Decolonization of teacher educators in universities from the Global South

Descolonização de professores formadores em universidades do Sul Global

Descolonización de los formadores de profesores en universidades del Sur Global

ABSTRACT

Teacher educators face policies aimed at framing their understanding horizons and criteria of action. At the same time, they engage in practices that allow for unprecedented forms of personal adaptation and social change. Amid this ambivalence, this paper carries out a critical reflection about the decolonization of the policies and practices that circumscribe teacher educators. To do so, it discusses the crisis of university and then analyzes teacher subjectivation, teacher subalternation and practices of resistance. Such discussion and analysis are done by providing descriptions and interpretations of arguments proposed mainly by authors from the Global South. The main conclusion is that teacher educators need critical awareness about how homogenizing discourses and standardizing policies legitimize teacher subalternity and, in turn, how they need to mobilize teacher education processes that enact personal and collective practices of resistance.

Keywords:
Teacher education; Educational policy; Decolonization

RESUMO

Os formadores de professores deparam-se com políticas que visam enquadrar seus horizontes de compreensão e critérios de ação. Ao mesmo tempo, esses formadores envolvem-se em práticas que permitem formas de adaptação pessoal e mudança social. Em meio a essa ambivalência, este artigo faz uma reflexão crítica sobre a descolonização das políticas e práticas que circunscrevem os formadores de professores. Para tanto, discute a crise da universidade e, a seguir, analisa a subjetivação docente, a subalternação docente e as práticas de resistência. Tal discussão é feita por meio de argumentos propostos principalmente por autores do Sul Global. A principal conclusão é que os formadores de professores precisam de consciência crítica sobre como homogeneizar discursos e políticas padronizadoras legitimam a subalternidade docente e, por sua vez, como eles precisam mobilizar processos de formação que promovam práticas pessoais e coletivas de resistência.

Palavras-chave:
Formação de professores; Política educacional; Descolonização

RESUMEN

Los educadores de docentes enfrentan políticas orientadas a enmarcar sus horizontes de comprensión y criterios de acción. Al mismo tiempo, ellos se involucran en prácticas que permiten formas sin precedentes de adaptación personal y cambio social. En medio de esta ambivalencia, este artículo realiza una reflexión crítica orientada a descolonizar las políticas y discursos que circunscriben a estos educadores. Para ello, el trabajo discute la crisis de la universidad y analiza la subjetivación docente, la subalternización docente y las prácticas de resistencia. Dicha discusión se realiza mediante argumentos propuestos principalmente por autores del Sur Global. La principal conclusión es que los educadores de docentes necesitan una conciencia crítica acerca de cómo los discursos homogeneizadores y las políticas estandarizadoras legitiman la subalternidad y, a la vez, como ellos necesitan movilizar procesos educativos que promulguen prácticas de resistencia personales y colectivas.

Palabras claves:
Formación de docentes; Política educacional; Descolonización

INTRODUCTION

In times of geocultural subalternation of knowledge and education, universities from the Global South are institutions torn between subalternizing policies and subjectivating practices. In these institutions circulate instrumentalist policies and bureaucratic discourses, both standardizing what teacher educators must do and homogenizing how they must think (Sousa Santos, 2007). However, universities from the Global South also configure adaptive processes and nonconforming actions that compel teacher educators to transgress, subvert and transform the status quo (Tünnermann, 2004). Within this conflicting context, teacher educators face policies and discourses aimed at framing their understanding horizons and criteria of action. Such policies and discourses seek to subalternize them. However, at the same time, teacher educators engage in practices and processes that allow for unprecedented forms of personal adaptation and social change. Such practices and processes provide them with opportunities and alternatives for subjectivation.

