British Journal of Sociology of Education

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbse20

School and community relationships in Mexico.

Researching inclusion in education from critical
and decolonial perspectives

Cristina Perales Franco & Stefano Claudio Sartorello

To cite this article: Cristina Perales Franco & Stefano Claudio Sartorello (2023): School
and community relationships in Mexico. Researching inclusion in education from
critical and decolonial perspectives, British Journal of Sociology of Education, DOI:
10.1080/01425692.2023.2219406

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2023.2219406

Published online: 05 Jun 2023.

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British Journal of Sociology of Education
https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2023.2219406

School and community relationships in Mexico.

Researching inclusion in education from critical and
decolonial perspectives
Cristina Perales Franco and Stefano Claudio Sartorello
Instituto de Investigaciones para el Desarrollo de la Educación (INIDE), Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico
City, Mexico

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper takes the notion of inclusion as an imperfect and contested Received 6 October 2022
project toward educational and social justice, which seeks to address Accepted 23 May 2023
social and historically constructed exclusion. It aims to problematise KEYWORDS
‘inclusion research’ of school and community relationships in Mexico Inclusion; exclusion;
by examining the orientations and implications for inclusion of doing decolonial; México;
educational research aligned with a more ‘Western’ critical approach to ethnography
social justice as opposed to research explicitly situated in a decolonial
and intercultural perspective. It firstly characterises how inclusion is
dealt with by critical and decolonial perspectives. Secondly, through a
comparative exploration of two ethnographic research projects about
school-community relationships, it analyses the implications of both
approaches and explores the articulation between ‘substantive power’
and ‘formal power’ in the research, arguing for the need to include an
epistemic and ontological dimension in inclusion as social-justice-ori-
ented research.

Introduction
The recognition, analysis, denouncement and articulation of strategies to counteract social
and educational exclusion has a long-standing tradition in the sociology of education. In
it, and other disciplines, the notion of inclusion has been used as a social justice reference
to overcome such shortfalls and/or to deconstruct the configuration of school systems across
the globe (Ocampo 2019; Artiles and Kozleski 2016; Schuelka and Engsig 2022; Fierro and
Patricia 2019). In this paper, we take as a starting point the notion of inclusion as an imper-
fect and contested project toward educational and social justice (Liasidou 2012; Artiles
2020; Koutsouris, Stentiford, and Norwich 2022), which seeks to address social and histor-
ically constructed exclusion, and we aim to problematise ‘inclusion research’ of school and
community relationships in Mexico. We explore the implications for inclusion of doing
educational research aligned with a more ‘Western’ critical approach to social justice as

CONTACT Cristina Perales Franco cristina.perales@ibero.mx Instituto de Investigaciones para el Desarrollo de la

Educación (INIDE), Universidad Iberoamericana Prolongación Paseo de Reforma 880, Lomas de Santa Fe, Mexico City, C.P.
01219, Mexico
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 C. PERALES FRANCO AND S. C. SARTORELLO

opposed to research explicitly situated in a decolonial and intercultural perspective, by

comparing two ethnographic research projects.
The first one is the study of convivencia (the experience of living together and learning
to live together) relationships between schools and their communities in six urban and
rural primary schools in Mexico characterised by their school and social violence (Perales
Franco 2022). Using a critique of the deficit approach and an intersectional framework, it
analyses the relationship between schools and families regarding conflict management,
inclusion and participation. The second one, called Educational Milpas (REDIIN 2019), is
an ongoing collaborative research and intervention process in 50 Indigenous rural com-
munities in Mexico. It is based on the development of the Critical Intercultural Method
(e.g. Gasché 2008), which fosters educational processes situated in the communities that
link together schools and families.
Mexico is a deeply unequal country, with historical issues rooted in colonialist, capitalist
and patriarchal projects that have actively excluded particular segments of the population
from successful and culturally pertinent educational trajectories. In 2020, 43.9% of the
population lived below the poverty line, and 8.5% were in extreme poverty (CONEVAL
n.d.), a condition that has deeply affected the schooling of thousands of students with a
disability, belonging to Indigenous or Afro-descendent groups, to a rural community or to
a home where the head of the household does not have basic education (Mejoredu 2021).
Mexico has also had an assimilative education project for Indigenous people since colonial
times, which was reinforced after the creation of the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) in
1921 with the implementation of forced Hispanicisation and other integrationist and nation-
alist educational policies, which were based on logics of whitening and acculturation (Bertely
1998; Stavenhagen 2000). Although such policies did not significantly contribute to reducing
the inequalities and injustices, they did construct a national negative representation of the
‘Indian,’ generating processes of racialisation and discrimination still present (OXFAM 2019).
These colonial trajectories interact with classist and gender differentiations that place a
particular notion of ‘ideal’ family and ‘ideal’ community at the core of the educational
system, which is based on white, middle-class urban families with a strong sexual division
of labour (Perales Franco 2022). Since the 1990s, educational reforms inspired by a func-
tional perspective of interculturality (Walsh 2012) and inclusion (García Cedillo 2018) have
responded to the demands for recognition of diversity in terms of ethnic-cultural and special
educational needs. These reforms, however, have not had a significant impact on the imple-
mentation of educational models that effectively transform exclusionist and assimilationist
patterns, since they often construct the excluded populations in terms of their deficiencies
and the challenges to the system that they present.
The paper, therefore, converses with other Latin American research projects that have
studied the relationships between schools, families and communities looking at the implica-
tions of such relationships in terms of social justice. Research in Brazil and Chile, for example,
has examined the social characteristics of low-income, minority and migrant families regard-
ing school selection (i.e. Alves et al. 2015; Moyano et al. 2020; Oyarzún et al., 2022) showing
the mechanisms of social exclusion at a policy and practice levels. Researchers such as Cerletti
(2014) and Vercellino (2017) in Argentina have problematise the notion of family included
in policy and law regarding family involvement in schooling, highlighting the dominant dis-
courses that homogenize families and communities and limit the possibilities of participation.
These and other researchers, such as Medina-Arévalo and Estupiñán-Aponte (2021) from
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 3

