The colonial character of power and knowledge in the development of the Bilingual Intercultural Education Program of the Experimental Pedagogical University of Venezuela

Abstract

This essay analyzes the colonial character of power and knowledge present in the Bilingual Intercultural Education Program (BIE) of the Experimental Pedagogical University of Venezuela. This analysis gets its theoretical support from the "epistemologies of the south" and various contributions on Intercultural Education in Latin America. The colonial character of knowledge is associated with the pattern of power that operates in different everyday contexts interrelated at the micro or macro structural level. In the BIE Program, historical evidence shows that indigenous knowledge has gradually been desecrated in the processes of management and training of teachers. Currently, curricular changes are under way in order to adequate the BIE Program to the current demands of teaching. Finally, possible proposals are put forward which seek to generate institutional and political changes on Intercultural Bilingual Education. This calls for the BIE to be taken from the socio-intercultural perspective, in order to progressively eradicate the pedagogical colonialism that still prevails in our centers of formation.