Interculturality in Educational Research: “Schools on the margins” in Latin America

ABSTRACT

Throughout the 1970s, questions concerning language, race, racialization, and Western culture-especially investigations into the naturalization of a single form of knowledge as valid-constituted objects for the production of studies on interculturality in Latin America. They traverse distinct paths in the region, whether through Freirean-based and community popular education, or in the outline proposed by the black movement and, primarily, through the production of indigenous education; the results of experiences and investigations contributed decisively to the displacement of part of the research in education toward the local dimension, a routine of/in the territories. Interculturality studies in Latin America are enunciated in the rigorous confrontation with tensions within the spaces constituted by universalizing ethnocentric modernity, such as the university, museums, and school. The presence of original, traditional, Amefrican, Afro-diasporic, peasant, riverside, and other communities generates encounters, tensions, studies, object, and agency. In this context, school education is taken under analysis by interculturality studies that are enunciated from the edges, from the “schools on the margins.” In this presentation text for the Dossier “Intercultural Experiences in Schools on the Margins in Latin America,” we hope that the results of investigations driven by those from the margins contribute to greater visibility for identity processes, to the affirmation of difference, to the irruption of other agencies and epistemes, and to that which moved them in projects across territories in Brazil, Mexico, and Ecuador. In an intercultural perspective of different methodological and theoretical nuances, this Dossier, like the “school on the margins,” becomes a political act.

Keywords:
Intercultural Education; Indigenous Education; Paulo Freire; School on the margins; Educational Research

RESUMO

Ao longo da década de 70, questionamentos sobre a linguagem, sobre raça e racialização e a cultura ocidental, sobretudo, as investigações sobre a naturalização de uma única forma de conhecimento como válida constituíram objetos para a produção de estudos sobre interculturalidade na América Latina. Percorrem caminhos distintos na região, seja pela educação popular de base freireana e comunitária, ou no traçado proposto pelo movimento negro e, principalmente, pela produção da educação indígena; os resultados das experiências e investigações contribuíram determinantemente para os deslocamentos de parte das pesquisas em educação para a dimensão local, cotidiana dos/nos territórios. Os estudos da interculturalidade na América Latina enunciam-se no enfrentamento rigoroso às tensões no interior dos espaços constituídos pela modernidade etnocêntrica universalizante como a universidade, museus, a escola. A presença das comunidades originárias, tradicionais, amefricana, afrodiaspórica, camponesa, ribeirinha e outras gera encontros, tensionamentos, estudos, objeto e agência. Neste contexto, a educação escolar é tomada sob análise pelos estudos da interculturalidade que se enunciam das bordas, das “escolas das margens”. Neste texto de apresentação ao Dossiê “Experiências Interculturais em Escolas das Margens na América Latina”, esperamos que os resultados de investigações movidas por aqueles e aquelas das margens contribuam para maior visibilidade aos processos identitários, à afirmação da diferença, à irrupção de agências e epistemes outras, àquilo que os moveu em projetos em territórios no Brasil, México e Equador. Em perspectiva intercultural de diferentes matizes metodológicos e teóricos, este Dossiê, como a “escola das margens”, torna-se ato político.

Palavras-chave:
Educação Intercultural; Educação Indígena; Paulo Freire; Escola das margens; Pesquisas em Educação

The project of gathering researchers who study the relationships between education, interculturality, and the tensions and provocations to the various forms that school education takes has been in development for some time. This text presents the result of this publication project, the dossier “Intercultural Experiences in Schools on the Margins in Latin America,” which intends to contribute to a continuous questioning of school education, but also to, at least with fragments, some updating of its objects. Considered as a field in growing consolidation and expansion in Education research developed in Latin America, interculturality begins its development process in the 1970s, when the term gains popularity in indigenous education studies, as Vera Maria Candau and Kelly Russo discuss in one of the first overviews published in Brazil (Candau; Russo, 2010) on the contribution of intercultural education in the Latin American continent, towards the understanding of social, political, and educational aspects, yet articulated to the processes of coloniality. In the period of the 70s, the works on bilingualism and indigenous school education in the Latin American continent, due to their relevant amount, but mainly due to the native voices present in the lines and between the lines, created the conditions for the studies of interculturality. Indigenous education constitutes the main field of reference (Candau; Russo, 2010), but for the constitution of interculturality, other fields align.