Colombia, concur that the construction in teachers’ initial education, in school practices and
in wider policies tends to be based on the notion that socially vulnerable families and com-
munities represent obstacles for ‘proper’ schooling. These issues are also highlighted in studies
of migrant families in Global North countries; Serrano Manzano and De la Herrán (2017),
for example, examine the excluding and including dimensions in the school experiences of
Latin-American migrant families in Spain evidencing a lack of spaces for participation and
ethnocentric practices that devaluate their cultures, as well as collaboration links that some
of these families have built among each other. These research projects can be positioned, as
well, in critical or decolonising approaches, highlighting some implications of their develop-
ment, and have served to problematize the Mexican research projects here presented.
These studies recognise and address the complexity of school-community relationships
and the exclusion of families and students when their physical, class, gender, race and/or
ethnic characteristics do not align with the schools’ implicit or explicit standards (Baquedano-
López, Alexander, and Hernández 2013), but also the exclusionist model of public schools—
based on the modernity/coloniality paradigm—that erases students’ and families’ diversities
and cultural rights (Walsh 2012). By comparing the projects’ scopes, methodologies, results
and implications, the paper seeks to provide, first, the identification of two empirical exam-
ples of critical and decolonial-oriented approaches, and second, a balance of their possibil-
ities and limitations. Through this analysis, it argues for the need to foster epistemic justice
in the research of school-community relationships by addressing power relationships and
their implication in the construction of knowledge. In this sense, we suggest to understand
inclusion as making community, which links together theoretical and praxeological aims.

Critical and decolonising approaches to inclusion

The notion of inclusion as a driver of educational analysis, goals and actions stems from
the recognition that there is a lack of participation in educational, but also public and private,
spaces for different people and communities, which is associated with their physical, social,
economic and or cultural characteristics. This concept has been useful to identify, prob-
lematise and aim to transform the educational and social experience of different groups.
In the case of Mexico, and Latin America more broadly, it has been associated mostly with
the educational process and outcomes of people with disabilities, Indigenous and Afro-
descendant groups, and sexual and gender diversities. Inclusion, however, can also be used
for a wider social analysis that involves categories and interactive social configurations
related to gender, social class, race, ethnicity, migratory experience and/or ableism. Following
Ocampo (2019), inclusion is an ‘eminently relational and structural concept and, as such,
it turns into critical research and practice to articulate a more complex comprehension of
the world and its chronic socio-political pathologies, such as oppression, social injustice
and inequity in a plurality of spaces’ (72 TS1).
The notion acknowledges and values social diversity and understands it as a natural
condition of human groups, but its lack of conceptual definition is often reflected in the
multiplicity and contradiction of its uses in educational policies and practices (Duk and
Murillo 2016; Allan 2008; Artiles and Kozleski 2016). Traditional constructions of inclusion,
which have oriented much of the educational policy worldwide since the 1990s, focus on
the integration of excluded populations into the mainstream educational system, mainly
people with disabilities, locating the difference in the characteristics of the excluded person
4 C. PERALES FRANCO AND S. C. SARTORELLO

(Kamenopoulou 2018; Ocampo 2021) and acknowledging the need for schools to admit
such diversity (Kamenopoulou 2018; Artiles 2020). These approaches are mostly concerned
with why educational settings should include and under what conditions (Allan 2008).
Critical approaches to inclusion recognise that processes of inclusion and exclusion are
developed by power relationships that are socially, culturally and historically constructed
and that these, in turn, shape practices, cultures and policies that build institutions and
social spaces. They focus more on how the students are included or excluded, the historical
and sociological developments of the schooling system, as well as what is the social and
justice purpose of inclusion. Allan (2008), in this sense poses the question of inclusion into
what?, which helps to show the tensions between inclusion and exclusion practices and
enquires whether the goal is to assimilate learners into educational settings that are exclu-
sionist, unequal and unfair (Artiles 2020).
These approaches address issues related to the nature of exclusion, the development of
just policies, practices and cultures that promote human dignity and the need and impli-
cations of developing schooling experiences that guarantee human rights (Ocampo 2021).
In particular, the critical perspective questions and seeks to transcend the deficit approach
that points to the social, economic, cultural and physical characteristics of the excluded
groups as the reason for their educational shortcomings (Liasidou 2012; Ocampo 2019),
seeking to transform settings that actively exclude (Slee 2011).
In the analysis of community and family relationships with the school, a key aspect in
creating better and more inclusive education (Duk and Murillo 2016), sociological
approaches have pointed out that relationships between families, communities and schools
emerge as a result of wider social processes (Lareau 1987) and show, through the exploration
of parental roles and types of choices and family involvement in school processes, for
example, that the way their participation is promoted is shaped by social categories such as
social class, gender, race and ethnicity, migration and ableism (Williams, Sánchez and
Hunnell, 2011; Deslandes 2019; Perales Franco 2022; Crozier and Davies 2007; Vincent
2000), using in some cases intersectional frameworks in their study (Oyarzún, Parcerisa,
and Carrasco 2022; Rodríguez 2022). Some of these studies identify how symbolic repre-
sentations and practices in everyday educational contexts are based on the deficit perspective
that posits the idea that families do not have the proper economic, social and educational
capital, or the attitudes and values to properly collaborate with schools, without recognising
that established ways of community and family involvement are strongly related to homo-
geneous and dominant cultures about families, schools and educational achievement
(Baquedano-López, Alexander, and Hernández 2013; Martín et al. 2014; García et al. 2015).
The deficit approach is particularly harmful in the case of communities that historically
have been marginalised, since issues such as educational failing or school violence are often
attributed to their characteristics (Perales Franco 2022).
In contrast to studies focusing on the shortfalls, challenges and implications of particular
ways of developing inclusion, there is a deeper critique linked to a wider decolonial project.
From a decolonial perspective, the debate on the issue of inclusion is loaded with political
implications that concern the ontological, epistemological and methodological dimensions
of research and knowledge generation. Tuhiwai Smith (1999) points out that, far from being
an innocent or neutral academic exercise, research is a device of power intertwined with
colonialism, imbued with theories, values, and practices that do not respond to indigenous
ontologies and epistemologies, but rather to a Westernized academy that promotes an
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 5

