Encounters and Disagreements Between Indigenous Family Education and School Education: Narrative Reviews

TL;DR

This paper explores the tensions and opportunities between Indigenous family education and Western schooling in Chile, advocating for inclusive educational strategies.

Contribution

The paper proposes strategies for integrating Indigenous knowledge into school systems through epistemological pluralism.

Findings

Indigenous family education emphasizes sociocultural logic, while Western schooling often neglects it.

Articulating Indigenous and school knowledge can improve students' socioeconomic outcomes.

Incorporating Indigenous scholars and contextualizing education are key to successful integration.

Abstract

In Chile, school education was established in indigenous territories with the aim of homogenizing knowledge in the education of children within a Western framework; this process has resulted in the denial of the education of indigenous families. The objective of this article is to reflect on the objectives of indigenous family education and school education at all levels for the training of new generations, revealing the potentialities of articulation between both forms of knowledge in education from an epistemological pluralism through a narrative review. To this end, a theoretical and empirical review was carried out in the Scopus, Scielo, and Scholar databases of the last decade. The article’s reflection includes encounters in the family–school relationship in indigenous territory, the involvement in horizontal educational processes for the construction of knowledge, and access to improve the socioeconomic situation of the students. However, there are disagreements with Western schooling that annul the social and cultural aspects of indigenous students’ origin. It concludes by proposing educational strategies such as (a) incorporating indigenous scholars into the teaching–learning processes, (b) contextualizing education, and (c) the articulation of contents and methods specific to the territory in the school system, so that it responds to the ways of teaching and learning from the sociocultural logic itself.