Experiencias educativas que acogen la alteridad y las diferencias. El caso del Liceo VAL

Abstract

Inclusive education is an approach that proposes education for all people, without exception, through the elimination of barriers to learning and the creation of the necessary supports (Unesco, 2005). At the international level, and also in Colombia, there is a broad legal framework that protects and promotes inclusive education, configuring it as a right; However, the antecedents show a gap between what is enacted in the laws and the reality in the school, as well as the perpetuation of rhetorics of otherness that refer to exclusion as a contrary and unexpected result by the promoters of inclusion in the educational field and at school. This situation aroused an investigative interest to identify an educational institution that, in some way, managed to embrace differences and otherness and thus understand the educational experience, describe it and abstract elements to take into account in the current discussion about how to be together in school. The conceptual context adopted in this research was based on the presuppositions of the pedagogies of differences and on the concepts of otherness, of education as experience and of the ethics of the gaze. A qualitative study was carried out based on the ethnographic perspective of the case study (Stake, 1999; Ameigeiras, 2006) and from an epistemology of the known subject (Vasilachis, 2007) with a flexible design and with the use of techniques such as the review of institutional, normative and legal documents (Valles, 1999), participant observation, in-depth interview and ethnographic interview (Ameigeiras, 2006). In this way, an immersion exercise was carried out in an educational institution with extensive experience and recognition for its educational practices based on respect and the promotion of differences. The results yielded descriptions and conceptual relationships that account for what is significant and that makes sense for the participants of the educational experience that, in the light of the research, become valuable elements for: a) the consideration of open educational institutions to differences; b) the current pedagogical discussion on inclusive education that deconstructs this concept; and c) decentralization of responsibility for inclusion imposed on teachers, becoming more of an experience for all educational actors. Finally, it is concluded that the legal and normative framework on inclusive education does not have the scope to move education and its members; therefore, an alternative path of openness to differences and otherness must be sought based on an ethical reflection around the gaze of the other and the experience that this entails.