Ethnic self-perceptions and ethnic perceptions in the multicultural school. A casa in a public school in Bogota

Abstract

With the massive internal migrations in Colombia, the district colleges were obliged to assume a task for which they were not prepared: working with diverse ethnic populations. Thus, teachers and students were immersed in a situation of coexistence that proposed them to understand the contributions of cultural diversity but did not give them tools to do so. This research article emerges in the framework Estudiantes indígenas en un colegio de Bogotá: ¿cómo se ven?, ¿cómo los ven? y ¿cómo se quieren ver? La escuela multicultural en la construcción de identidades étnicas indígenas developed in 2019. In this text, the self-perceptions of students focused as indigenous are exposed and contrasted with the perceptions of their peers in relation to ethnic traits to identify if the school environment is taking place in the self-perceptions of people with indigenous ethnic backgrounds. Through a series of interviews based on the initial compilation of drawings made by the students of the three grades, some imaginations were expressed that specify about the indigenous people in Bogotá. On the other hand, the qualitative analysis of the data demonstrates the fundamental role that interactions in the school play in the processes of self-recognition and of the other in multicultural contexts.