The Master Degree in Intercultural Education (MEI) is a postgraduate program of the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI). This postgraduate program has been operating since February 2008 and offers an opportunity for postgraduate education in the area of Intercultural Education. The syllabus is flexible, tutorial and interdisciplinary and its main feature is to work with an intercultural approach. The students of the first generation of the MEI were 90% teachers of the BA of the same institution (BA in Intercultural Management for Development) and had to travel to the capital city of Veracruz, Xalapa, to attend in person. The second generation which started in February 2010 is now operating in Xalapa, Orizaba and Coatzacoalcos. Students come from various states of Mexico to receive face to face tutorial. This is the only opportunity many students have to study a Masters Degree locally in a public university.
The opening of intercultural universities in Mexico since 2003 has been a first answer to a basic justice criterion. These are institutions that are mainly placed in regions populated by indigenous peoples. One of these institutions is the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI), which is part of an important public university in Mexico, the Universidad Veracruzana. The MA in Intercultural Education was first designed to offer a postgraduate opportunity for the academics placed and working in the ten intercultural universities in Mexico who still have needs to strengthen their own higher education as far as the intercultural approach is concerned. Since this academic field is still being conformed it is important to create a space for debate, analysis and construction of new designs and performance of proposals to carry out programs on intercultural education. The whole of the educational structure and model in Mexico has recently been defined as intercultural and therefore the need to construct a web of interdisciplinary interconnections with new innovative strategies for the analysis and transformation of the teaching practice and for the teachers to work on an intercultural approach is very necessary. Today teachers and people working and in contact with cultural diversity in many varied contexts need to also get acquainted with methodologies and conceptual frameworks for research and management and the MA offers an opportunity to build together with the tutors and other co-students this “knowledge” and put it into dialogue with other experiences in the field.
The main objective of the MEI is to become a place to develop educational models sensitive to conditions and needs of contemporary societies where equal opportunities, the right to be different and attention to diversity are the main functions of every educational doing. Difference is always seen as an enrichment and not as a problem to deal with and the ultimate goal of this program is to contribute to a spreading of the intercultural approach as such and in this way add to the building fairer, more equal ways of educating.
The MEI is an open, flexible, interdisciplinary space for the knowledge dialogue and the collective building of different kind of knowledge on intercultural education. The MEI syllabus is arranged in four semesters or axe:
Theoretical and conceptual,
Methodological, and two more called
Interculturality in Educational Institutions and
Interculturality in Social Action and Management).
Each semester we offer five or six courses and each student has to choose two courses each semester. The other important part of their education is fostered offering individual tutorial follow up. Each student has a tutor who is responsible for guiding the research or intervention project. For that there also is a constant methodological seminar which runs throughout the program. Some courses are taught 50 per cent face to face and 50% on a virtual educational platform and other courses happen 100 per cent on the virtual platform, since the teachers might be as distant as Spain from Mexico. We share a twin program, but with important differences in its operation with the UNED in Madrid. The first generation of the MEI started with 20 students and has finished with 12 students who are in the process of submitting their final papers. The profile of these students is quite diverse, the students studied anthropology, pedagogy, languages, medicine, veterinary medicine, biology, agronomy etc. which of course enriched the debates and analysis carried out. The second generation is even more diverse or diverse in a different way, since it has opened up to 40 students with the need and purpose to pursue a postgraduate course in a “new field”. This second generation only started a few months ago, in February, but we can already see that the impact of the intercultural approach will start to spread inside the Universidad Veracruzana in different faculties, as well as in rural and urban primary schools, NGOs, other intercultural universities in Mexico and public institutions like the police.
The results of this program cannot easily be measured yet, but we know that the exchange of readings, analysis and debates that took place amongst the teachers of the first generation of the MEI had a direct impact on their tutoring, research accompaniment and teaching in the UVI. The impact on the students of the BA in our institution is therefore the first to show its fruits. The working conditions of the students also have improved and that of course has an impact on the living standards of each student. Another result is the growth of the program which started this time with double the number of students and is being offered in three campuses instead of just one, avoiding the travelling of a significant number of students. Instead, the teachers travel to Coatzacoalcos and Orizaba where the students live or work mostly nearby.
The innovative aspects are that the MEI is working in a local context, decentralizing postgraduate education in the state of Veracruz taking local knowledge into account and trying to put local knowledge into dialogue with more global trends. The developing of interdisciplinary, flexible programs can also be taken in Mexico as an innovative aspect.
guninetwork.org | Ph: +34 93 401 70 08 | Fx: +34 93 401 08 55 | C. Jordi Girona, 31. Edifici TG(S1). E-08755 Barcelona
