

Keywords: Master Narratives; Critical, Decolonial and Queer Pedagogies; Teacher Education; Educational Research.

References

Angenot, M. (2012). El discurso social. Los límites históricos de lo pensable y lo decible. Buenos Aires: Siglo veintiuno.

Bourdieu, P. (2008). El sentido práctico. Barcelona: España Editores.

BRITZMAN, D. (2016). ‘¿Hay una pedagogía queer? O, no leas tan recto’. Revista de Educación de la Facultad de Humanidades 9, 7. Pp. 13-34. (1995).

Burbules, N. (1995). Posmodern Doubt and Philosophy of Education. Illinois: University of Illinois. 

Cairo, H. and R. Grosfoguel (et al.) (2010). Descolonizar la modernidad, descolonizar Europa: un diálogo Europa-América Latina. Madrid: IEPALA. 

Castro-Gómez, S. (2005). La hybris del Punto Cero: ciencia, raza e Ilustración en la Nueva Granada (1750-1816). Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.

Coelho, T. (2009). Diccionario Crítico de Política Cultural. Cultura e imaginario. Barcelona: Gedisa. 

Denzin, N. (2018). ‘Performance, Hermeneutics, Interpretation. In: The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Data Collection. Sage Publications Ltd. 200-216.

Denzin, N. and Lincoln, Y. (2011). El campo de la investigación cualitativa. Manual de investigación cualitativa. Vol. I. Barcelona: Gedisa.

Denzin, N. and Lincoln, Y. (2012). Paradigmas y perspectivas en disputa. Manual de investigación cualitativa. Vol. II. Barcelona: Gedisa.

Fenstermacher, G. and Richardson, V. (2005). ‘On making determinations of quality in teaching’. In: Teachers College Record, Vol. 107, Nº 1: 188-213.

Ferrera-Balanquet, R. (Comp.). (2015). Andar Erótico Decolonial. CABA: del Signo.

Ferstenmacher, G. (1989). Tres aspectos de la filosofía de la investigación sobre la enseñanza”. In: Wittrock, M. (comp.) La investigación de la enseñanza, I. Buenos Aires: Paidós.

Flores, V. (2017). Tropismos de la disidencia. Santiago de Chile: Palinodia.

Galcerán Huguet, M. (2010). ‘Límites y paradojas de los universales eurocéntricos’. In: Cairo, H. & R. Grosfoguel (et al.) Descolonizar la modernidad, descolonizar Europa: un diálogo Europa-América Latina. Madrid: IEPALA.

Gerrard, J.; Rudolph, S. and Sriprakash, A. (2017). ‘The Politics of Post-Qualitative Inquiry: History and Power’.  Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 23 (5) 384-394.

Grimson, A. (2013). ‘Introducción’. In: Grimson, A. and Bidaseca, K. Hegemonía cultural y políticas de la diferencia. Buenos Aires: Clacso.

Guba, E. and Lincoln. Y. (2012). Controversias paradigmáticas, contradicciones y confluencias emergentes. Cap. 8, pp.3878. In: Denzin, N. & Lincoln, Y. Paradigmas y perspectivas en disputa. Manual de investigación cualitativa. Vol. II. Barcelona: Gedisa.

Halberstam, J. (2018). El arte queer del fracaso. Trad. J. Sáez. Barcelona: Egales editorial.

Han, B. (2015). La salvación de lo bello. Barcelona: Herder.

Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest_Witness@. New York, London: Routlege.

Kincheloe, J. and McLaren, P. (2012). ‘Replanteo de la teoría crítica y de la investigación cualitativa’. In: Denzin, N. and Lincoln, Y. Paradigmas y perspectivas en disputa. Manual de investigación cualitativa. Vol. II, pp. 241-315.

Kuby, C. and Christ, R. (2018). Productive Aporias and Inten(t/s)ionalities of Paradigming: Spacetimematterings in an Introductory Qualitative Research Course. Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 24 (4), 293-304.

