Danza y memoria social. La danza andina como recurso para la educación intercultural

Abstract

Reflections about otherness, interculturality, and social construction are not divorced from dance, understood as a space for encountering memory. Modernity, as a political, social, and cultural process, assumes Eurocentric and mono-culturality view as the only truth. In this context, dance called “folkloric” —by the people in power— captures the social imaginaries, whether they are white, creole of mestizo from an intercultural diversity. Dance looks at and builds the otherness from the staging; this otherness is an internal me that lives in the territory. Dance at school makes visible-invisible and discovers-covers their presence. Education was born as an instrument of indoctrination, however, reflections from Latin America, since the 1970s, have led to rethinking this paradigm. A liberation and intercultural education questions the epistemic horizons on which the contemporary educational system rests.Dance, in this sense, is a necessary tool that allows the development of approaches that value diversity as it generates elements of educational endeavor, in addition to questioning the instituted power and how its views. Despite Ley Orgánica de Educación Intercultural (Organic Law of Intercultural Education —LOEI—), in Ecuador, reflections on the contribution of dance as a methodological learning tool in classrooms are scarce. This presentation sets out the experiences in the educational field with the traditional dance group of the Colegio de Bachillerato Ciudad de Cuenca, during 2018 and 2019, from an intercultural approach, but, above all, experiential approach that Guerrero calls corazonar (to act from the heart) and from other insurgent wisdoms.