Educational Qualitative Research in Latin America

The Struggle for a New Paradigm

Gary L. Anderson, Martha Montero, Gary L. Anderson, Martha Montero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135548735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Juan Carlos Tedesco, a prominent Argentinean sociologist argues that qualitative studies of education in Latin America represent a major challenge to current research. Latin American qualitative researchers are producing interpretive studies that focus on the realities of current developmental and educational reforms. Indigenous communities, women, students, and teachers are given voice in these studies, which represent the state of Latin American ethnographic, qualitative, and participatory research.
This is the first book in English to offer a state-of-the-art collection of educational qualitative research studies in Latin America. The first three chapters present an overview of qualitative research, while the remaining seven chapters provide studies that explore various aspects of education from public schools to informal educational programs.

Section I
An Overview of Qualitative Research in Latin America

The three chapters in the first section provide overviews of the origins, current status, and new directions of qualitative research in Latin America. We begin the book with a chapter by Elsie Rockwell, who provides an account of the evolution of research at the Department of Educational Research (DIE) of Mexico’s Polytechnic University. It is perhaps appropriate to begin here since, as Graciela Batallan points out in Chapter Two, the DIE was influential in the early days of the development and legitimation of ethnographic methods in education. In 1980 the Latin American Network of Qualitative Research on Schools (RINCUARE) was formed, and the DIE hosted a month-long seminar that brought together for the first time a group of Latin American qualitative researchers interested in the study of schools. Two of this volume’s authors, Graciela Batallan, from Argentina, and Nelly Stromquist, originally from Peru, were instrumental in the creation of this early network.

In Chapter Two Graciela Batallan describes the evolution of ethnographic research in Chile and Argentina. She describes the influence of Clifford Geertz’s brand of interpretive anthropology on researchers in these countries and the simultaneous influence of the more critical works of Agnes Heller and Antonio Gramsci, largely through the influence of Chilean and Argentinean ethnographers like Veronica Edwards, Justo Ezpeleta, and Eduardo Remedi, who worked or studied at the DIE in Mexico. She provides an extensive review of qualitative research in the southern cone from studies that include teachers as researchers to ethnographic studies of school failure in public schools.

Chapter Three provides an overview of qualitative research in Mexico by two Mexican authors, Maria Bertely, a graduate of the DIE, and Martha Corenstein, a qualitative sociologist. Bertely has done extensive ethnographic work in indigenous communities in Mexico; she reviews much of the recent literature on the contributions that ethnographic studies have made regarding the role of schools in Mexican indigenous communities. The two authors also provide an overview of qualitative research in Mexico, organizing their discussion under three dimensions: the institutional and political, the curricular, and the social.

Readers interested in the development of qualitative research in Brazil should consult Chapter Eight, in which Elvira Souza Lima provides an overview along with an account of her own action research on teacher development in a rural Brazilian community.

Chapter One
Ethnography and the Commitment to Public Schooling

A Review of Research at the DIE

Elsie Rockwell

Ethnography, as Geertz (1983) has reminded us, works by the light of local knowledge. Researchers draw on common pools of ideas disseminated throughout the academic world, yet they interpret them through local references, sharpen them in local debates, and use them to understand local realities. It is in this sense that I will trace the ethnographic research done at the Department of Educational Research (DIE)¹ in Mexico, recognizing commonalities and noting divergences. The intellectual and political context for this research was marked by a growing commitment to public schooling built up by progressive educators in Latin America. I propose to show how this commitment underlies and explains much of the conceptual orientation and thematic range of ethnography at the DIE.

Research is always indebted to academic traditions and constructed within particular institutional settings. In Mexico a long history of anthropological contributions to education preceded our research. During the present century distinguished ethnologists such as Manuel Gamio, Moisés Saenz, Julio de la Fuente, and Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran helped forge a tradition of rural and bilingual education responsive to national, regional, and indigenous cultures, and they wrote accounts of their experience and research.² Nevertheless by the mid-1970s only a few researchers (Modiano, 1974; Schensul, 1976) had done in-depth studies of Mexican schools. The ethnographic study of formal education gained legitimacy in Mexico toward the end of the decade primarily at two research institutes, the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS),³ and the Department of Educational Research (DIE), both founded in the 1970s.

The DIE offered several conditions that allowed a tradition in ethnographic research to be built up over the years. The departments involvement in national educational reforms had led to increasing contact with authorities and teachers and interest in what was occurring in schools. To pursue this interest, the initial group of researchers at the DIE supported alternative approaches, including intensive fieldwork and interpretive analysis. The DIE’s interdisciplinary orientation nevertheless forced those of us involved in ethnography to be explicit about the epistemological assumptions of our research and to engage in theoretical discussions across many fields. A commitment to collective research projects reinforced this orientation. The interdisciplinary experience also influenced the master’s program. This program was designed to incorporate students into ongoing research projects, and thus allowed many of them to acquire practical training in ethnography.⁴ The graduate seminars also became the locus for discussing critical sociological theory and educational policy. Continuous exchange with other Latin American scholars centered the academic concerns on issues vital to the region. Throughout the years, many of the practices and ideas adopted and generated by ethnographers at the DIE were further disseminated through courses, workshops, conferences, and publications,⁵ and have been taken up by other researchers.

Work at the DIE has been diverse, and several methodological and theoretical orientations have been adopted. For this review I have adopted a rather strict definition of ethnography, as research characterized by time in the field, attention to the cultural dimension, and production of texts that both include contextualized, interpretive descriptions and engage in theoretical dialogue.⁶ I have not included the numerous educational development projects and diagnostic or evaluative studies done at the department that incorporated qualitative methods at some stage. My particular view of a collective, long-term experience perhaps distorts some of the intentions of my colleagues, and it necessarily stresses consensus by using a partially fictitious “we” that glosses over internal debate. Yet I hope that the review will serve as an adequate introduction to ethnography at the DIE.

