Academic Literacies From the South to the South: Tensions and Advances in Three Initiatives Located in Ibero-America

Abstract

Certainly, most academic-disciplinary literacy initiatives in the Ibero-American context have arisen with the purpose of achieving social justice, especially in a territory that has suffered from inequity and whose deepening has increased with the current health emergency situation. However, despite well-intentioned initiatives, these programs, in general, have followed Anglo-Saxon models far removed from Ibero-American needs and reality. Therefore, in their implementation, they have dichotomies that ultimately weaken their sustainability over time and their results in their level of real inclusion, some of these – considering the approaches of Tierney (2018) and others – are: assimilation/accommodation, elitism/inclusion, institutional reform/educational innovation, research/action, remediation/re-mediation, standardization/contextualization, performance/learning, submission/emancipation, monologism/dialogism and homogeneity/diversity. In this way, based on a qualitative and reflective analysis on the experiences of three academic literacy programs in three universities in Argentina, Chile, and Spain, we will make these tensions explicit, and we will reveal practices that are truly contextualized to the communities where they are inserted, such as their eclectic, collaborative, dialogic, and remediated nature, which allows them to be constantly codesigned by the participation of students, professors, and tutors and whose research is promoted through action. In this sense, these countries can be related by sharing the language, a recent tradition of academic literacy and high school dropout rates. Finally, knowing both the strengths and the contradictions they still hold will contribute to continuing the process of contextualizing to the communities and, thus, establishing them as emancipatory pedagogies from the South to the South.

Citation

Errázuriz, M.C., Natale, L. and Núñez Cortés, J.A. (2022), "Academic Literacies From the South to the South: Tensions and Advances in Three Initiatives Located in Ibero-America", Assaf, L.C., Sowa, P. and Zammit, K. (Ed.) Global Meaning Making (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 39), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 57-75. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-368720220000039005