Abstract
In rural Araucanía secondary schools, prescriptive and formal government programs for interculturalism – designed to overcome differentials between Indigenous and non-Indigenous pupils in educational outcomes – have had limited impact. Drawing on research across four schools, this article examines how the dynamics between state-led top-down prescriptive guidelines interface with teacher practice, school objectives, and existing racializing dynamics to produce diverse educational outcomes. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research involving over 100 pupils and teachers, this article identifies two key in-school processes that work to undercut official policy effectiveness. First, state policies do little to challenge staff and institutionalized racism, thereby perpetuating the marking of Indigenous pupils as Other. Combined with lack of political will and resources for teacher training and lesson preparation, this leaves educational inequalities in place. Second, the institutional allocation of time and resources to intercultural education reinforces widespread devaluation of indigenous knowledge among teachers, educators and public opinion. Nevertheless, the study also found that in certain schools these conditions did not prevent the adoption of pedagogies that affirmed Indigenous difference and challenged the dominance of whiteness. Informed by a critical theorization of the power and unmarked nature of racial inequality, this article argues that whiteness is neither recognized nor challenged in rural secondary schools in southern Chile, despite its ubiquity and pervasive influence on curriculum, pedagogies and institutional arrangements.
Highlights
In the southern region of Araucanía where educational outcomes are among the lowest in Chile, teachers working in Indigenous-majority rural secondary schools face a number of challenges
Racial and political contexts in the Araucanía tend to produce a range of intercultural moments across school environments, which vary in their effectiveness to challenge inequitable educational outcomes
The findings presented in this article form part of broader research objectives to investigate how contested relations between ethnicity, nationhood, citizenship, and indigenous rights among Mapuche youths are worked out in educational settings
Summary
Lack of critical self-awareness among teachers is likely to re-produce ethnocentric responses to ethnically diverse pupils’ behaviours so as to privilege dominant national-majority norms (Gay and Howard 2000) Extending these studies we demonstrate the inter-play between teachers’ privileging of an unacknowledged whiteness and their restricted definitions and practices of interculturalism. New racism reworks colonial and imperialist ideas into expressions emerging from contemporary meaningful cultural and religious differences so as to mark out particular populations as Other (Barker 1981) Guided by this approach, the wider study of which this article forms a part critically examined the structural and ideological reproduction of white privilege through education, and questioned the capacity of interculturalism to reconfigure these social formations of racism ( Radcliffe and Webb 2015). In the Chilean context, close observation in secondary schools of the Mapuche-majority rural areas of Araucanía confirms that state-led ‘recognition’ of cultural diversity, for lack of wider initiatives in teacher training and resource provision, achieves little to challenge staff and institutionalized racism or the marking out of Indigenous pupils as Other from a whitened norm, leaving in place existing educational inequalities
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