Neozapatista decolonial pedagogy: an approach to the disruptive conceptualisation of the learner

Abstract

In January 1994, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) (EZLN), an indigenous group, staged an uprising in eight municipalities of Chiapas, Mexico. Since then, Neozapatism has emerged as both a social and political movement that critiques neoliberalism and a reference point for those interested in decoloniality and indigenous ideas, such as Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Pablo González Casanova, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Academic debates have been sparked on the ecologies of knowledge and provincialising modernity. This chapter examines the Zapatista pedagogical proposal, focusing on the conceptualisation of the learner. The chapter analyses the pedagogical notions that underpin the Sistema Educativo Rebelde Autónomo Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Rebel Autonomous Education System of National Liberation) (SERAZ-LN), the Universidad de la Tierra (University of the Earth), and the Universidad Intercultural (Intercultural University) projects that inspire Neozapatista ideology. We provide a political, social, and ideological contextualisation of the Zapatista movement from a decolonial perspective. We then examine the four core dimensions of Zapatista decolonial pedagogy, including the rejection of the individual-society dichotomy, the search for alternative ethics, the view of education as a path to emancipation, and the defence of incidental learning. Furthermore, we argue that these elements constitute a roadmap for articulating a decolonial pedagogy in the 21st century, with the Zapatista practice serving as a practical reference for detailed theoretical study.