Latin American Narrative Learning

Catalog description

This course will address how narrative learning or narrative ways of knowing are necessary epistemological foundations to curriculum in education. Stories are themselves ways of knowing for us, the Latin American peoples. The epistemological breakthrough that enabled narrative learning gaining a place within educational research has been a historically difficult process. Narrative learning can be traced back to the way in which indigenous peoples of Latin America have made sense of reality over millennia. This idea leads to the notion of narrative knowledge as a special form of reasoning, feeling, and grasping the world for us in Latin America. In our countries we translate knowing into telling and telling into knowing. Narrating or telling our knowledge is a special form of reasoning, feeling, and making sense of reality. In this course students will learn how narratives become the key aspect of an intimate relation between knower and the known for us. While we were growing up in Latin America, narratives shaped the manner in which we thought about what we know and how we know it. That process passed down from generation to generation. Thanks to the decolonial thinking perspective in vogue, today we have the opportunity of speaking for ourselves to explain our narrative ways of knowing and learning. Since you as an educator or teacher work with Latin American students on a daily basis, you have the opportunity to learn what knowledge and ways of knowing your students already have with them.