Transforming Contempt into Recognition. Mobilized School Communities

Abstract

The social justice model of recognition has acquired particular connotation in the framework of contemporary social movements, especially in those groups traditionally invisibilized, such as indigenous, rural, and marginal urban communities, among many others. Enlazador de mundos is a Chilean social movement that organizes itself in this type of social contexts, through dialogic community classrooms, in order to overcome the undervaluation of the cultural heritage of these communities in the official curricula. It is of interest to know how these collectives organize themselves to overcome the injustices in these classrooms. Through participatory action research, the forms of injustice/contempt and justice/recognition produced in the organizational dynamics adopted by the social collectives that are part of these community classrooms were identified. For this purpose, three research communities were constituted in three schools in a diversity of cultural contexts: peasant, mining, Mapuche, in different geographical regions of the country. The results show, on one hand, that the organizational dynamics of the collectives that mobilize the community classrooms are capable of generating social justice attributable to different forms of recognition, and on the other hand, that the injustices identified as forms of contempt, turned out to be the triggers of the dialogic transforming process that manages to produce the justice of social recognition.