It has become significant to understand and emphasize the intense colonizing process present in the Latin American continent. The production that begins to circulate and reaches the present day, brought by the studies of interculturality, faces and questions the physical elimination of the other, ethnic inferiorization, the violent form of negation, the naturalization of prejudiced, discriminatory, and racist actions and attitudes, the strong silencing, and the severe subalternization of social groups (Santiago; Akkari; Marques, 2013; Mignolo; Pérez Armiño, 2025). The problems and objects proposed by studies of interculturality addressed the indigenous question, but simultaneously and gradually they are proposed by these subjects who cause it to transcend its original boundaries.

Based on the writings of Candau and Russo (2010), and other researchers, however, it is significant to note that interculturality highlights agencies. These studies make it possible to observe other voices in systematic epistemological elaboration, circulating within the academy but also across territories, including those on the margins - a spatiality defined by the Acre-based researcher Gerson Albuquerque in the introduction to the book Das Margens (2016):

[...] outside this type of route [of colonization and universality], opposing [ourselves] to its ordinances, subverting them from the margins. Encounters at the margins of the conventional axes or idealized centers of production/diffusion of an “educated culture” and the ones who produce everything that must be consumed in the “peripheries” of an asymmetrical and hierarchical world. From the margins because we speak in the “hollow of the world” [...] (Albuquerque, 2016, p. 7, our translation).

Indigenous and community voices, African, Afro-diasporic, and Amefrican voices, those of traditional Quilombola, rural, and riverside peoples - voices that affirm their difference, as well as voices that propose questions about gender difference, sexual orientation, and religious identity - belong to the margins. They challenge and affirm their own cultures, history, and epistemes. Their agency mobilizes as they have long done.

In the course through which studies of interculturality are constituted, gradually and simultaneously across diverse territories, it begins to make sense to think about and study their objects. They proposed the questioning of Eurocentrism, whiteness, and the “[...] route of colonization [that] projected certain cities, places, spaces/times in our subjectivities” (Albuquerque, 2016, p. 7, our translation) as a process that succeeded in maintaining coloniality:

[...] routes of silencing differences and erasing everything that is unfamiliar to the imposition of a certain educated culture, certain languages, a certain aesthetic perception, a certain artistic reference, a certain notion of preference and beauty, a certain pattern of modernity, a certain creativity, a certain production and circulation of values, a certain emancipation, a certain historical and identity narrative. In synthesis, the imposition of a [Eurocentric] global totalitarian universality (Albuquerque, 2016, p. 7, our translation).

In other words, the perspective of knowledge that, through historical and cultural processes, has established itself as the sole valid epistemology for the systematic elaboration of what is recognized as knowledge is pointed as a problematic field by interculturality.

In the presentation of this dossier, we wish to affirm a political act: to mobilize the reader toward a certain Latin American spatiality - the schools on the margins. These are those spatialities, then, that are found at the edges, not on the flip side, from where bodies that transit see the world . This is something that Rosane Borges (2025) translates in a provocative and poetic way in her readings of Vonnegut and Achille Mbembe:

The inhabitants of the edge of the world see first; the female inhabitants of the edge of the world see unimaginable things; the female inhabitants of the edge of the world see catastrophes corroding the borders, simply because they are inhabitants of the edge (Borges, 2025, 10m15s, our translation).

From this perspective, what do those who transit through the schools on the margins see? Perhaps the political impediment of their own historical narratives; the provocation toward the homogenization of differences, both historically and culturally; the racialization used to hierarchize bodies; the confinement of peoples into small territories and the production of displaced persons in subaltern spatialities, in addition to promoting the “erasure” of certain cultural contexts and manifestations. However, European centrality is interchallenged by the voices from the margins. In this context, those who move across the school grounds located in these places have the chance to propose their questions, as we will be able to read in the texts in this dossier. If, as Porto-Gonçalves (2012, p. 7, our translation) points out, coloniality has influenced and provoked the creation of a certain “[...] pattern of control, hierarchization, and classification of the world population that affects all dimensions of social existence, and which has the concept of race as its structuring axis,” on the other hand, returning to Candau (2014), interculturality is the affirmation of difference, the production of dialogue, and the confrontation of the processes of coloniality.

Interculturality, then, tensions the school. As an apparatus defined by coloniality to ratify the classical position and the validation of the universalized European episteme to represent knowledge, the school aligns itself with museums and universities (Mignolo; Pérez Armiño, 2025). However, in the schools on the margins, perhaps agency assumes the articulation of other questions. Seen as a spatiality, its daily life is woven by the political bodies that transit there, and in doing so, they learn, teach, and tension power relations and the binding of knowledge to a single perspective. They mobilize forms of knowledge, languages, and cultures that ultimately interpellate the school itself.