individualistic investigation characterized by the use of colonizing methodologies.

Traditional research usually simplifies indigenous knowledge, banishing it from its own
terms and translating it into defined Western canons from the authoritative voice and
expertise of Western academia. Thus, research is oriented according to the concerns, inter-
ests and methods of the researcher who, in addition, becomes the main beneficiary of it,
relegating the communities to the background.
In response to this critique, Bishop (2012) and Nakata (2007) raise the importance of
carrying out politically and culturally responsive research that rejects a pathologic approach
that underestimates and belittles indigenous ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies,
as well as perpetuates the colonial power asymmetries. Thus, from a decolonial approach,
topics, initiation, benefits, representation, legitimacy and responsibility of the research
project are defined from the political interests, epistemological perspectives, and sociocul-
tural context of the research participants. In this way, researchers, far from obeying the
principles of the colonial academy, have the possibility of channeling the self-determination
and agency of the research participants.
As part of this decolonial approach, the educational and social project of inclusion
has been criticised for forging new inequalities and contributing to ‘neocolonial devel-
opments in the global North and South’ (Artiles 2020). The decolonial perspective sus-
tains that the inclusion project created in the Global North, particularly in its restrictive
approach, has become a hegemonic notion exported to nations of the South
(Kamenopoulou 2018; Walton 2018) and it is often presented as a superficial solution
to complex problems in the name of diversity recognition (Koutsouris, Stentiford, and
Norwich 2022; Schuelka and Engsig 2022). In this perspective, the question inclusion
into what? that Allan (2008) proposes is also used by authors such as Walton (2018) and
Bourassa (2021) to further problematise the notion of inclusion and to examine legacies
and oppressions derived from the colonial-capitalist-patriarchal matrix, especially for
the countries in the Global South.
Walton (2018) states that the international agenda of inclusion fails to recognise how
social, political and economic dynamics that derive from colonialism are historically related
to educational exclusion. She relates inclusive education to the coloniality of power, knowl-
edge and being (Quijano 2000; Lander 2000; Maldonado-Torres 2007) since many of its
policies are incompatible with the realities of some of the countries of the South. Such
policies have minimised and ignored local, Indigenous and culturally relevant knowledge,
leaving unchanged Western epistemologies and discourses—such as meritocracy and aca-
demic success (Schuelka and Engsig 2022)—at the heart of education. As a result, some
ways of being and some identities are still presented as inferior or undesirable, and some
students, their families and communities routinely experience oppression, symbolic vio-
lence, marginalisation and exclusion. Bourassa (2021) draws attention as well to the way
neoliberalism has appropriated the multiculturalist discourse on identity and inclusion and
argues that current strategies of inclusion are unable to subvert capitalism, settler colonial-
ism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, or ableism. In his view, inclusion is constructed as
a path to overcome exclusion, but the way it is carried out has implications for othering and
does not reverse the neoliberal/capitalist project.
Despite the critiques of inclusion as a societal project, authors such as Walton (2018)
or Peruzzo and Allen (forthcoming) consider that inclusive education and research on
inclusion can be an ally of the decolonising project if it questions, challenges and resists
6 C. PERALES FRANCO AND S. C. SARTORELLO

the ‘benign politics of inclusion’ (Peruzzo and Allen, forthcoming), seeking to overcome
the coloniality of power, knowledge and being. Inclusive education can be therefore a
strategy to reduce exclusion through the recognition of structural oppressions and
injustices and the redistribution of resources (Slee 2011), and by confronting the con-
struction of knowledge from the reference of the dominant student—urban, Western,
middle-class, male—(Walton 2018), actively opposing othering discourses from the
deficit approach and confronting normative approaches to human rights and educa-
tional equity.
In challenging the coloniality of power, knowing and being, the notion of epistemic
justice is key. It first recognises how the dominant epistemic community has systematically
denied contrasting ways of knowing and being (Skopec et al. 2021). Secondly, it addresses
not only the content of knowledge, opening it up to a diversity of ways of understanding
and being in the world, but also questions who produces such knowledge and who deter-
mines what is considered valid (Dutta et al., 2022). In this sense, the decolonising project
also promotes particular ways of researching that place local knowledge and the experience
of historically marginalised groups at the centre (Walton 2018) and promotes ways of con-
structing knowledge and doing research that are responsive, rooted and non-exploitative,
taking an ethical and political position with communities and popular struggles (Dutta
et al. 2021).

Methodology
For the analytical exercise presented in this paper, two inclusion research projects on com-
munity-school relationships were explored through a specific question: what happens with
inclusion research that recognises and tries to address the unjust distribution of resources,
exclusionary practices and discriminatory representations, when it is approached from a
critical perspective or an explicit decolonising stance?
To address this question, four dimensions were explored:

(1) Conceptualisation of inclusion in the projects.