Amid this ambivalence, with subalternation on the one hand and subjectivation on the other, teacher educators fulfill their functions and elucidate their reality according to what is imposed and normalized but, at the same time, they construct knowledge and resignify their experiences based on what is transgressive and innovative. It is necessary, then, to decolonize the policies and discourses that aim to circumscribe teacher educators in an effort to reveal not only how standardizing policies and homogenizing discourses enact teacher subalternation, but also how personal and collective practices of resistance enable teacher subjectivation. As a result, this paper calls for a critical reflection about the decolonization of teacher educators in universities from the Global South and, to do so, it will provide some initial thoughts on the crisis of universities from the Global South today, teacher subjectivation, teacher subalternation, and practices of teacher resistance.

THE CRISIS OF UNIVERSITIES FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH TODAY

Universities from the Global South are experiencing a crisis, which is associated with the development of projects of insertion into the global economy as well as the dissemination of premises of educational mercantilism (Brunner and Uribe, 2007). This crisis manifests itself in issues such as the creation of bureaucratic accreditation systems, the imposition of standards and guidelines of a commercial nature, the loss of university autonomy and the limited participation of university professors in decision-making (Gregorutti and Bon Pereira, 2013). Similarly, the existence of instrumentalist education policies has legitimized policies and discourses that belong to the world of economy and commerce. Such policies are designed, implemented, and evaluated from positivist parameters such as measurement, quantification, verification, and replicability, whereas the discourses are characterized by a fixation with issues such as impact, quality, and efficiency (Ríos Delgado, 2012). In this perspective, Mollis (2003) points out that the production and dissemination of knowledge oriented to the satisfaction of the public good has not been the leading factor in the reforms of higher education in the last 20 years. Knowledge is created and disseminated through a business logic; a logic that assumes it as a product that must be commercialized. This logic has allowed relations between the university, the State and society that are defined through clauses, guarantees and agreements that all accept in exchange for a service or a profit.

This paper argues that universities from the Global South should critically reflect about their current mercantilist nature and examine how such nature plays a role in the ways teacher educators experience and understand their professional life and pedagogical work. This is so as the present mercantilist nature assumes the university not as a social organization, but as "[…] an economic-functional institution, in which not only a static structure of it is assumed, but it is valued from the logic of production" (Murcia Peña and Gamboa Suárez, 2015, p. 424). As economic-functional institutions, universities from the global south are forced to adapt themselves to the logic of the free market, which denaturalizes the ideal of a university that educates human beings, researches the world, and transmits culture. This logic establishes the notion of universities that market science and knowledge as merchandise, provide classes and projects as services, and comply with criteria of business efficiency and productivity (See Zarate et al., 2008). On the other hand, Mejía (2006) states that many universities tend to implement academic models that, among other things, base their teacher evaluation systems on international standards, which not only establish levels of scientific productivity and academic performance, but also regulate issues such as job stability and career opportunities. To Mejía, these models resignify the ways in which teacher educators relate to science, since they assume themselves as corporatized intellectuals who build scientific knowledge at the service of interests of third parties who have the capacity to pay.

Among other reasons, the commodification of universities and the corporatization of teacher educators have appeared because of the imposition of educational policies built in the societies of the North and established in the societies of the Global South. This imposition, maintains Mollis (2006), has denaturalized university knowledge by reformulating it as commercialized knowledge. This denaturalization has resulted in "[…] the construction of a new identity that equates universities with supermarkets, where students are consumers, knowledge is a merchandise and teachers are salaried employees" (Mollis, 2006, p. 87). Likewise, this denaturalization has been accompanied by an Americanization of higher education, which "[…] is evidenced by the place assigned to instrumental knowledge at the service of economic development, on the one hand, and the subordination of national and local development to the global dynamics of hegemonic countries, on the other" (ibidem, p. 89).

