Afro-indigenous approaches: intercultural performatic experiences with qom students in a teacher training institution (Rosario-Argentina)

Abstract

Here we take up a pedagogical experience developed in 2019 in a teacher training institution in the city of Rosario, within the framework of the Bilingual Intercultural Teachers Professionalization Program of the Ministry of Education of Santa Fe. The students of the program make up the “qom community” local. Some are incorporated into the Santa Fe public education system under the figure of "suitable teachers" and others maintain an irregular link with that system. The experience unfolded in a workshop called "Ritual Theater and Dance" in the provincial design. The courtly proposal was to go through aesthetic-expressive cultural practices linked to the baggage of –and to the historical and conflictive interactions between–, indigenous, Afro-descendant and European peoples in America. We decided to name such an event as a performative experience of interculturalization in order to problematize emerging events that took place at the level of practices and relationships in the classroom and refer to two dimensions: exchanges with students who expose certain assessments of Afro-descendants and blackness in our context and; to the relevance of a pedagogical strategy that proposes a performative approach to social issues. Our interest is to examine how much it allows (or not) to establish new connections between the aesthetic and the ethical/political.