(2) Key methodological choices and researchers’ positioning.
(3) Research participants – who they are and how they participate.
(4) Aims and uses of the research.

The cases were then compared to construct reflections on the implications of doing
research from the two traditions, using as a general framework of analysis the contrast
between critical and decolonial perspectives on inclusion. Both cases use, as well, conceptual
apparatuses that go beyond the scope of inclusion and additional concepts are included
bellow to explain them. It is important to state that although we consider these to be good
examples of rigorous social justice-oriented research in these two approaches, in no way
do we claim that the conclusions represent an exhaustive and definite differentiation
between them. We acknowledge that the traditions have multiple points of connection and
that research projects are fluid paths. Nevertheless, we believe this analytical exercise is
important to reflect on the implications and congruence of doing social justice-oriented
research.
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 7

Researching school-community relationships and convivencia from a critical

perspective
The first case is research on school convivencia, which is a Spanish language term that refers
to the experience of living together and learning to live together that happens in schools.
There is not an exact English translation of convivencia, and close terms such as conviviality
or coexistence do not fully capture its meaning and contextual use, particularly the positive
connotation and descriptive quality it entails. School Convivencia in Latin American coun-
tries usually encompasses phenomena related to conflict management, democratic partic-
ipation, recognition of diversity, inclusive practices, cultures and policy, school climate and
violence prevention (Fierro and Patricia 2019; Perales Franco, 2019).
Unlike approaches that deal with convivencia in normative terms, closer to traditional
approaches to inclusion, or that position it solely as a way to reduce violence and improve
order—the key issue that convivencia policy tries to address in countries such as Mexico,
Chile or Perú—this project understands convivencia in analytical terms, as a network of
interpersonal relationships that are historically and culturally constructed in particular con-
texts (Perales Franco 2022). This particular project focuses on the relationships between
public primary schools in Mexico and their local communities, and the implications of such
relationships for conflict management, inclusion and participation. The analytic approach
taken is situated in the critical perspective of inclusion since it represents a path to investigate
how processes of inclusion and exclusion, along with peacebuilding and violence, take place
through everyday interactions and their implications for social justice (Perales Franco 2022).
The research emerges from questioning the social discourse that schools suffer from a
pernicious context that blocks the possibility of changing aggressive and violent relationships
and the construction of peace. Although recognising the extreme direct, cultural and structural
manifestations of violence in Mexico and their impact on school experiences, this project
rejects the notion of positioning the schools both as separated from their communities and
as solely receptors of the violence. It shows, on the one hand, that schools in marginalised
communities in Mexico struggle to deal with structural issues of poverty and social exclusion,
as well as with social violence, which is also linked to teachers’ sense of lack of material,
pedagogical and emotional resources. On the other hand, it asserts that although there might
be problems that ‘come’ to school, there are also issues fostered by the schools’ processes,
practices and cultures that actively exclude particular populations. The research does not only
focus on the challenges, limitations and incongruences of the relationships, it also acknowl-
edges and actively seeks the possibilities of inclusion and peacebuilding that already happen
in the communities, since there are practices of care, trust, recognition and respect that are
not always explicitly recognised, incentivised and institutionalised (Perales Franco 2022).
This research understands inclusion is framed by a ‘political stance that expects education to
be a mechanism of social justice and argues for a critical view of the inequalities fostered,
produced or experienced in schools’ (Perales Franco 2022, 25).
The project so far consists of two particular studies developed in Mexico which explore
the relationship between schools and communities, particularly the relationships with the
families and their implications for peacebuilding, the right of education of the students and
for understanding schools as spaces of public participation.
The first one is an ethnographic study carried out between 2014 and 2018 in two public
primary schools located in the periphery of two Mexican cities, in communities where drug
8 C. PERALES FRANCO AND S. C. SARTORELLO

related, social and school violence were considered on the rise (Perales Franco, 2018, 2019,
2022). It aimed to analyse the relationships between schools and their local communities,
and the implications of such relationships in the schools’ convivencia, examining the role
of educational policy and how the type(s) of convivencia in schools link, shape and are
shaped by processes of participation, inclusion-exclusion and conflict management (Perales
Franco 2022). The study used participant observation over two school years and carried
out t­ hirty-nine semi-structured interviews with students, teachers, principals and mothers.
In this project a distinction was made between restrictive convivencia, which mainly
focuses on the maintenance of order by controlling the students’ wrong behaviours, and
comprehensive convivencia, which positions learning to live together as a goal, emphasising
life in common, and links together social justice issues such as equity, inclusion, democratic
participation and peacebuilding (Carbajal 2018). It also addressed the relationship with the
communities mainly through the relationship with the students’ families, using as key
referents studies on parental roles (e.g. Vincent 2000); the relationship between social cat-
egories, such as class, gender and race, and family participation (e.g. Lareau 1987; Williams,
Sánchez and Hunnell, 2011); and broader approaches to deficit and inclusion (Baquedano-
López et al. 2013).
The second study is a deeper exploration of families’ participation in four Mexican public
primary schools situated in contexts that present different degrees of marginalisation and
analyse their implications for the students’ learning processes and the construction of dem-
ocratic and peaceful communities. It was carried out from 2020 to 2022. The schools in this
project were a) one urban with 180 students of middle-class families, b) one situated in the
periphery of a city with 180 students of lower-middle and working-class families, c) one
situated in an Indigenous community with 180 students of campesino2 families and d) one
in a very small rural community with only 15 students of campesino families. Two teachers,
the principal and four families were contacted in each school.
The aim of this second project was to analyse through an intersectional approach (Misra
et al., 2021) the inclusion-exclusion processes of families in schools, in order to identify
how patterns related to social class, race/ethnicity, gender, age, migration experience,
family structure, etc., contributed to the inclusion or exclusion of particular families in
schools. It was originally planned as an ethnography as well, but due to the pandemic, it
was modified as a phenomenological oriented research, which consisted in analysing expe-
riences and meanings of families, mainly mothers, and teachers through narrative inter-
views that occurred with each participant approximately every two weeks for six months
during the pandemic schools’ closures (Perales Franco and Muñoz Rodríguez 2021) . The
research team carried out ­ninety-five interviews. They were done by phone or zoom, with
the exception of the ones of school c), since the distance communication was limited and
the team had to wait to visit the community directly.
These two studies have developed important findings regarding the inclusion of com-
munities in schools from a critical perspective. The first main one is that explicit convi-
vencia approaches in schools and policies are deeply framed by an understanding of order
and security, which aims at controlling the wrong or aggressive behaviour of students to
prevent, block or eradicate violence. A more comprehensive stance, however, shows that
the types of convivencia are shaped by broader processes in the policies, practices and
cultures that include other and actors besides the students, especially the relationship with
their families.
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 9

