Conference Program

Within the framework of European educational policies, contemporary schools are formally tasked with promoting democratic citizenship, inclusion, and equal opportunities. However, they remain permeated by tensions, ambivalences, and processes that reproduce social inequalities.
Schools thus emerge as environments marked by a profound paradox: on the one hand, they present themselves as institutions grounded in democratic principles; on the other, they are historically situated spaces, traversed by normative regimes that shape bodies, identities, and possibilities for action. Simultaneously, schools are the sites where democracy is taught and learned, acknowledging that democratic values cannot merely be transmitted through instruction but must be experienced, negotiated, and co-constructed through relationships among all participants, understood as reflexive and critical actors within the educational setting, and through the mediation of the world (Freire, 2004).

Consequently, teaching practices, curriculum, discipline and institutional culture often reflect the relational dynamics of contemporary society, which Walsh (2013) characterizes as capitalist, patriarchal, Western, and Christian-centered since 1492. This perpetuates the challenge of constructing genuinely inter-relational contexts capable of ensuring recognition, participation, and legitimacy for all subjectivities.

This contribution adopts the perspective of the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2002) as a set of relational dynamics permeating everyday educational practices, shaping the exercise of authority, the legitimization of knowledge, and the positioning of students and teachers. Within school contexts, these dynamics manifest through the coloniality of knowledge (Lander, 2000), being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007), and gender (Mendoza, 2023), which operate, respectively, in the curricular decisions, in the construction of implicit hierarchies of humanity and value, and in the processes regulating bodies and identities.

The study situates itself at the intersection of queer pedagogy, decolonial theory, and critical postcolonial pedagogy, in dialogue with intersectionality (Collins, 2019), presenting findings from a case study (Stake, 1998) conducted in a fourth-year class of Educación Secundaria Obligatoria (ESO) in Andalusia. The research explores pedagogical relationships in a heterogeneous and multicultural context drawing on the written and oral material recollected from personal participant observation in classroom, focus groups with students and semi-structured interviews with curricular teachers (Spanish language, Latin, history and geography, biology, English). Particular attention is paid to the pedagogical triangle (Houssaye, 1988) ̶ knowledge, students, teachers ̶ to investigate modes of teaching, content, and processes of engagement and positioning of the subjects.

Through the Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2013) of field notes, interviews, and focus groups, and in dialogue with queer and decolonial perspectives, the study reflects on how everyday pedagogical interactions may reinforce, reproduce, or occasionally destabilize dominant regimes of gender, normativity, and legitimacy, interrogating the conditions under which pedagogy can be reconceptualized as a space for emancipation, participation, and plurality.