Classroom-world. Practices to decolonize the university training of professionals in educational and care work

Abstract

This contribution proposes a reflection on the impact of decolonial theories and practices in social pedagogy courses for future professionals in educational and care work (educators, social workers, rehabilitation experts and doctors). In these areas, a decolonial conceptual framework questions the dichotomies that inform the asymmetric professional-user/patient relationships, marked by social inequalities and ethical dilemmas. How do decolonial theories and practices help reconfigure imaginaries and rethink professionalisms? In dialogue with Chicano and Caribbean literature (Anzaldua e Moraga, 2002; Glissant 1990, 1998, 2009), with the feminist theories of women of color (Mohanty Talpade, 2003; hooks, 2020, 2023), the article explores the idea of ​​difference from a decolonial perspective, relating it to the issues of partiality of knowledge and oppression. Starting from an autoethnographic research carried out during the courses that I have been teaching since 2015 and from the journals of the students who attended them, the article explores methodologies and processes that favor becoming aware of the process of co-construction of knowledge situated and embodied during their academic education. Inspired by Glissant’s vision of the All-World (1990), a paradigmatic form of all creolization, we will therefore talk about the classroom-world, a meeting place that seeks to ward off the ghost of the universal and the globalized, in favor of a relationship with globality.