The research within the field of interculturality aim to understand if and how the transit of political bodies and their own utterances have the potential to cause cracks in the school daily routine. In doing so, researchers learn, teach, tension power relations, and the binding of knowledge to a single perspective. However, children, youth, the community, social movements, teachers, and other agents participate in intercultural research - and sometimes coordinate it - mobilizing forms of knowledge, languages, and cultures that interpellate the school. For Candau and Russo (2010), through school educational processes that become intercultural, there are chances to question coloniality, Eurocentrism, and the racism present in society and in education itself. For the authors,

[...] it promotes the recognition of diverse forms of knowledge and the dialogue between different systems of knowledge, combats various forms of dehumanization, stimulates the construction of cultural identities and the empowerment of excluded individuals and groups, favoring collective processes from the perspective of personal life projects and “other” societies (Candau; Russo, 2010, p. 166, our translation).

Community-based popular education experiences referenced in Paulo Freire, sometimes coordinated by the educator, participate in the constitution of this complex debate on encounters of diverse forms of knowledge and the dialogue between different systems of knowledge that has been constituting the field of interculturality since the 1970s (Walsh, 2014; Fleury, 2014; Oliveira, 2011, 2015; Penna, 2014; Muraca, 2024). In the 1970s, the experience with popular education in the region, in contexts marked by regimes of exception and colonialism, is identified among the precursors of Latin American theoretical production on interculturality in the field of education - a theorization of experience-in-practice. Paulo Freire’s work appears in the literature addressing interculturality studies of the period (Muraca, 2024; Oliveira, 2011) as the primary reference. The terms dialogue and praxis begin to appear conceptually in the propositions of popular education methodologies and circulate in experiences within community spaces. Paulo Freire advised many initiatives, including those in several Latin American countries. In his books, essays, and articles, it is possible, especially due to his writing style (Brandão, 2013), to re-live popular education in rural areas, traditional communities, and urban peripheries when dialogue guided the agency of popular educators. Although the term interculturality was not explicitly discussed in Freire’s work, studies by Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh (2018) recognize the dialogue, praxis, and the commitment to overcoming relations of oppression and subalternization historically produced in the Latin American colonial context that coincide with the themes and problems present in the intense interlocution for the proposition of interculturality in the 1970s.

Paulo Freire’s methodological contribution to community-based popular education, given its effects, assumes relevance for educators working in schools. Educators practicing their craft in schools within indigenous and traditional communities, in both urban and rural areas - by defending a pedagogical practice grounded in dialogue, respect for local forms of knowledge, and an interlocution that collectively produces a critical reading of reality - recognize in Freire’s proposition the references for regionally and interculturally situated educational processes. Accounts of school education experiences in community schools are expanding, demanding intercultural education: an ethical-political-pedagogical educational experience sensible to the languages, worldviews, and specific forms of social and cultural organization of the involved groups in dialogue. These agents demand radicality in considering popular education as the specific modes of knowledge production of these groups - the other epistemes - and Paulo Freire is the primary reference for the constitution of this quefazer (what-to-do).

From the perspective of what affects schools, without disregarding the tensions that arise when the institution is questioned by popular education processes, the pedagogical practice in Paulo Freire’s writings and experiences highlights the orientation of pedagogical processes through an interlocution aware to cultural contexts and a critical reading of reality. These are central elements for an education committed to the emancipation of subjects. Popular education experiences demonstrate a pedagogical stance that rejects homogeneous and universalizing models, valuing local forms of knowledge and specific modes of social organization. These methodologies become pedagogical practice and, in the same movement, contribute to the proposal of the fundamental principles of intercultural education. They recognize that educational processes can be constituted in articulation with communities and cultural, traditional, and indigenous groups, and promote horizontal relationships between educators and students. In this way, Freire’s production contributes decisively to the constitution of interculturality studies in Latin America, articulating theory, practice, and political-pedagogical commitment.

Susana Sacavino (2016, 2019), along with the theoretical perspective that understands interculturality as a plural, complex, and original construction, states that:

[...] it implies questioning the existence of a dominant, superior, and organizing center that identifies itself with a single culture, positioning itself as the measure and reference for other cultures, considering itself the bearer and standard of universal thought and culture. On the contrary, it implies the recognition that all cultures are incomplete and that we live in a context of diversity [...] (Sacavino, 2019, p. 11-12, our translation).

We wish to consider, crossed by the reflexive path up to this point, that from the perspective of interculturality, school education is a complex field of cultural practices that poses problems for our reflection, but also for education research, as long as its delineation within the routes of universalizing colonization is highlighted. Taking it under analysis in the present day establishes the necessity, from the standpoint of interculturality studies, of shifting toward the local dimension - the most everyday level - without losing sight of its articulations, in the case of this proposal, in terms of Latin America. Thus, simultaneously, within this space constituted by universalizing ethnocentric modernity, the interculturality enunciated from within the school on the margins makes it possible - as much as unavoidable - to question ethnocentric, classical school education and to make explicit the route of colonization.

