how to facilitate decolonial and pluriversal perspectives?

We live in times of “plural crises” that encompass social, cultural, ecological, political, systemic and economic dimensions, which have changed society over the last decades. They mostly emerge from western epistemologies founded on the dominant narratives of global, colonial and capitalist systems (Egmose et al., 2022). These narratives could be addressed from the educational landscape in which it is urgent to integrate pluriversal and decolonised understandings. 

Contextualized in south tyrol, this study reviews the local educational departments’ values and guidelines for high school curriculum and analyses the philosophy and history syllabuses of two high schools of bolzano. It explores how to demonopolize eurocentric perspectives, which tend to underrepresent alternative knowledge systems and cultural narratives. To facilitate relational learning in high schools, complementary ‘plug-in’ approaches and examples are proposed to integrate more-than-western epistemological approaches like the “pluriverse” (Escobar, 2018) and “sentipensar1”, expand the existing curricula. 

A priori, narrative interviews, ethnographic methods and a prototyping intervention were carried out to weave an understanding of relational practices. As a result, five plug-ins were designed intending to create space for horizontal co-learning processes between teachers and students by sharing reflections and emotions leading to a comprehension of relationality and responsibility.