Designing Pedagogical Actions with School Adolescents with the Help of Uncertainty: an Application of Intercultural Performative Pedagogy in a Medellín-based (Colombia) High School

Abstract

The decline of supposedly symbolic structures devised for eternity, such as God, family, nation, sex or gender, unties in the citizens of the worlds a certain uncertainty that influences our thinking and acting. Intercultural Performative Pedagogy (IPP) considers such declines of our beliefs to be an opportunity for us to perceive and/or devise ourselves as actuated subjects that follow traditional and structural patterns and, at the time, as subjects acting within our own identity games. For that reason, it calls for pedagogical actions that are consistent with this chiasmatic focus. In this context, IPP sees adolescent life worlds and its random thinking as paradigmatic manifestations of uncertainty. Constructive maieutic didactic techniques designed to put on stage and learn how to read the chiasmatic MacKeldey this as well as that” as suggested by IPP have proved to be auto-ethnography, the dramatic play, the documentary methodology and feedback. In conclusion, what this writing seeks to prove by pointing to chiasmatic IPP and a few exemplary experiences collected between 2005 and 2014 is that taking advantage of uncertainty eases successful teaching and learning processes with school adolescents. This way, we consider IPP to be a mechanism that is suitable for co-constructive pedagogical practice in subjects that relate to democratic education in a direct or transversal manner.