Given all these considerations, we believe that the dossier “Intercultural Experiences in Schools on the Margins in Latin America” constitutes a rich, fruitful, and inventive space for reflections that address - through multiple paths trodden within the school spaces of Latin America’s margins - objects and problems that allow for the articulation of contributions to interculturality studies. There are updated objects such as the possibilities for an intercultural debate in Paulo Freire based on Mayan indigenous education in Mexico, rural education in contemporary multigrade schools, the reflection analyzing indigenous teacher-training courses within the context of the public university, and African ancestry establishing thresholds in the museum. Above all, the dossier intends to contribute to keeping the questioning of school education alive from the margins, from the “school on the margins” as one of the spaces from which the updating of interculturality studies erupts.

The present dossier presents debates on confronting the silencing and erasures engendered by universalizing processes, the hierarchical nature of the distinction between periphery and center, and the implications of educational research in this regard. The articles demonstrate how their authors allowed themselves to be affected by the dialogue with indigenous and traditional communities, rural populations, and those from urban peripheries - those who are targets of processes of racialization and the subalternization of bodies. Covering diverse themes and perspectives, the texts focus on the conditions and possibilities, as well as the questioning of schooling processes that delegitimize bodies, cosmologies, forms of knowledge, and other epistemes. Proposed by researchers from the fields of Cultural Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, and interculturality studies, the gathered works offer a more detailed examination of what happens in the schools on the margins - from the margins.

In this regard, the dossier will present ten works in three blocks that will provide a reading of the effects produced by the articulation between interculturality and school education. In each context mobilized by the authors - in Brazil, Mexico, and Ecuador - we hope that intercultural studies will create debate at the threshold, in the contours, on the edges, and at the margins.

Starting with the broadest block of works, we will present the five articles by authors participating in the debates on interculturality and the presence of Paulo Freire on the “Virtual Permanent Seminar: Philosophy and Pedagogy of Paulo Freire. Contemporary Relevance in Multiculturality,” promoted by the Universidad Intercultural de Chiapas-Mexico in partnership with the Professional School Education Graduate Program - PPGEEProf, of the Federal University of Rondônia, Brazil. In 2023, between the months of February and December, always at the end of the afternoon on the last Friday of the month, Brazilian and Mexican researchers presented their experiences in the territories, their contributions, and questions regarding the possibilities of reinventing educational processes - both school and non-school - according to community education processes. These are projects in which educational experiences are produced with languages, distinct worldviews, and the specific forms of social and cultural organization of the involved groups.

The first of the texts, titled “Experiencias formativas desde las contribuciones pedagógicas y didácticas freyrianas. El proyecto ‘Slumal lo´il maxiletik yu´un snichimaj p´ijiletik’, ‘Tierra de cuentos para florecer el pensamiento’” is authored by Edit Araceli Pérez Martínez and Edgar Federico Pérez Martínez, Indigenous Maya Tzotzil faculty members from the Universidad Intercultural de Chiapas, Mexico. The work presents a substantiated description and analysis of two formative experiences based on Paulo Freire’s philosophy and pedagogy. The reflection problematizes the role of the teaching practice of those who teach in Indigenous contexts.

Following, two more texts by faculty members from the Universidad Intercultural de Chiapas are presented. The text “Cultura propia e interculturalidade crítica: referencias decoloniales en la construcción da educación comunitaria en pueblos de Chiapas,” Mexico, by António de Jesús Nájera Castellanos, addresses community education - a counter-hegemonic perspective characterized by the approach to representative aspects of local cultures to foster intercultural educational processes. It considers, primarily, the reflection on the involvement of teachers with the communities where they practice. Nájera Castellanos significantly transverses religious, political, and economic dimensions. In a decolonial approach, the author challenges himself and the readers by grounding his analyses in a hermeneutic that proposes a revision of modern epistemologies, making explicit the exclusion and silencing of worldviews.

The text by Maria Antonieta Flores Ramos, “A cultura escrita como desafio da educação intercultural”, draws on her long-standing experience of nearly twenty years as a tenured professor of Spanish at the Universidad Intercultural de Chiapas to reflect on written culture - one of the fundamental challenges within the scope of intercultural higher education. In an autobiographical style, the author guides us through the journey of José, an indigenous student. The author portrays written culture in its standard version as a cultural object that cannot be overvalued as a substitutive learning process for the mother tongue. Above all, Flores Ramos confronts written culture as a challenge that is as unavoidable as it is provocative of new questions and objects for intercultural education in higher education. The educational context at the Universidad Intercultural de Chiapas is useful to amplify the issues brought forth by Flores Ramos as she highlights markers of orality in the educational processes of Spanish classes, as well as tensions arising from the coexistence with indigenous processes of communication and socialization. In the end, she weaves reflections on specific ways of learning-teaching that must have their difference affirmed.

