Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This article provides an extensive critical reflection on a variety of issues that impact the practice of cultural democracy within education. The discussion begins by identifying contemporary conditions of inequality faced by subaltern communities in the U.S. and abroad. Key to this discussion is the link between culture and power, which opens the door to a decolonizing understanding of social justice. Drawing on John Dewey and Paulo Freire’s writings on democracy and education, a set of pedagogical principles are asserted, which can support a culturally democratic approach within the classroom. In building a rationale for a critical pedagogical path toward a cultural democratic pedagogy, the process of racialization and language domination are explored, alongside the significance of resistance in the education of subaltern students. Finally, a collective vision of liberation is reinforced here as paramount to the transformation of education and creating educational opportunities, despite the limitations of hegemonic schooling.

    In this paper, I focus on the role of the teacher educator in education for cultural democracy and social justice work. I have been a teacher educator for many years and wanted to examine how one becomes a teacher educator, the personal, cultural and societal antecedents that shape such a role. Using a self-study and critically self-reflective approach, I interrogate my role in the context of the technocratic and bureaucratic control that threatens to extinguish the joy and liberatory potential of truly democratic education. I reflect on the processes of becoming a liberatory teacher educator and how this has translated into being responsible for teaching teachers how to teach. I conclude with some reflections on the challenges facing a teacher educator who wants to preserve joy and liberation of the human spirit in their profession.

In this paper, I draw inspiration from Antonia Darder’s chosen piece to indicate some of the challenges for a genuinely democratic education and critical pedagogy in these turbulent times. I give pride of place to the war in the Ukraine, targeting the themes of imperialisms in a multipolar world, militarisation, extreme nationalism and Fascism. I also tackle climate change and potential wars in the south resulting from depletion of resources and the related theme of mass migration from ‘South’ to ‘North’. I also tackle the tangible cultural products characterised by social relations marked by human suffering and slavery, these distressing histories carried forward as part of the ‘portability of cultures’ of descendants knocking at the gates of the West.

This paper explores the implications of Antonia Darder’s article “Reflections on Cultural Democracy and Schooling” (this issue) on the author’s pedagogy as a teacher educator preparing teacher candidates to work in urban public schools during the pandemic. The author illustrates the ways in which he integrates Darder’s culturally democratic pedagogy into his teaching. Particular attention is placed on how the author helps teacher candidates analyze the role of ideology in concealing and legitimizing structures of power, guiding candidates to center students’ lived experiences in the curriculum and develop student voice, and cultivating their capacity to understand teaching as a moral and political act.

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This article exfoliates Antonia Darder’s critical excavations on cultural democracy and schooling. The article unfolds her arguments in the context of our contemporary epoch, an epoch paced by an absurd. In doing so, the paper scrutinizes eugenics and the curriculum epistemicide as the real colors of such absurdity in our field. The paper situates such absurdity within the matrix of Modern Western Eurocentric reason – a Prosperous reason – and examinates its non-derivative abyssal nature. The article also unpacks Darder’s call to challenge such eugenic reason, through a commitment to decolonize our cultural forms, the very praxis of democracy as well as our educational institutions, educational policy, curriculum, and teacher preparation programs. The article flags categories such as race and language as quite dear to a Freirean scholar with a strong Neogramscian footprint such as Antonia Darder. The article ends by examining not only, how the notion of cultural democracy in schooling and pedagogies speaks volumes to what I have called itinerant educational and curriculum theories, but also how the piece is a clear call to some of the challenges we face within the critical and post critical territories.

Educational development within the postcolonial Indian Nation-state is integrally connected with the colonial history. Much like other postcolonial nations, modernisation of Indian society through education is a product of the “local history” and the “global design” of colonialism and contemporary processes of globalisation. The modern colonial imaginary has been predominant in shaping the “subject lessons” learnt by modern Indian elites. Though there were missionaries, some benevolent Europeans, and native intellectuals committed to the cause of education for the uplift of the Indian masses, the British Raj mostly promoted the education for the elites. This modern colonial imaginary also shaped Indian nationalism and the nationalist freedom movement led by the elites of the Indian society. Within a diverse class, caste, multi-ethnic and religious context, often this nationalist imaginary led to the suppression of subaltern voices. The establishment of the Modern Indian nation-state with a democratic constitution drafted by a constituent assembly with representation from all sections of the diverse Indian society (including 15 women from diverse backgrounds) and chaired by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, a dalit[i] scholar and intellectual, promised the establishment of democracy and social justice. However, this paper argues that the constitutional promise cannot be fulfilled without decolonising the aims and objectives of education that serves the interest of specific elite groups. In order to decolonise education, it would be of utmost importance to align the aims and objectives of education with that of democratic education. 

Today, most educational contexts appear as culturally diverse digital spaces that require effective intercultural relations to function properly. Learning Spanish is not exempt from this task. The objective of this study was to analyse to what extent a virtual program that explores the linguistic and cultural diversity of Spanish as a foreign language can help to develop intercultural communication. We use a nested concurrent mixed method. The quantitative techniques remain the predominant approach. Data will be analysed from a pre-test, post-test, and control group design and will include questionnaires and personal interviews. The results confirm that the digital pedagogical tool encourages and facilitates an intercultural dialogue between the varieties of Spanish involved in a more exhaustive and effective way, also between Spanish and other students’ languages, thus reflecting a more open and eclectic learning process.

The aim of this article is to make a theoretical review on resilience, play and creativity: their definitions, the main theories, their impact and evolution in the stages of life. The purpose of this bibliographic review is to know in detail of each variable, as well as to establish the relationship between them.