Entrelazando vulnerabilidades y agencias: experiencias pedagógicas de profesionales en un programa de reinserción escolar en Chile

Abstract

This article explores the forms of agency that emerge through the practices of professionals participating in a school reintegration programme in Santiago, Chile, implemented within the framework of rights-restorative educational policies. It starts from the observation that agency is commonly conceived as an individual capacity, while vulnerability is treated as a passive condition, a distinction that has constrained more integrated approaches in educational research. Drawing on feminist scholarship, the article instead conceptualises agency and vulnerability as relational, ambivalent, and situated dimensions that become intertwined in the formation of subjectivities and pedagogical practices. The research adopts a collaborative ethnographic design centred on a case study and employs cartographies as its theoretical and methodological tool. Developed with four professionals from the programme, the cartographies were produced through a series of collective and individual sessions in which participants created visual and verbal narratives about their personal and professional trajectories. The analysis brought together thematic, narrative, and metaphorical approaches, alongside processes of participant feedback and collaborative analysis that foregrounded participants’ voices. The findings show how the professionals' previous experiences of grief, migration, downward social mobility, and resilience become interwoven with their pedagogical practices, shaping forms of agency that emerge through vulnerability. These narratives suggest that, rather than functioning as an obstacle, wounding can become a productive force by fostering ethical and affective relationships with students. The originality of the study lies in rebalancing existing approaches to vulnerability and agency, moving the discussion away from abstract frameworks and towards situated empirical realities, while also proposing cartographies as an innovative means of making embodied forms of agency visible. The article concludes that recognising vulnerability as a form of openness to the world enables us to imagine more inclusive and transformative educational practices.