Without losing sight of the intercultural education processes that affect Indigenous peoples, given their presence in the Mexican population, the work of Diego Juárez Bolaños and Esteban García Hernández - researchers from the Institute for “Investigaciones para el Desarrollo de la Educación, da Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México” addresses rural education. In the article “Necessidades na formação inicial de professores de escolas multisseriadas no México”, the authors analyze the primary needs that must be addressed in the initial training of teachers working in multigrade schools within the country’s rural context. They point out how the multigrade school model is extensively present as part of public policy, as it responds to the need for providing school education in rural communities. However, the authors do not gloss over its limitations, just as they highlight the pedagogical, administrative, and management challenges to be faced by rural schools designated as multigrade.

The analysis by Juárez Bolaños and García Hernández demonstrates the involvement of research in the field of rural education in public educational policies as part of investigative efforts aimed at updating the model of rural multigrade schools. At this point, interculturality erupts considering the diversity of social, cultural, economic, political, and environmental contexts that multigrade schools mobilize.

In the articles of the initial block, then, the intercultural education processes that took place in various pedagogical proposals and models in the countries of the permanent virtual seminar participants will be addressed and analyzed. Looking at each of the involved communities, but primarily at what interweaves Latin American agents in conflict with colonizing processes, creates important conditions for knowing, reflecting on, and analyzing different paths to/in/from schools. In other words, they mobilize progressive, liberating, and emancipatory educational proposals, projects, and models.

The second block of works presents itself as a record of esperançar (hoping/acting in hope). These are works that interpellate hegemonic and universalizing cultural processes while rigorously examining other experiences in formative spaces and demonstrating their reach. Through distinct paths, the articles demonstrate confrontations with issues such as racialization and prejudice - constituted within school contexts - and elaborate positions regarding educational models and systems. Assuming different scopes, the authors confront the materiality of relations of domination to make propositions regarding intercultural methodologies and didactic materials, such as the revision of the use of non-school cultural spaces. The authors address cinema, the enjoyment of museums, and the power of mobilizing agents in circles of conversation about race, gender studies, masculinities, racism, and violence in educational projects that took place at the edges, at the margins, meeting the central discussion of this dossier. The texts mobilize cultural production and reflection to interpellate the hegemonic Eurocentric imposition on the oppressed body, which continues its formation. However, the articles address and highlight other cultural productions at the margins, other spatialities, and intercultural experiences that dialogue with and demarcate certain issues for school formation.

Manuel Medina, who opens the second block of articles, is a researcher in the field of Cultural Studies, an Ecuadorian, and a professor of Latin American Cinema and Literature at the University of Louisville, United States. In the article “Blak Mama y la pedagogía del oprimido: diálogos interculturales y subversión cultural en el cine ecuatoriano” (Blak Mama and the pedagogy of the oppressed: intercultural dialogues and cultural subversion in Ecuadorian cinema), he expands his investigation dedicated to pedagogy that uses Latin American film production and aims to mobilize students and basic education teachers for debates on race and processes of racialization. In the article, the author discusses the film Blak Mama (2009), directed by Miguel Alvear and Patricio Andrade - a cinematographic text that incorporates and resignifies Paulo Freire’s principles of liberatory pedagogy in dialogue with categories from Cultural Studies and film theory. Drawing on concepts such as “awareness,” “dialogue,” and the “tested feasible” (inédito viável), he examines how the work subverts official symbols of Ecuadorian culture through strategies of parody, carnival, and hybridity, transforming them into spaces of cultural negotiation and the interpellation of racialization processes.

Medina confirms cinema as an art of cultural subversion, capable of questioning dominant narratives and enabling the proposal of pedagogies aligned with interculturality in basic education. In this way, by illuminating critical readings within the scope of Latin American cinema, Medina reiterates the continued relevance of the intercultural perspective to show how art can generate conscientization and resistance beyond the school.