The second one, is that the analysis of such relationships shows four modes of convivencia
between schools and families—alliance, confrontation, detachment and collaboration—that
are based on notions of what an appropriate family is and what is considered a ‘dysfunctional’
family, one that is not able to satisfactorily participate, respond to students’ academic under-
achievement and manage conflicts in schools (Perales Franco 2022). The notion of ‘dys-
functional’ families is used pervasively to explain, from the schools and the public opinion
perspectives, the causes of school and social violence and construct a ‘deficit’ understanding
of the families (Baquedano-López, Alexander, and Hernández 2013).
The third one is that intersectional analyses of the relationships between families and
schools show that patterns related to social class, race/ethnicity, gender, age, migration
experience, family structure, etc., contribute to the inclusion or exclusion of particular
families in schools and of the construction of the notions of dysfunctional or appropriate
families. These patterns are hardly recognised in the school contexts which only present
limited spaces for family involvement. These are mostly occupied by allied families—­
characterised by the participation of mothers who do not work away from home, have
more time flexibility, have higher degrees of schooling and a stronger believe in it as an
upward mobility mechanism (Perales Franco 2022). In that sense, findings show a strong
relationship between class and gender, and their interactions with other categories such
as family structure and age help to explain the families’ type of participation.
The studies also find that these patterns, however, vary from context to context. For
example, the differentiation in inclusion is better explained by class when there is a stronger
heterogeneity in the families; if there is not, family structure and gender have a stronger
role in shaping the participation. In the case of the Indigenous community, class and gender
are strongly mediated by the cultural-race-language component. The exploration through
situated intersectional approaches has helped to identify how the perceived lack of interest
and commitment of the families in the confrontation and detachment modes of convivencia
can be better explained by exploring particular interactions among social categories (Perales
2022; Muñoz Rodríguez 2022).
In contrast, we find that collaborative relationships between families and school derive
from a notion of inclusion that questions the role of the appropriate family, diversifying
its configuration, situating their possibilities of involvement in their contextual and
cultural characteristics and opting for creating inclusive educational projects that actively
recognise the right of families to participate and positions the wellbeing of the students
at their centre. The convivencia research project, therefore, addresses the exclusionist
patterns in policy, cultures and practices but also shows threads of opportunities present
in particular relationships that can address and transform these patterns.

School-community relationships in Educational Milpas: education and

research from a decolonising perspective
‘Educational Milpas3 For Good Living’ is a project that has been developed since 2017 in
approximately 50 Indigenous communities of Chiapas, Puebla, Michoacán and Oaxaca in
Mexico. It is carried out through the collaboration between two Indigenous organisations—
the Union of Teachers of the New Education for Mexico (UNEM) and the Inductive
Intercultural Education Network (REDIIN)4 and researchers from three universities in the
country (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social,
10 C. PERALES FRANCO AND S. C. SARTORELLO

Universidad Pedagógica Nacional and Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México). It