In this situation, teacher educators have mobilized practices and processes of resistance that have allowed them to face "[…] the use that universities make… [of the] human capital of their academics, with the purpose to increase their income; this use has to do with a set of initiatives and behaviors economically motivated to ensure the procurement of external resources" (Ibarra Colado, 2003, p. 1059). From a decolonizing perspective, it is pertinent, then, that universities engage in critical reflections about the ways in which teacher educators have faced the restructuring of higher education in the Global South. These critical reflections should also address the new forms of power, knowledge and being that these actors have been forced to cope with as a result of the modification of "[…] the nature, content and organization of their academic work" (ibidem, p. 1060). Furthermore, it is essential that these critical reflections make visible the ways in which teacher educators have faced the growing presence of university dynamics with significant economic purposes. In view of that, such critical reflections must delve into historical-social and ethical-political issues such as teacher subjectivation, teacher subalternation and teachers' practices of resistance.

TEACHER SUBJECTIVATION

Without a doubt, Foucault's work is an unparalleled reference in the understanding of subject and subjectivation. When speaking of a subject, Foucault resorts to Nietzsche's approach in assuming a historical perspective that opposes the Cartesian idealism of the subject as a conscious and autonomous being capable of controlling and dominating the world as an object. Similarly, Foucault departs from the modern conception of subject proposed by Kant, who understands it as an individual circumscribed to reason, disjointed from his body and sensible realities, and separated from the natural world. In other words, Foucault challenges two perspectives: a Cartesian, unique and non-historical self, and a universal and historical Kantian self (Serrano Gonzalez, 1989).

When reflecting about the subject, Foucault questions the traditional conception of an emancipated and stable subject, endowed with full awareness and the source of autonomous actions and senses. To him, the subject is a product of forms of power and knowledge that the prevailing discourses of the dominant class produce, legitimize, and enforce. This way, the subject is made "[…] inside specific historically discursive formations. Hence, all individuals in each period become subjects of a particular discourse and, therefore, bearers of their power-knowledge" (Hall apud Aquino Moreschi, 2013, p. 261). Such making of subjects is carried out through discipline, which aims at instituting a mentality consistent with a series of prevailing ideological and political conditions. This discipline is enacted through a series of dispositifs and technologies aimed at circumscribing, both historically and ideologically, not just the mentality and performance, but also the bodies of the subjects. A dispositif is an institutional and discursive framework that contains norms, regulations, spaces, and knowledge through which the constructions of truth are configured (Foucault apud Rojas and Leyton, 2014). Technologies, on the other hand, are a series of instruments that have the power to produce and delimit the forms and practices of organization and communication within a community (Castro apud Rojas and Leyton, 2014).

The ideological and political circumscription of certain types of subjects derives from an interaction between technologies of power and technologies of the self (Foucault, 2008). Through technologies of power, Foucault scrutinizes the historical procedures that determine the behaviors of individuals, subjecting them to certain types of control and domination. On the other hand, through technologies of the self, he makes visible the personal or communal operations that allow individuals to transform or improve their thoughts, behaviors, or identities to reach certain states of stability and wisdom. To Foucault, the articulations, intersections, and tensions that occur between the self and power, between the government of others over the self and the government of the self over itself constitute a space to understand how subjects build their subjectivity through reconfigurations and interplays of power, knowledge, and truth.

In Latin America, the notion of subjectivation goes hand in hand with an epistemological shift in social sciences from an explanatory and deterministic rationality that prioritizes objective factors in social processes towards a dynamic and situated perspective that advocates for the subjective substrate of collective action. This perspective highlights the role of subjects both in the construction of knowledge and in the historical construction of social reality. In this regard, Zemelman (2012) proposes assuming the subject as a complex of experiences and worlds that converge in his subjectivity or his world of life. This assumption allows breaking the separation between reality as externality and the subject as objectivity. Instead, it associates subjectivation with "[…] the idea of spaces of possibilities in which the existence of the subjects and the consequent display of their construction capacities take place" (Zemelman, 2012, p. 1). In other words, subjectivation allows understanding the subjects' efforts to build their realities through individual actions while transforming their coexistence through collective constructions of meaning.

