Dancing to Different Tunes: Conveying Latin American realities to composite classes

Abstract

Students are often attracted to courses about Latin America by media images of the region with their aura of danger and unpredictability. Such stereotypes must be addressed in teaching, but the means is far from clear when the participants stem from different disciplinary backgrounds and academic traditions. The method adopted here was to tackle development through discourse construction through an appreciation of positionality. This approach enabled students to draw on their respective backgrounds and experience critically; it also ensured that students appreciated the core concepts embedded in the discipline, while engaging in a challenging way with the issues raised by Latin American development.