Traditional Knowledge, Southern Theories and Communitarianism in recent Educational Reforms in Mexico: Towards a new Wave of Global Educational Policies
media release: Please join UW Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program. The events are free and open to the public.
Room 206 Ingraham Hall - 1155 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706.
LACIS Lunchtime Lecture: “Traditional knowledge, southern theories and communitarianism in recent educational reforms in Mexico: towards a new wave of global educational policies?”
Presented by Nave Visting Scholar, Dr. Ines Dussel, Department of Educational Research, CINVESTAV, Mexico
About the presentation: The curriculum for the Nueva Escuela Mexicana, launched by the MORENA government in 2022, has implied a discursive shift from a PISA-oriented curriculum–centered on improving performance in learning tests and competitive performance in a global market–towards an emphasis on the decolonialization of knowledge, epistemic diversity and the mobilization of local communities’ knowledges as significant actors in educational reforms. This shift was already visible in other Latin American reforms such as Bolivia’s and Ecuador’s in the early 2000s, but in the Mexican case it builds on a longstanding tradition of participation of local communities in education, entangled with teachers’ unions and social scientists, which give particular traits to what is considered as traditional knowledges.
The new curricular proposal references itself in the traditions of critical, democratic and emancipatory education, as well as on the philosophies and epistemologies of the South. I seek to interrogate what is packed into the notions of southern theories and decolonial and traditional knowledges and their translations into curriculum content and school lessons. I focus on the material assemblages and community networks organized by the reform and discuss the complexity of the inscription of this reform into the global circulation of curriculum policies.
About the presenter: Inés Dussel is Full-Time Researcher at the Department of Educational Research, CINVESTAV, Mexico, a top leading public research institution in Latin America. She got her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and served as Director of the Education Area, Latin American School for the Social Sciences (Argentina). She has published extensively on schooling, pedagogy, visual and digital media. She has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Melbourne, Paris 8, and Humboldt-zu-Berlin. She was President of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) between 2022 and 2025. In 2018 she received the Humboldt Research Award in Germany, in recognition of her research trajectory.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