In the context of the integration of individual and collective realities, Zemelman (1998) suggests regarding teachers as individuals capable of living subjectivation as a form of resistance to the inertia of their daily and collective lives. This resistance arises from critical processes of questioning and seeking new senses about what they are, do, think, and feel. Due to their subjectivation, not only do teachers develop their professional capacities for amazement, reasoning, autonomy, planning, and sense making, but they also position themselves as individuals with possibilities of projecting, inventing, and devising. Ultimately, teacher subjectivation is a process of epistemological, axiological, methodological, discursive, and historical construction through which teachers can reinterpret and transform their actions, thinking, feelings and future (Zemelman Guzmán and León Vega, 1997).

In Colombia, teacher subjectivation relates to the theoretical-methodological critical reflections carried out by Zuluaga Garcés and her research group "History of pedagogical practices" (1987). These critical reflections implemented postulates from Foucault's archeology of knowledge, such as the delegitimization of the existence of historical continuity and the unveiling of hidden senses, which helped consider pedagogy as historical practices and knowledge. To Zuluaga Garcés (1987, p. 22), the conceptualization of the practices and knowledge of teachers requires a sociohistorical epistemology that "[…] recovers the historicity of pedagogy, which allows (a) analyzing it as knowledge, (b) studying its processes of formation as a discipline, (c) working with the discursiveness of pedagogy, and (d) examining the practices of pedagogical knowledge in our society". In this epistemological perspective, teachers can recognize and question their present practices and discourses based on the historicity of their doing and saying. Such processes of recognition and questioning enable them, among other things, to reveal and understand socio-cultural rules and political-ideological patterns that constrain the forms and functions of their performance and enunciation.

For his part, Martínez Boom (1994; 2016) offers a view of teacher subjectivation based on his historical approach to the moments during which the work of Colombian teachers has passed through. The recognition of the existence of different, but complementary historical moments allows understanding the traces and wounds that have marked the sociocultural image of teachers. This sociocultural image reveals a figure that is not historically homogeneous or static. Instead, this figure is a combination of identities and qualities attached to teachers with a set of gestures, discourses and desires assigned to them. Finally, Martínez Boom (2016) points out that carrying out this historical reading involves working with two categories:

1. displacement, understood as "[…] management of forms of power that define the teacher as a subject with social struggles and historical hazards." (Martínez Boom, 2016, p. 35), and

2. discontinuity, defined as a "[…] set of initiatives, movements and reform decisions that regulate who the teacher should be, how he should proceed and what he should say" (ibidem, p. 256).

TEACHER SUBALTERNATION

It is important to note that Gramsci was the first to use the term "subaltern" from a theoretical perspective, as he attempted to account for the relationship between hegemony (government by consensus) and dominance (government by force). For him, subaltern refers to "[…] any person or group of people in a particular society that suffers the hegemonic dominance of an elite ruling class that denies them the basic rights of participation in the creation of local history and culture as active individuals of the same nation" (Gramsci, 1971, p. 200). Gramsci was interested in studying the conscience and culture of subaltern groups as a way of making their voices heard instead of simply relying on the historical narrative of the state, that is, in the end, the history of the ruling class. In this context, Gramsci theorized that subaltern groups could challenge normative perspectives of social and political reality through intellectual and moral processes. These processes allowed them to make sense of their world and their daily lives, and, most importantly, resist subaltern consciousness. Ultimately, these processes were part of what Gramsci called counterhegemony: "[…] the generation of a new worldview that facilitates the political initiative of the subaltern classes and changes the direction of the forces that must be absorbed so that a new historical perspective can emerge" (Campione, 2015, p. 18).

