Rural Education in the context of Latin America and Schools with Multigrade Classes

Other reflections from Post-Colonial Studies

Abstract

This text is the result of a completed master's research. This dissertation sought to understand the expectations of the peasant community about the school with multigrade classes in the countryside. In this way, this article aimed to understand the meanings of Rural Education in the context of Latin America and the conceptions that underpin the construction of School, Rural School and School with multigrade rural classes. The reflections carried out here took Post-Colonial Studies as a theoretical-methodological lens, as it allows us to problematize the processes of inferiorization and silencing imposed on peasant peoples, their territories and their schooling processes. We point out as results that Rural Education in the Latin American scenario needs to be understood as another possibility to break the colonial inheritances imposed by the Eurocentric and urbancentric logic. Latin America is constituted as a plural space-time with other valid know-hows that carry out decolonial actions by claiming and re-signifying their place-time in history and in educational construction. In this sense, we consider that rural people recognize the school as an institution that contributes to the formation of subjects, as they continue to demand a school that is socially referenced in their subject-territories. Thus, in the midst of this discussion, we consider that the organization of rural schools, based on multiseriation, is configured as a possibility of keeping educational institutions active in the rural territory and that, based on a curricular and pedagogical practice aligned with the reality of students of different ages/grades, it is possible to promote critical, reflexive and decolonial teaching and learning processes.