The second article is titled “Educação escolar e museal como práticas (antirracistas) da liberdade na América Latina” (School and museum education as (anti-racist) practices of freedom in Latin America), by Alan Alves-Brito and Isael da Silva Pinheiro, from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. The authors mobilize contributions from anti-racist education in Latin America to address their object of reflection - a relevant dialogue based on material produced across three international experiences. The first discusses the results of the Améfrica Ladina Project, which involved researchers from 20 countries in the region. The second experience involves the production of the 2023 Guide to Science Centers and Museums in Latin America and the Caribbean, which provides visibility to the mapping of 18 museums dedicated to the theme of anti-racist practices. The final experience addressed by Alves-Brito and Pinheiro brings together analyses of the exhibition on Afro-Pindoramic cosmologies held at the Rio de Janeiro Planetarium, emphasizing curation and mediation. Taking school and museum as formative spaces for anti-racist cultural practices, and supported by a broad and fundamental bibliographic review on school and museum education, the authors - with a strong and emphatic writing style - reclaim cultural voices and practices, contribute questions regarding agency in the context of anti-racist education, and present the novelty produced by the articulation of the three mobilized sources.

It is a work that interpellates the reader’s own experience. Territory, teaching-learning, curation, and mediation connect as categories and offer themselves for reflection on interculturality. The analyses allowed the authors to highlight the scientific, pedagogical, political, and ethical roles of museums. From one perspective, while organizing this dossier, it led us to recognize convergences between the authors’ position and that of Walter Mignolo regarding the possibilities for foundational institutions of modernity to produce fissures and de-westernization (Mignolo; Pérez Armiño, 2025) when their projects promote a disobedient opening to the Western purposes of museums and schools. The text provokes reflection on the possibilities for developing anti-racist curricula engendered by the interrelation between schools and museums in collaborative formative processes, just as it prompts us to consider other cultural facilities in this dialogue.

The article by Eduardo dos Santos Henrique and Luciano Daudt da Rocha, from the University of Southern Santa Catarina, titled “Pensamento Liminar em Concepções de Masculinidades de Estudantes do Ensino Médio” (Border Thinking in Conceptions of Masculinities among High School Students), concludes this block of texts by addressing a contemporary issue. The times in which we live lack deeper debates within the field of education focused on a theme that gained some mobilization following what has been conventionally referred to as the “school attacks” of 2023, the repercussions of the Netflix series Adolescence, and even the increase in legislative bills that, in practice, mitigate crimes of rape and pedophilia by prohibiting - based on arguments from a conservative moral agenda - assisted abortion for adolescents and women who have survived situations of violence. The authors achieve their purpose of addressing masculinity through the experiences and accounts of young Black men from the peripheries who participated in their research. The article contributes to decolonizing thought impregnated by impositions constructed within the socio-historical-cultural plane of modernity/coloniality and seeks to identify border thinking in the positions on masculinity elaborated by Black high school students.

In interactions mediated by a pedagogical practice grounded in interculturality and action-research, the authors embrace their transit along the borders, and from that perspective, lead readers into a terrain of transformation and - why not admit - hope. There is a courageous confrontation of racism, evidenced by the shared experiences, which reveals not only the challenges but also the revolutionary potential of masculinities in evolution. The rethinking of whiteness by the participants signals a movement of conscientization that transcends the boundaries of the school.

Closing the second block is the article “A Cultura como Consumo no Âmbito da Libras e da Formação Docente” (Culture as Consumption within the Scope of Libras and Teacher Training), authored by Bruna da Silva Branco and Lodenir Becker Karnopp from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. This work addresses Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) as a cultural object, relating it to what they discuss as the “culture of consumption.” For the authors, certain objects - their technologies, dictionaries, grammar, classes, and other productions of the Deaf community - are approached in teacher-training courses as objects of consumption. According to the authors, who anchored contributions from Cultural Studies in Education and Deaf Studies, the professional training of Deaf teachers for the teaching of Libras does not escape this framework. They mobilize interculturality to address the proposed issues, considering the experiences of Deaf people when entering the Bachelor of Arts in Libras (Letras-Libras) to graduate as Deaf teachers of Libras. Referencing Jorge Larrosa and the Spanish author’s discussion on the experience/meaning pair, as well as the notion of the expediency of culture proposed by George Yúdice, they take as a premise that the cultural marker for Deaf culture is Libras - the language. From this point, they argue that becoming a Libras teacher for a Deaf person is an experience, which means reconfiguring the formative context in the Letras-Libras degree as a political act, beyond merely providing professionals to comply with legal parameters.

The second block of texts mobilizes potential contributions from interculturality studies to confront formative hegemonies. Thus, the schools of the margins demonstrate their strength precisely because this position - where discourses are produced - is not glossed over. Likewise, regarding what mobilizes us in this dossier, intercultural education presents itself as a rigorous confrontation of the assumptions and effects of Eurocentric school education.