In the 1980s, the study of subalternation cohered with the theoretical critical reflections of the members of the "subaltern studies" group (Ranajit Guha, Touraj Atabaki, Shahid Ami and others), who take the subaltern concept to reread the history and the historiography of India. From this concept, these authors critically approach the subordination present in Indian society in terms of class and caste, gender, race, age and language. For them, this subordination tells a national history controlled by a bourgeois nationalist elitism produced by British colonialism, which denies the existence and transcendence of groups such as peasants, women, immigrants, etc. In contrast to this colonialized and colonializing history, they propose to make a history from below, focused more on what happens among the masses at the basic levels of society (Guha, 1989). In other words, they seek to reread history to visualize and legitimize the voices and actions of subaltern groups. This rereading results in an understanding of subaltern as

[…] an abstraction used to identify the intractable that emerges within a dominant system X and that the dominant discourse cannot completely appropriate; an otherness that resists being contained … This means that the subaltern presents counterhegemonic possibilities that force contradictions and dislocations in the dominant discourse, and provide sources of immanent criticism. (Prakash apud Rodríguez, 2009, p. 225)

Now, regarding teacher subalternation from Latin America, it is worth stating that it implies recognizing the existence of technocratic perspectives that not only ignore the historical-social and ethical-political dimensions of educational phenomena, institutions, and actors, but also emphasize the technical dimension of educational processes and products. These perspectives endow education with features such as quality, effectiveness, and efficiency, which disconnect it from the material and symbolic realities that make it possible. In this regard, Berrío Cifuentes and Jaramillo Gallego (2012) argue that studies carried out both nationally and internationally give an account of a teacher subjected to institutional arrangements that conceal his work as a professional and distort his role as an educational actor. This subjection goes together with the assignment of excessive tasks, the experience of adverse situations in work contexts, and ultimately the dissemination of low social recognition. These authors also point out that the preponderance of rational thinking and the objectivity of knowledge in educational systems have promoted the existence of a subject "[…] detached from feelings, emotions, beliefs and culture" (Berrío Cifuentes and Jaramillo Gallego, 2012, p. 14).

In 2016, Thisted defined teacher subalternation as a product of the current control of modes of production and cognition that come from an active colonial legacy, which mobilize contemporary colonial dispositifs that seek to dominate teachers. In this context, teacher subalternation configures social relations that deny or overlook the existence of teachers as actors of their own history. In addition, this subalternation promotes cultural and academic fragmentations that are functional for the preservation of dominant socioeconomic and cultural schemes. This way, teachers operate or function in the official discourse as makers of homogeneity and key pieces in the construction of a certain type of citizen for a particular type of nation. Furthermore, teachers live forms of work and discourse about their knowledge that support practices that degrade their professional status and denaturalize their educational work.

Despite suffering inequalities and injustices, Thisted (2016) maintains that teachers can create new conditions to resist and transform the prevailing ways of thinking and acting of today's cultural and educational policies. Through transgressive practices and nonconforming actions, teachers can open spaces and times to accommodate different cultural repertoires that struggle to be present at the school. These practices may enable teachers to experience "[…] substantive improvements in life situations, in the effective recognition of rights and in the education of subalternized groups" (Thisted, 2016, p. 11). Correspondingly, authors such as Buendía Espinosa (2018) argue for teacher de-subalternation, since the mission of teachers as members of academia is of thought and action, not of subjection and obedience. These subjects, whose subjectivities are denied, ignored, or silenced, must be able to resist and overcome policies and discourses in which certain ways of knowing, acting, being and feeling are imposed according to the interests and needs of other actors who want to dominate and subjugate them.

On the other hand, when discussing teacher subalternation, it is important to refer to disciplinary control dispositifs A disciplinary control dispositif accounts for discourses and tactics designed to scrutinize, normalize, and standardize subjects. To Santiago Muñoz (2017), these discourses and tactics result in practical procedures that configure and govern the bodies, thoughts, and actions of individuals. Some of them are the distribution of people in heterogeneous and closed spaces, the control of activities through rhythms and repetitions and the saving of time through cycles and divisions. In education, states Santiago, the three main disciplinary dispositifs are hierarchical inspection (vigilance), normalizing sanction (punishment) and final evaluation (exams).