includes as well the active participation of children, parents and community members.
The project gives continuity to the political-pedagogical work promoted since 1995 by
the communitarian educators of UNEM who, inspired by the Zapatista movement and
other independent Indigenous organisations, have been fighting to build a community-­
controlled critical and decolonising intercultural education. The main aim of Educational
Milpas is to contribute to the transformation of education both in official schools belonging
to the Indigenous Education Subsystem of the Mexican Public Education Secretariat
(DGEIIB-SEP), where REDIIN teachers work, and in independent communitarian schools
served by UNEM educators. Milpas explicitly seeks to improve the pertinence and socio-­
cultural relevance of the educational processes and learning of Indigenous children by
constructing a decolonial, inclusive and intercultural educational model (Walsh 2012;
Walton 2018; Skopec et al. 2021; Dutta et al. 2022); rejecting the coloniality of power, of
knowledge and of being (Quijano 2000; Lander 2000; Maldonado-Torres 2007); and con-
tributing to resistance against the processes of acculturation.
In Milpas, the research is articulated to the educational practice. The collaboration
between UNEM educators, REDIIN teachers and academics is based on the Rooted
Intercultural Methodology (Metodología Arraigada Intercultural) (Sartorello 2014). This
methodology fosters articulated praxis processes in which differentiated forms of exercising
power are contrasted, negotiated and articulated to seek intercultural co-theorisation for
educational processes rooted in Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies and pedagogies,
responding to their political-educational aims. It recognises mainly two types of power:
the substantive power of the Indigenous participants—due to their expertise in Indigenous
sources of knowledge and epistemologies—and the formalising power of the academics—
that helps to arrange processes and spaces for co-theorisation and to find funding to sustain
the collaborative processes (Sartorello 2014). One of the methodological tenets is a com-
mitment to the decolonisation of knowledge through a severe critique of the coloniality
of power, knowledge and being, which has led us to transform traditional forms of con-
structing and validating knowledge (REDIIN 2019; Sartorello, 2021, 2022).
Examining this project through the lens of inclusion, it is evident that Milpas has at
its core a recognition of the exclusion that the Indigenous communities suffer in Mexico,
not only at a social and economic level, but also in ontological and epistemic terms. The
project identifies that national educational policies and practices are still operating in
what Santos (2009) has characterised as the monoculture of knowledge and the rigour of
knowledge that fosters exclusionary rationality in which only one type of valid knowledge
exists. This monoculture draws the ‘abysmal line’ that separates scientific knowledge
produced in metropolitan societies from popular and Indigenous knowledge from the
campesino and Indigenous communities. Educational policies and practices constructed
by the Mexican Public Education Secretariat, therefore, conceive of Indigenous pedago-
gies, knowledge, skills and values as absent and not relevant, excluding them from the
formal school curriculum. Such actions have increased the educational gaps of these
groups (Mejoredu 2021) and erased understandings of the world derived from other
ontologies and other epistemologies, as well as practices developed from their own
Indigenous pedagogies.
In opposition to this societal project, the members of UNEM and REDIIN construct
and practice inclusion through the Educational Milpas intercultural educational processes.
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 11

They are based on the four pillars of the Inductive Intercultural Method (e.g. Gasché 2008),
Milpas’ educational and research methodology:

Political pillar
It reflects the political and social horizon of buen vivir (good living) intended as the onto-
logical way of life according to the Indigenous worldview that inspires Educational Milpas.
It arises in social, political and educational struggles which have claimed the ontological
and epistemic validity of their Indigenous societal projects and ways of generating knowl-
edge, as well as the sociocultural pertinence and relevance of their own pedagogies. Echoing
continental Indigenous ontologies, Educational Milpas assumes that buen vivir ‘entails a
different philosophy of life, which allows the subordination of economic objectives to the
criteria of ecology, human dignity and social justice’ (Escobar 2016, 26, TS).
Far from responding to idealistic visions of Indigenous societies, buen vivir, for the
teachers of the UNEM and REDIIN, is a politically charged term that refers to an anti-­
capitalist and decolonial societal horizon. Educating for buen vivir constitutes the starting
and arrival point of the educational processes and implies generating practices and theo-
risations that contribute to the construction and inclusion of Indigenous forms of citizenship
in Mexico.

The axiological pillar

It implies that during the educational processes in the milpas, teachers promote reflection
about values that guide and regulate community behaviours, asking the community mem-
bers to identify and highlight the key values that derive from the activity itself. It fosters
the recognition that positive values - like solidarity, reciprocity, respect, agreement, and
campesino work– sustain community sociability for buen vivir, and therefore, they are a
fundamental part of their way of conceiving life in common.

The epistemological pillar

It accounts for how Educational Milpas seek to break with the impositions and limitations
intrinsic to the positivist epistemology that characterises the Mexican official curriculum.
This curriculum is based on fragmented and decontextualised disciplinary content which
is mostly meaningless and useless for Indigenous children who have other ontological,
epistemic and cultural references rooted in empirical knowledge based on ‘experiential
epistemologies’ according to which ‘social practices are practices of knowledge’ (Santos
2009, 88). In line with what Boege (2008) has identified as the indissolubility between
knowledge and territory, and related to Escobar’s concept of ‘relational ontology’ (2016,
18), this epistemology accounts for the dense network of relationships between territory
and spiritual, animal, vegetable, mineral and human beings that inhabit it. As one of the
most experienced UNEM community educators reflects:
When using the word territory, we refer to what encompasses us all, to what is the base from
which we act, to what moves us, what surrounds us, what makes us act. The territory is not
only the land, the mountains, we have to give life to the trees, the hills, the caves, and the
12 C. PERALES FRANCO AND S. C. SARTORELLO

rivers, because they also have life. Territory for us is to integrate all of us, men, animals, air,
soil, water, ajawes, thunder, etc., everything that exists within what can be seen or felt, that
encompasses us (UNEM, 2009, 85–86, TS)

Educational Milpa’s knowledge is generated from the social, productive, ritual and rec-
reational activities that community members carry out in the territory according to their
social, agricultural and ritual calendar. Consequently, research knowledge is also generated
through the systematisation and reflection of these activities.

The pedagogical pillar

The pedagogical pillar links together the other three presented above; it is based on the
recognition that knowledge emerges from the community’s life and territory. Following the
intercultural inductive pedagogy the educational processes take place outside the school
classrooms, in real-life situations and specific spaces of the locality: a milpa, a coffee plan-
tation, a river, a hill, a kitchen, a crafts laboratory, a ritual, a community assembly. Learning
in each educational milpa is therefore situated and self-regulated, has local relevance and
is built with the members of the community who accompany the educational processes and
who are experts in the activity.
Parents and community members, therefore, are present not only in traditional school
management activities but also in pedagogical ones. Inclusion here implies breaking with
conventional classroom and book-centred teaching styles and generating inductive educa-
tional processes in the socio-cultural activities and practices that Indigenous community
members carry out. Inclusion also implies not considering the previous knowledge of
Indigenous children simply as the starting point to make conventional school knowledge
more significant, which is the national approach to the recognition of diversity (Sartorello
2022). Only when Indigenous knowledge has been reinforced and systematised, and after
teachers have identified, practised, explained and analysed it with the students—recognising
its ontological and epistemic validity—does the process of articulating with conventional
knowledge of the official curriculum begin, as teachers and students reflect on the onto-
logical and epistemological differences between them. In this way, in Educational Milpas
teachers seek to implement an inclusive and intercultural educational process in which the
self enters into dialogue with the other in a ‘horizontal’ relation that promotes a ‘symmetric
dialogue’ between Indigenous and Western knowledge. It is precisely in this process of
intercultural articulation-contrast that inclusion opens towards interculturality.

