Education and decolonization: the village of San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia

Abstract

The paper presents the first report of a field research that took place from 9 to 23 January and is still ongoing in the community of San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia. The survey used semi-structured interviews, systematic field observations, a collection of free narratives and a bibliographical review on the subject. The aim of this study is to investigate the sense of training among the afro-descendant communities of the Palenqueors, former slaves deported from Africa to Latin America and sold at the slave market in Cartagena de Indias. Through a decolonial pedagogical perspective (Burgio, 2023) we tried to highlight the educational value of difference in the inter-cultural and trans-cultural field (Lopez, 2018) and the processes of knowledge construction in the Afro-descendant community of San Basilio. It is an archaeological work (Mariani, 2003) aimed at studying the educational sense of systems of rationality very far from our traditions. The work has a hermeneutic epistemological structure and postulates an interpretative pedagogy (Malavasi, 1992). Therefore, the reference is to a qualitative methodology with an ethnographic approach (Bove, 2019), understood as a normative epistemology.