Today's control society establishes a regime of subjection that does not need closed institutions (schools, jails, asylums) to restrain and suppress subjects. This is so as institutions are now characterized by being open, so that individuals self-regulate and self-govern their discourses and practices for the achievement of a life project based on imposed concepts such as consumption, competitiveness, and success. For Anzaldúa Arce (2015, p. 5-6), this regime of subjection embodies:

[…] a strategy of power that is exercised in the open field, which no longer requires confinement for vigilance, as it employs ongoing control inside and outside institutions […] the control society does not seek to subjugate subjects according to a fixed model, but it wants to modulate them so that they become flexible and adaptable subjects.

In the context of today's regime of subjection, the control society imposes on universities a bureaucratic-functional logic that not only denies the autonomy of being, but also weakens all capacity for power that could involve criticism and resistance. For Bonvecchio (2001, p. 18), in this logic, the teacher educator "[…] is, at the same time, the victim and the agent of a culture that, by not submitting to its ends, rejects and marginalizes him". Through disciplinary control dispositifs such as teacher statutes, teacher evaluation systems and syllabus, teacher educators live a series of power relations, which triggers a subalternized subjectivity. Camargo Palencia (2013, p. 141) explains that not only do these dispositifs arrange and manage the life, work, and imaginaries of teachers "[…] through the conditioning and arrangement of their different activities […]", but also have transformed universities into "[…] a biopolitical dispositif for the production of subjectivities based on economic competitiveness in the global market". This biopolitical dispositif imposes discourses and policies designed and implemented from the logic of globalization of production and the capitalist market and, in doing so, forces teacher educators to be docile actors in the formation of competitive individuals. In brief, not only do these discourses and policies regulate and restrict the meanings and purposes of teacher educators' academic work and research, but, also, they force them to arrange and administer their professional lives within imaginaries derived from both the commodification of knowledge and the supremacy of capitalist ideology.

PRACTICES OF TEACHER RESISTANCE

As was previously seen, teacher educators suffer from subalternation processes derived from dynamics such as today's regime of subjection and the use of disciplinary control dispositifs. Despite this situation, teacher educators do not resign themselves to being passive subjects subordinate to subalternizing discourses and policies. Instead, they strive to act as critical subjects that exert resistance through transgressive and nonconforming practices. However, before defining and discussing resistance practices, it is necessary to account for the concept of power. From a Foucaultian position, power appears to be a constant element of both social life (interpersonal relationships and interactions) and the inner world of subjects (intrapersonal actions, senses, and purposes). Power is not, then, only a right that the subject possesses as a good that can be gained or lost partially or totally (liberal conception of power). Nor is it simply a way to maintain and reproduce the relations of domination of one class over another (Marxist conception). Similarly, power is not just a repressive mechanism that imposes the interests of some and restricts the actions of others. On the contrary, to Foucault (1986), power constitutes itself and functions as relations of force in continuous imbalance and tension that modify or influence other relations throughout the network of interactions and exchanges that take place in society.

When it is assumed as a force on other forces in society, power gives rise to the existence of two opposite but complementary practices: the exercise of power and the resistance of power. Concerning the exercise of power, García (2009) argues that power adopts two paths. On the one hand, it creates an individualizing anato-policy directed especially to the body of the subjects. This policy uses discipline as its technique, which distributes the bodies of subjects in enclosed spaces, disciplining their times and gestures through a continuous regime of strict control and vigilance. On the other hand, it produces a collective bio-policy aimed at the behaviors of citizens. This policy uses governmentality as its technique, which controls the life of many groups (population) in a large and limited space (territory) through a set of institutions, procedures and tactics focused on security dispositifs.

Concerning the resistance of power, power gives an account of the creative capacity of subjects to reuse their forces and escape exercises of control, discipline and vigilance over their bodies, behaviors, and minds. Because of its creative dimension, resistance is not a simple mechanical response (given an action, a reaction occurs). On the contrary, resistance comprises diverse and innovative responses that subjects use to intervene socially and break with existing norms, imposed certainties and assigned realities. Besides, these responses are actions in the now against eternalized forms of the past based on a time to come. In this way, power-resistance relations "[…] forge their own history, find their own unique ways, never definitive, always in movement and confrontation, always framed in particular spaces and times" (García, 2009, p. 213).