The reading of the articles that compose the second block of the dossier demonstrates the possibility of intercultural experiences, the dialogue of knowledges, and the potential for constructing dialogical and problematizing practices that raise questions traversing Intercultural Education. To study interculturality is to create important and significant paths for dialogues with other identities, genders, and cultures, as well as modes of engaging with the body and language that affirm difference. It means building conditions for an openness that allows one to be affected by the narration of stories and the presentation of knowledges and understandings - often forbidden and silenced by modern-colonial thought. It means other ways of conducting research in Education.

The third block of articles concludes this dossier by mobilizing Indigenous school education, which is significant given what we discussed in the opening remarks of this presentation: we learn about interculturality by looking at Indigenous school education.

To work from an intercultural perspective is to coexist, to be together with the other. It is the development of a sensitive listening promoted in different encounters, across the most varied geographical contexts. In other words, to circulate among these individuals whose rights have been denied is to learn how to listen - and to listen with attention, respect, and wisdom to identities and differences. Inspired by these movements of coexistence and encounter with the other, which produce and mobilize intercultural practices, the authors seek to present the intercultural dialogues they have constructed.

The text “Pedagogia intercultural indígena: diálogos sobre língua, alfabetização e interculturalidade” (Indigenous intercultural pedagogy: dialogues on language, literacy, and interculturality), authored by Célia Aparecida Bettiol, Jeiviane Justiniano, and Adria Simone from the University of the State of Amazonas, describes the training experiences lived with Indigenous teachers from the Alto Solimões and Vale do Javari regions. These experiences occurred within an Intercultural Pedagogy course offered since 2018 at the institution, under the scope of the National Policy for the Training of Basic Education Teachers/PARFOR at that university (Decree No. 6,755 of January 29, 2009).

According to the authors, these training experiences serve as a meeting point and signal the advancement of the course within the University of the State of Amazonas. The text addresses the particularities of training Indigenous teachers in the regions of the state where the degree has been and is currently offered. While contributing to the recognition and validation of other training processes for Indigenous teachers in the state of Amazonas, the experience of the Intercultural Pedagogy course adds to the body of Indigenous intercultural training, which currently presents great sociocultural and linguistic diversity.

The authors Maria Aparecida Bergamaschi and Márcia Luísa Tomazzoni, from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, present the article “Aprendizagens interculturais na con-vivência com os Mbyá Guarani” (Intercultural learning in co-existence with the Mbyá Guarani). This text allows the reader to learn about the collective construction process of a documentary regarding the traditional education and school education of the Mbyá Guarani people, as well as the tensions between these educational practices. The documentary is titled Mbyá Arandu: a sabedoria de viver entre dois mundos (Mbyá Arandu: the wisdom of living between two worlds), a title derived from the voices of the Mbyá Guarani leaders and teachers involved in the creation of the audiovisual work, who also participated in its conception and direction. The article proposes a reflection on the intercultural learning fostered during the documentary’s authorship process.

In the article, the authors emphasize that one of the lessons learned from this work carried out alongside the Mbyá Guarani was the collaborative perspective, which resulted in exchanges on various themes that could be addressed - by both researchers and educators - regarding Federal Law No. 11,645 of 2008, which mandates the inclusion of Indigenous history and culture in Brazilian school curricula.

We hope that the dossier will produce powerful encounters and contribute to expanding the debate on interculturality studies within education research.

