Descolonizando la educación: la educación propia como herramienta de sentido a partir de una cartografía de experiencias

Abstract

This article develops a critical reflection on the processes of educational decolonization in Latin American contexts, situating self-determined education as a central axis for the construction of meaning, identity and cultural resistance in the face of hegemonic educational systems that have reproduced colonial matrices of knowledge, power and being. From a theoretical-critical position, and through an approach to a cartography of self-determined educational experiences, the way in which these dominant logics have configured exclusionary educational ontologies, limiting the recognition of ancestral, community and territorial knowledge in contemporary schools, is problematized. The text’s thesis is that educational decolonization is only possible through the full recognition of epistemic plurality and the restitution of the pedagogical sovereignty of peoples. From a decolonial standpoint, it is argued that self-education does not constitute a curricular adaptation or a compensatory strategy, but an epistemological, pedagogical and political proposal that challenges the extractive logics of modern school knowledge. The reflection puts in dialogue contributions of critical pedagogy, the epistemologies of the South and decolonial thought to show how the educational practices themselves, examined in this cartography, institute relational forms of learning based on reciprocity, community life, diverse worldviews and links with the territory. From this theoretical position, it is proposed that decolonizing education implies an ethical and political commitment aimed at cognitive justice, the dignification of historically denied knowledge and the regeneration of social fabric.