To García, practices of resistance can assume three general forms: resistance as denial, resistance as affirmation and resistance as interiority. In the first case, the subject resists external attacks, opposing contrary forces to those exerted on him. In this struggle for not being affected, the subject rejects or denies any type of relationship or contact that comes from external or strange forces. In the second case, resistance assumes an affirmative character as it becomes an intervention force capable of affecting the surrounding space. In this struggle to affect, the subject examines and instructs himself, accumulating experience and building his history. In the third case, resistance consists of the subject's relationship with himself, a way of affecting his own self. In this self-relationship, the subject lives a dialogue with the parts that constitute his interiority.

Following García, it should be noted that both the exercise of power and the practices of resistance mobilize technologies of the self and practices of self-care, which help the subject develop subjectivation. This subjectivation emerges when the subject constructs himself by refusing imposed norms, principles, prescriptions, or prohibitions. Likewise, the subject builds himself when he examines areas of his interiority to accumulate experience. In the same way, the subject affects his own self when he puts into dialogue the parts that constitute himself with the rules and values that are proposed or imposed socio-historically.

Now, concretely, from the perspective of practices of teacher resistance, the construction of the subject is inscribed in three axes that, at their point of intersection, produce an individual in a given space and time. The first is the axis of knowledge, which makes the subject a subject of knowledge, while the second is the axis of power, that constitutes it as a socio-legal subject. The last axis is that of the self (the being), which transforms it into an ethical subject. In these three dimensions, resistance makes its appearance, as "[…] the subjects resist (a) knowledge that seeks to impose itself as truth, (b) laws, norms, rules, and regulations that try to subjugate their bodies and (c) the prevailing moral codes and their corresponding technologies of the self that try to control their minds" (ibidem, p. 213).

CONCLUSION

A review of issues such as teacher subjectivation, teacher subalternation and practices of teacher resistance allows delving into the logics and dynamics teacher educators are facing today in universities from the Global South. A critical reflection of such logics and dynamics allows reaching two conclusions:

1. there is a geocultural context that promotes the subalternation of knowledge and education, a subalternation which is reflected in situations such as academic capitalism, educational mercantilism, commodification of universities, corporatization of teacher educators, subalternate subjectivities, biopolitical dispositives, etc.

2. decolonization is required as an epistemological turn, as this epistemic disobedience is capable of denaturalizing and delegitimizing the existing geo-cultural subalternation of knowledge and education. It can do so not simply because it questions forms of power, knowing and being that are colonial, capitalist, and Eurocentric, but mainly because it advocates social relations, types of knowledge and ways of being that are alternative, situated, emancipatory and liberating.

In the remaining paragraphs, this paper offers some consideration for teacher educators and universities from the Global South to engage in critical reflections about both the geo-cultural subalternation of knowledge and education and decolonization as an epistemological turn.

Considering the geocultural subalternation of knowledge and education, Mignolo (2002) argues that this subalternation emerges as a product of a modern Western thought which positions Europe as a "geo-cultural entity", silences other forms of knowledge and, ultimately, institutes a single privileged locus of enunciation over other forms of rationality or forms of thought. To Walsh (2002, p. 206), the geo-cultural subalternation of knowledge and education gives an account of "the effort of the current colonial and subalternizing reality to extend its initiative beyond the political sphere, combining this with a strategic production and dissemination of knowledge". This colonial subalternizing reality seeks to privilege Western science and enforce its values (empiricism, positivism, materialism, and reductionism) through Eurocentric forms of knowledge creation and education development.

