Abstract:

The San Simon University (Cochabamba, Bolivia) has developed e-learning programs from 2005, into the frame of its PROEIB Andes Unit for Intercultural Bilingual Education; one of them based on the “Universidad Indígena Intercultural” Project. This project count with a staff of professors that have expertises on e-learning programs, besides, the project is executed –and supported- by an environmental design of e-learning platform that incorporates several tools and strategies for teaching, like virtual conferences, interactive tasks and working documents.

The “instructional design” of the courses was made specially oriented to the “cooperative learning” including intercultural aspects, between the participants who are from different indigenous cultures from Latinamerica –and no-indigenous people too- by creating interrelations and exchanges of experiences through the platform, and, specifically, through the forum as a principal tool.

The design of the course combine various types of tools in order to reinforce the learning processes of the students, so, it is expected that the participants, be able to improve their culturally situated competences and the e-learning environment makes possible their auto trainning. As a tool, the “instructional design” was proved demostrating proficiency and usefulness in teaching processes.

The present communication discuss -with regard to the educative field- the scopes of intercultural curriculum in an e-learning environment for an inclusive education that is developed in contexts of cultural conflict and, in many cases, politician, from the experiences of learning of the students.

The aforesaid is discussed having in mind that the indigenous and afrodescendients peoples, who have cultural practices, a vision of the world and different expectations from the western ones, or of the “mestizos”, are themselves threatened in their forms to be and in their survival. In these conditions, the intercultural education is in a privileged situation for “reconstructing” the relations between people of different cultures in the measurement that can develop practices in which “the other is recognized like a legitimate other in the coexistence”. From this perspective, the intercultural point of view is a practice that needs to be assumed from the reflection of the experience that is lived in relation to people of different cultures. What we call “interculturalidad” is not only a normative speech that defines certain social ideals or a pedagogical methodology by means of which they are possible to be established certain type of relations between the cultural differences. The interculturalidad is, essentially, a practice that is founded on the experience that is lived with the other and that is processed in relations of cultural conflict, looking for its transformation.

Keywords:

interculturality, indigenous e-learning, intercultural bilingual education, ethoeducation.