Implications of researching inclusion from a critical and decolonising

perspective in the school-community relationships
This paper has presented two research projects that show two approaches to doing social-
­justice-oriented educational research on inclusion, using this notion as a ‘relational and
structural concept’ (Ocampo 2019, 72) that explicitly seeks to research and transform exclu-
sionary cultures, policies and practices of and in the Mexican educational system. The two
projects have in common a recognition that the students’ schooling experiences are not
separated from their families’ and communities’ experiences and that social justice-oriented
education must recognise such ties, especially when situating it in larger debates around
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 13

poverty, marginalisation, forms of violence, recognition of identities, colonial legacies and

epistemic justice. In this last section we use these two projects as heuristic tools, highlighting
their differences to reflect on the implications of their positions as part of critical or deco-
lonial approaches, through exploring their scopes, methodologies, results and relations to
educational policy.
The first difference is that both projects reflect different comprehensions of their research
aims in terms of social justice. In the research on convivencia the aim is to produce a complex
understanding of school-community relationships evidencing the inclusion and exclusion
patterns for students and their families, in line with the general orientation of critical
approaches to inclusion that question constructions based on deficit of these population
(Liasidou 2012; Ocampo 2019; Baquedano-López, Alexander, and Hernández 2013) and
highlighting how homogeneous and dominant cultures about families, schools and educa-
tional achievement actively exclude particular communities (Baquedano-López, Alexander,
and Hernández 2013; Martín et al. 2014; García et al. 2015). In that sense, the research aims
to first comprehend the current situation and later, through knowledge construction, con-
tribute to its transformation. We recognise that the latter actions are much more tenuous
(inform public policy, develop workshops in schools and/or communities) and they are
‘good practice’ but are not considered a substantial part of the research.
In contrast, in the Educational Milpas project, explicitly positioned as decolonising
research, those two processes go hand in hand. In it, for example, there is hardly a possibility
of addressing only research methodology, since it takes a secondary position to the educa-
tional practice. In that sense, we can better understand its research aims as looking to
simultaneously transform-comprehend-generate knowledge and thus contribute to indig-
enous self-determination and empowerment, a crucial tenet of the decolonial project
(Bishop 2012, Nakata 2007).
A second consideration is that in both cases exclusion is a starting point, and inclusion
and the need to construct more just relationships provide value orientations that guide the
analysis, but the projects differ in the way they address these issues. In the research on
convivencia, the project revolves around analysing how exclusion is constructed and iden-
tifying relationship patterns that need to be transformed (Artiles 2020; Slee 2011). For this,
developing intersectional ways of analysing has been crucial since it allows for better con-
textually-situated research and for a more complex understanding of the social, cultural,
and economic elements that construct the relationship patterns (Oyarzún, Parcerisa, and
Carrasco 2022; Muñoz Rodríguez 2022). Different from this critical position, in the research
on Milpas exclusion practices are recognised by the actors as a starting point and the project
primarily seeks to transcend such exclusion through the notion of epistemic justice and
critical and decolonial interculturality (Walsh 2012).
In our opinion, this marks a key difference between the decolonial and critical approaches.
The question of inclusion into what? that Allan (2008), Artiles (2020), Bourassa (2021), and
Walton (2018) have proposed implies, from a decolonial approach, deliberately engaging in
ontological and epistemic discussions and taking an explicit political stance (Bishop 2012;
Nakata 2007) in favour of those communities who have been erased by the monoculture and
the rigour of knowledge (Santos 2009). The decolonial approach requires developing respon-
sive research practices that democratize and share the control of the different phases of the
research process with indigenous and local people (Tuhiwai Smith 1999; Bishop 2012; Nakata
2007). The critical approach, however, although focusing on meanings and practices of
14 C. PERALES FRANCO AND S. C. SARTORELLO