It is noteworthy that, in the context of this geocultural subalternation, the relation of domination of the northern part of the globe over the Global South is based on colonialities of power, knowledge and being, which reveal that knowledge as well as economy are organized in centers of power and peripheral regions. These colonialities make the academic-administrative structure of the universities from the Global South submissive (subaltern) to organizational, economic, and academic dynamics based on a globalization that eliminates national operating particularities (Bauer, 2007). In this way, the universities of the Global South face a colonial and northern epistemology that not only promotes the hegemony of Eurocentrism as the only knowledge perspective, but also avoids the appearance of epistemological frameworks that pluralize, problematize, and challenge the notion of a totalitarian, unique, and universal knowledge. Ultimately, the colonialities of power, knowledge and being together with the subalternized administrative structure that is present in the universities from the Global South impose discourses and policies of control, domination, and discipline on teacher educators. In other words, teacher educators confront academic contexts as well as administrative frameworks that seek to configure them as obedient and subordinate subjects, preventing them from becoming independent and free subjects of knowledge and education (See Dennis, 2018).

It is vital, then, that teacher educators and the universities from the Global South denaturalize and delegitimize policies and discourses framed in subalternation, coloniality, hegemonization, and standardization. Such denaturalization and delegitimization can both make visible and mobilize processes of subjectivation and practices of resistance oriented towards emancipation, empowerment, and autonomy. In this regard, Cossio Moreno (2018, p. 16) points out the need to conduct studies with the ultimate goal of "[…] demystifying the Eurocentric conception of knowledge without subject, without history, without power relations, knowledge from nowhere, decorporalized and delocalized; this way, one can decolonize thought and challenge the parameters that have been imposed".

An alternative for teacher educators and universities from the Global South to carry out such demystification can be the use of what Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel (2007) call "decolonization". For these authors, decolonization accounts for an epistemological turn from the Global South that questions homogeneous forms of knowledge production and challenges colonial processes of subalternation. Above all, this epistemological turn "[…] enable[s] forms of production of senses and experiences that advocate social relations, ways of thinking and ways of being that resignify processes of the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system without relying on the old language inherited from nineteenth-century social sciences" (Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel, 2007, p. 17). To Maldonado-Torres (2011, p. 683), decolonization accounts for fundamental changes in the basic coordinates of thought that mobilize "[…] ways of thinking that are simultaneously inspired by the crisis of the European civilization project, on the one hand, and in the affirmation of possibilities of power, knowing, and being that exceed the constitutive limits of western science model".

Decolonization can allow teacher educators and universities from the Global South to give rise to critical reflections that unmask ways in which forms of power, knowledge and being articulate inequalities and legitimize domination-submission relationships framed in issues such as colonial difference, American supremacy, Eurocentric legacy, and capitalism (Mignolo, 2000). On the other hand, decolonization can help teacher educators and universities from the Global South to understand how geocultural subalternization and colonialities cause the establishment of particular disciplinary control dispositifs that no longer seek to model disciplined subjects who should act as functional operators and rational citizens. Instead, these dispositifs seek to fashion controllable subjects who must act as efficient workers and competent professionals (Anzaldúa Arce, 2015).

In summary, this paper advocates the decolonization of teacher educators in universities from the Global South. To this end, it proposes a critical reflection of issues such as the university crisis, teacher subjectivation, teacher subalternation and practices of teacher resistance. It was argued that such reflection can help reveal how the geo-cultural subalternation of knowledge and education has affected policies and discourses through the naturalization and institutionalization of concepts of homogenization, standardization, control, discipline, and submission. Likewise, this reflection can help make room and space for decolonization as an epistemological turn from the Global South with the potential to start a movement capable of transforming not only the work and reality of teacher educators, but also of the nature and mission of universities themselves. This movement can help both teacher educators and universities from the Global South start:

an academic-led decolonization movement […] [that] understands its position as responding to live issues of inequality, colonialism, and oppression—rather than just being a matter of legacies or unearthing historical accounts for the sake of it. To do this kind of work in the university is […] to enter the university space as a transformative force, to connect what is happening inside the institution to the outside, and to utilize its resources in the interest of social justice. (Gebrial, 2018, p. 33-34)

• Funding: The study didn't receive funding.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  03 May 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  15 Aug 2021
• Accepted
  12 Apr 2023