Lander, E. (2001). ‘Ciencias sociales: saberes coloniales y eurocéntricos’. In: Edgardo Lander (Comp.) La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales: perspectivas latinoamericanas. 2da edición. Buenos Aires; Ciccus Ediciones.

Litwin, E. (1996). ‘El campo de la didáctica: en búsqueda de una nueva agenda’. In: Camilloni, A.; Davini, M. C.; Eldestein, G.;  Litwin, E.; Souto, M. and S. Barco Corrientes didácticas contemporáneas. Buenos Aires: Paidós.

Litwin, E. (2008). El oficio de enseñar. Condiciones y contextos. Paidós voces de la educación. Buenos Aires, Paidós.

Llamazares, A. (2013). Del reloj a la flor de loto. Crisis contemporánea y cambio de paradigmas. Buenos Aires: Del Nuevo Extremo.

Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). ‘On the Coloniality of Being’. In: Cultural Studies, 21, Issues 2-3 Globalization and the De-colonial Option, 240-270.

Morin, E. (1999). Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future. Paris: UNESCO.

Nordstrom, S. (2018). ‘Antimethodology: Postqualitative Generative Conventions’. Qualitative Inquiry Vol. 24 (3) 215-226.

Porta, L. and Yedaide, M. (2016). ‘Hybrid Narrative for Decolonial Pedagogy’. Revista Internacional de Educación y Organización Escolar. 1, 1, pp. 3-15.

Quijano, A. (1997). ‘Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina’. In: Anuario Mariateguiano, IX/9: 113-121.

Rau, A.; Elliker, F. and J. Coetzee (2018). ‘Collecting Data for Analyzing Discourses’. In: The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Data Collection. Sage Publications Ltd. 300-313.

Rivera Cusicanqui, S. (2017). Historias Debidas VIII: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. Canal Encuentro

Ryan, B.A. (1999). ‘Does Postmodernism Mean the End of Science in the Behavioral Sciences, and Does It Matter Anyway?’. Theory and Psychology, Vol. 9 (4): 483-502. Sage Publications

Sedgwick, E. K. (2018). Tocar la fibra: Afecto, pedagogía, performatividad. Madrid: Alpuerto.

Segato, R. (2015). La crítica de la colonialidad en ocho ensayos. Y una antropología por demanda. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros.

Segato, R. (2019). ‘Las virtudes de la desobediencia’. Página 12; April 26, 2019. 

Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing Metholodogies. Research and the Indigenous People. Malasya: Zed Books Ltd.    

Smith, L. T. (2005). ‘On tricky ground: Researching the native in an age of uncertainty’. In: N.K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research. 3rd Ed. Pp. 87-107. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.  

Steiner, George (2007). Lecciones de los maestros. Buenos Aires, Fondo de cultura económica: Siruela.

Wacquant, L. (2005). ‘Conexiones carnales: sobre corporización, aprendizaje y pertenencia’. On Body and Soul. Notebooks of an apprentice boxer, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2004. In Qualitative Sociology, V. 20, N° 3, summer 2005.

Walsh, C. (2011). The politics of naming. Cultural Studies, 2011. Routledge. 1-18.

Walsh, C. (2013). Pedagogías decoloniales. Prácticas insurgentes de resistir, (re) existir y (re) vivir. Tomo I. Quito-Ecuador: Ediciones Abya-Yala.

Yedaide, M. (2016). ‘Condiciones para una investigación narrativa por demanda’. In: III Jornadas de Investigadorxs, Grupos y Proyectos en Educación en Educación. Mar del Plata, June 27 – 28.

Yedaide, M. (2017). El relato “oficial” y los “otros” relatos sobre la enseñanza en la formación del Profesorado. Un estudio interpretativo en la Facultad de Humanidades, UNMDP. Dissertation Paper. PhD in Humanities and the Arts, Rosario State University, Argentina.