References

• ALBUQUERQUE, Gerson Rodrigues. Desde as margens amazônicas/andinas. In: ALBUQUERQUE, Gerson Rodrigues (org.). Das margens. Rio Branco: Nepan Editora, 2016. p. 7-9.
• BORGES, Rosane. #172 Achille Mbembe, além da necropolítica. YouTube, 14 nov. 2025. Disponível em: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWmwtVTmVEM Acesso em: 25 nov. 2025.
  » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWmwtVTmVEM
• CANDAU, Vera Maria Ferrão. Ser professor/a hoje: novos confrontos entre saberes, culturas e práticas. Educação, [S. l.], v. 37, n. 1, p. 33-41, 2014. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15448/1981-2582.2014.1.15003 Acesso em: 18 set. 2024.
  » https://doi.org/10.15448/1981-2582.2014.1.15003
• CANDAU, Vera Maria Ferrão; RUSSO, Kelly. Interculturalidade e educação na América Latina: uma construção plural, original e complexa. Revista Diálogo Educacional, Curitiba, v. 10, n. 29, p. 151-169, abr. 2010. Disponível em: http://educa.fcc.org.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1981-416X2010000100009&lng=pt&nrm=iso Acesso em: 25 mar. 2025.
  » http://educa.fcc.org.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1981-416X2010000100009&lng=pt&nrm=iso
• FLEURI, Reinaldo Matias. Interculturalidade, identidade e decolonialidade: desafios políticos e educacionais. Série Estudos, Campo Grande, n. 37, p. 89-106, jun. 2014. Disponível em: http://educa.fcc.org.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2318-19822014000100089&lng=pt&nrm=iso Acesso em: 18 mar. 2024.
  » http://educa.fcc.org.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2318-19822014000100089&lng=pt&nrm=iso
• MIGNOLO, Walter; PÉREZ ARMIÑO, Luis. La decolonialidad implica la reconstitución de memorias robadas. Revista del Comité Español del ICOM, n. 18, p. 195-215, 2025. Disponível em: https://www.icom-ce.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Revista-del-Comite-Espanol-de-ICOM_n_18_octubre-2025.pdf Acesso em: out. 2025.
  » https://www.icom-ce.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Revista-del-Comite-Espanol-de-ICOM_n_18_octubre-2025.pdf
• MIGNOLO, Walter; WALSH, Catherine. On decoloniality: concepts, analytics, praxis. London: Duke University Press, 2018.
• MURACA, M. Caminhos da educação intercultural na Europa e no Brasil: especificidades e diálogos possíveis. Revista Cocar, [S. l.], v. 21, n. 39, 2024. Disponível em: https://periodicos.uepa.br/index.php/cocar/article/view/8793 Acesso em: 25 mar. 2025.
  » https://periodicos.uepa.br/index.php/cocar/article/view/8793
• OLIVEIRA, Ivanilde Apoluceno de. Paulo Freire: gênese da educação intercultural no Brasil. Curitiba: CRV, 2015.
• OLIVEIRA, Ivanilde Apoluceno de. Cultura e interculturalidade na educação popular de Paulo Freire. EccoS - Revista Científica, [S. l.], n. 25, p. 109-124, 2012. Disponível em: https://periodicos.uninove.br/eccos/article/view/3219 Acesso em: 9 mar. 2023.
  » https://periodicos.uninove.br/eccos/article/view/3219
• PENNA, Camila. Paulo Freire no pensamento decolonial: um olhar pedagógico sobre a teoria pós-colonial latino-americana. Revista de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre as Américas, [S. l.], v. 8, n. 2, p. 164-180, 2014. Disponível em: https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/repam/article/view/16133 Acesso em: 25 mar. 2024.
  » https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/repam/article/view/16133
• PORTO-GONÇALVES, Carlos Walter; ARAÚJO QUENTAL, Pedro de. Colonialidade do poder e os desafios da integração regional na América Latina. Polis Revista Latinoamericana, Santiago, v. 11, n. 31, p. 295-332, abr. 2012. Disponível em: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=5632842 Acesso em: 12 maio 2023.
  » https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=5632842
• SACAVINO, Susana Beatriz. Educação descolonizadora e interculturalidade: notas para educadoras e educadores. In: CANDAU, Vera Maria (org.). Interculturalizar, descolonizar, democratizar: uma educação “outra”? Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras, 2016.
• SACAVINO, Susana Beatriz. Educação e práticas pedagógicas: construindo os caminhos. Educação, Santa Maria, v. 44, 2019. Disponível em: https://periodicos.ufsm.br/reveducacao Acesso em: 12 ago. 2024.
  » https://periodicos.ufsm.br/reveducacao
• SANTIAGO, Mylene Cristina; AKKARI, Abdeljalil; MARQUES, Luciana Pacheco. Educação intercultural: desafios e possibilidades. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2013.
• WALSH, Catherine. Pedagogías decoloniales caminando y preguntando: notas a Paulo Freire desde Abya Yala. Entramados: Educación y Sociedad, v. 1, n. 1, p. 17-30, 2014. Disponível em: https://fh.mdp.edu.ar/revistas/index.php/entramados/article/view/1075/1393 Acesso em: 14 abr. 2023.
  » https://fh.mdp.edu.ar/revistas/index.php/entramados/article/view/1075/1393

• Support or funding:
  CNPq
• Research data availability:
  All data are available in this article.
• How to cite this article:
  LIMA, Marcia Machado de; VIEIRA, Carlos Magno Naglis. Interculturality in Educational Research: “school of the margins” in Latin America. Educar em Revista, Curitiba, v. 42, e104065, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1590/1984-0411.104065-T

• Responsible editor(s): Associate Editor:
  Marcia Machado de Lima

• Associate Editor:
  Carlos Magno Naglis Vieira

• Editor-in-chief:
  Angela Scalabrin Coutinho

Data availability

All data are available in this article.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  15 May 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  27 Mar 2026
• Accepted
  30 Mar 2026