particular communities that have been made vulnerable (Williams, Sánchez and Hunnell,
2011; Deslandes 2019; Perales Franco 2022), it does not necessarily explicitly engage with
ontological an epistemological discussion, leaving these elements somewhat obscured.
A third difference addresses the uses of research and its scope. Given the critique of the
educational system from a political, ontological and epistemological position, the Milpas
project mainly seeks to transform the particular realities of their actors: the students, their
families and community members, but also the researchers and the academy itself, actively
seeking ways to undertake research and knowledge building in a collective way that explicitly
contrasts colonized ways of constructing educational knowledge. The convivencia research,
for its part, tries to present a careful analysis of the relationships, addressing the exclusionist
nature of normative notions of order that often penalise communities that have historically
been excluded (Artiles 2020), such as working-class and campesino families, Indigenous
and Afro-descendant populations, and students and families with disabilities-. In that sense,
its uses are based on constructing a situated, pertinent and complex knowledge of commu-
nity-school relationships that can help to question, denounce and deconstruct educational
policy and inform practice-based interventions.
Given these uses, we recognise that the construction of knowledge from research in both
projects follows therefore a different logic. The research project on convivencia seeks to
construct knowledge from a critical perspective through what can be considered a sum-
mative path, exploring different aspects of convivencia regarding inclusion/exclusion, par-
ticipation and conflict management in different communities and with different social and
cultural groups. It is interested in the analysis of the phenomenon, since it is considered
crucial for the achievement of a dignified life for the Mexican people. Such approach is
common in the critical research on inclusion where the aim is often to get a comprehensive
understanding of the issues.
The Milpas project constructs what can be called an expansive path, moving from the
core—which is the lived educational experience of the students in specific Indigenous
communities—to other areas such as interculturality, teaching practice, curriculum and
educational materials. This is also a good reflection of the decolonial approach where, as
stated before, the research seeks to contribute particularly to indigenous self-determination
and empowerment.
The critical and decolonising positions also have implications for power relationships
between researchers and participants (convivencia project) or collaborators (milpa project),
the fourth aspect to consider in this analysis. For this exploration, we differentiate between
the ‘formal power’ of the academic knowledge that the researchers usually bring and the
‘substantive power’ of indigenous and local knowledge of the collaborators (Sartorello 2014).
In the Milpas project, the substantive power of indigenous collaborators takes precedent:
it generates and articulates the practices and, in that sense, the formal power of academic
researchers only comes into play as articulating support for the substantive power. The
researchers, therefore, are not positioned as central to the knowledge-building practices,
their—always in tension—role is to incentivise reflective and valuing spaces for Indigenous
knowledge and to help formalise them through systematic processes (Sartorello 2020).
In the convivencia project, although the researchers recognise and value the substantive
power of the communities they have worked with and it is explicitly part of their agenda
to advocate for their identities, characteristics and needs, the formal power is not explicitly
articulated with the substantive power. Here the researchers are essential to the project since
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 15

they are the ones that decide the types of communities to work with, the length of the
participation and the overall construction of the research. The social justice orientation of
this position is taken through a commitment to particular issues, as well as to developing
a research practice with reflexivity and multivocality at its core, trying to provide empathetic,
balanced and critical accounts of the different situations and advocating for these commu-
nities in political, academic and public opinion spheres. The researchers, therefore, are the
ones in charge of articulating the construction of knowledge about the different commu-
nities. The participants, although they have given informed consent to all the stages of the
research, are not necessarily transformed through the research practice itself. It is important
to state that this disengagement between substantive and formal power is not common to
all research of inclusion from a critical position, but we do consider that it is not an explicit
element of the research, as it seems to be in the decolonial approach.
Finally, through the exercise developed for this paper, we recognise that this exploration
of substantive and formal power also has implications for research on inclusion, since it has
allowed us to question whether the research derived from critical and decolonial perspectives
is in itself inclusive research, that is, research that in itself deconstructs and transforms exclu-
sionary practices, cultures and policies. One of the main takeaways is that the inclusion project
can, as Peruzzo and Allen (forthcoming) and Walton (2018) have pointed out, contribute to
the aim of creating just school and social communities, but, perhaps especially for countries
in the Global South, such research must explicitly aim for and practice deconstructing and
transforming social, cultural, economic, political, epistemic and otological injustices. In this
sense, we recognise that inclusion research that is committed to social justice requires explicitly
considering epistemological and ontological dimensions, questioning who produces knowl-
edge and who determines what is considered valid (Dutta et al. 2022).
This also implies changing how research problems and practices are constructed and car-
ried out. We believe the critique of the deficit paradigm (Baquedano-López et al., 2013; Cerletti
2014; Medina-Arévalo and Estupiñán-Aponte 2021) that is often the basis for the relationship
between schools and their communities is an important mechanism, but increasingly, through
decolonial and social-justice reflections, we realise that is not enough to analyse the patterns
of exclusion. It is also necessary to explore with the historically excluded groups ways of
constructing inclusion. In that sense, inclusion research, for us, needs to be transformed into
making community research that articulates substantive and formal power more thoroughly,
and, hopefully, presents and constructs alternative relationships that will help to shape policies,
cultures and practices in schools and communities.

Conclusion
This paper aimed to problematise ‘inclusion research’ through a comparative exploration
of two research projects about school-community relationships in Mexico, as heuristic
tools to examine the orientations and implications for inclusion of doing educational
research aligned with a more ‘Western’ critical approach to social justice as opposed to
research explicitly situated in a decolonial perspective. It highlights their differences on
research aims, knowledge-building processes and uses. It also reflects on the articulation
between ‘substantive power’ and ‘formal power’ in the research and, finally, argues for
the need to include an epistemic and ontological dimension in inclusion research as a
social-justice-oriented project.
16 C. PERALES FRANCO AND S. C. SARTORELLO

Notes
1. TS: Translated from Spanish by the authors.
2. We use campesino instead of peasant to move away for the possible negative connotation of
the word in English and to recognize a rural way of living that it is a culture in itself in Latin
American communities.
3. In Mexico, milpa is the name given to the traditional poly crop agricultural system around
corn that also includes various species such as beans, pumpkins, chilli peppers, tomatoes, and
other different local species, along with animals and fungi that inhabit the plots. Such diver-
sity turns the milpa into an ecosystem with beneficial ecological interactions. The milpas vary
widely, depending on the natural setting, the traditions and local knowledge and the campes-
ino families’ preferences.
4. REDIIN, created in 2009, is an independent multi-ethnic organisation made up of Indigenous
teachers from approximately 12 original Mexican populations. They have been trained at the
political and pedagogical level by community educators from UNEM.

Disclosure statement
The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Funding
This work was supported by the CONACYT-México and by INIDE-Universidad Iberoamericana in
the case of convivencia project and by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and INIDE-Universidad
Iberoamericana for the Educational Milpas project.

ORCID
Cristina Perales Franco http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4733-1547
Stefano Claudio Sartorello http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6324-3032

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