The first part of the text traces some of the educational issues in Latin America that influenced the conceptual debates at the DIE. In the second section I review those studies carried out at the department that have shed some light on the everyday life of schools, and I attempt to make clear their thematic coherence. In the final part I discuss the general orientation of this work in relation to other traditions of ethnographic research.

From Deschooling to Reclaiming Public Schools: The Latin American Debate

In Latin America, as in much of the world, a strong current of criticism of formal schooling was unleashed by the political movements of the 1960s. The voices of Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire were initially the strongest in the region. Early critical publications from the United States and, later, the thrust of reproduction theory from Europe converged with the general dissatisfaction with the course of schooling in the region. As a consequence many Latin American educators joined in the search for non-formal alternatives to public schools, in what came to be known as the popular education movement. Yet over the past two decades—and strongly bound up with the ongoing struggle for a democratic society—a shift has taken place among progressive educators in Latin America toward revaluing public schools and reclaiming them for popular education.⁷ This position has faced new challenges and has been forced to respond to neo-liberal policies, which have effected fundamental changes in educational systems in recent years. The discussions that accompanied these political confrontations have influenced educational research in the region and therefore merit closer examination.

The Freirían tradition was forged during the 1970s, particularly in countries (Brazil, Chile) dominated by military dictatorships, and was sustained largely by a wide network of church-backed popular education projects. Those involved in the movement tended to be highly critical of official schools. They advocated and established community-based, nongovernmental alternatives for educating the rural and marginal urban (primarily adult) population and in the process developed a substantial stock of innovative methods and materials. The movement was far from monolithic. In fact it led to a wide variety of experiences, which reflect the diversity of local groups and interests it engaged.

At the same time in other countries such as Peru and Mexico federal governments undertook radical educational reforms of public schools at the primary and secondary levels. In Mexico President Luis Echeverría (1972—1978), intent upon reversing the negative image resulting from the government’s massacre of students atTlatelolco in 1968, gave high priority to education. He convened scholars associated with the radical political movement of the 1960s to participate in the reform. Many educators, including some at the newly founded DIE, collaborated in writing national textbooks for elementary school, designing ways to introduce innovative teaching methods and promote critical thinking. The accent was on transforming public schools.

Toward the late 1970s, however, researchers of the region began to question whether the recent curricular reforms and the significant growth of school systems in Latin America were actually leading to a democratization of schooling. Quantitative evidence disclosed the extreme regional and class differences in access to schooling. At the DIE, our initial ethnographic research during these years also muted the enthusiasm generated by the reform. Fieldwork unearthed the complexities of the classroom interaction that surrounded the use of the new textbooks (Rockwell and Galvez, 1982), and found an unforeseen “hidden curriculum” (Paradise, 1979), which seemed to subvert the explicit intentions of reformers. The practical difficulties of transforming schools became evident.

Both the criticism of formal schools by the popular education movement and the disillusionment of educators with the possibilities of transforming schools were fertile ground for the dissemination of reproduction theory, which entered Latin America through early translations of the works of Althusser, Bowles and Gintis, Baudelot and Establet, Bourdieu and Passeron, Broccoli and Foucault.⁸ Several widely read Latin American authors of the 1970s (Labarca, 1977; Ponce, 1974; Vasconi, 1973) had developed similar theories. At that time educational researchers in the region began to attribute the social reproduction of class structures to differential schooling and analyzed teaching and textbooks largely in terms of the inculcation of dominant ideologies.

During the early 1980s, reproduction theory was questioned and reformulated in the English-speaking world on various grounds.⁹ Proponents of symbolic interactionism, working in the ethnographic tradition, stressed human agency and cultural production as mediating processes for social reproduction. More significantly, the strength of the feminist and minority movements contested the primacy of class domination as an explanation within the reproductivist perspective, and added gender, race, and ethnicity to the agenda. The prevalence of countercultures among certain school-going youths in developed countries also posed a challenge, and resistance theory evolved to account for the apparent failure of the reproduction paradigm.¹⁰ However, resistance theory, grounded in the cultural production of differences within schools, tended to reinforce reproduction theory. In the long run it strengthened one of the basic arguments: what happens in schools contributes more to building and preserving the divisions within society than it does to breaking down pre-existing barriers between classes, genders, and races. As Paul Willis has put it recently, “the crucially interesting thing about cultural reproduction is how (really and potentially) critical resistant or rebellious forces become contradictorily tied up in the further development and maintenance of the ‘teeth-gritting,’ harmony of capitalist formations” (1990, p. 102).

The surge of critical ethnography in education, particularly in the United States,¹¹ further elaborated the significant contributions of the theories of cultural reproduction and resistance. At the same time it has added a new dimension: the commitment to transforming educational practices and the belief that this is possible through participatory or emancipatory research projects. This particular current—critical pedagogy— has been strongly inspired by Freires early work, which has recently enjoyed a significant revival in the United States. The tendency is to develop and document alternative, critical practices that counteract the assumed reproductivist character of ordinary schooling, yet this basic thesis is rarely questioned.¹²

During the same period reproduction theory was being challenged in Latin America on somewhat different grounds.¹³ Scholars in the Marxist tradition in Latin America had long questioned the relevance of structuralist neo-Marxism for understanding Latin American history, and they were looking to the works of Gramsci and of the Peruvian Marxist, Mariategui, for new ways of analyzing issues of the state, democracy, and culture in the regional context.¹⁴ Developments in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala demanded new explanations. Though there were different position...