Paper short abstract:

Cultural strategies that Mapuche children maintain in the space of the school are described. Mapuche children collaborate in shared activities, help younger children, and act collectively. These characteristics are typical of the Mapuche learning model that guides the children's socialization.

Paper long abstract:

In the Araucanía region of Chile, inhabits the Mapuche people, which is the highest indigenous people in the country. This study was carried out in three rural schools in a county of the Araucanía with approximately 90% of Mapuche population. Its objective was to identify some cultural strategies that Mapuche children maintain in the context of the western school model of the Chilean society. Observations of various settings were made, such as classes, playground, dining room and sports activities. In them it was observed that Mapuche children have the initiative to collaborate in activities of common goals, to help younger children with their assignments, carry out individual activities collectively even when the teacher's instructions are to perform them individually, to act collectively in all kind of situations, some educational and some in the playground.

This behavior of collaboration, participation and mutual support is a cultural value of the Mapuche learning model, in which children are socialized in their families and communities. These collaborative strategies are transferred to the rural school, however, school rules stimulate learning and the achievement of individual goals. There are few spaces where Mapuche children are encouraged to continue developing these cultural values.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we will analyze the ways in which public health discourses on food risk extend moral values through individual responsibility for bodily health, their own and that of their children, based on people's eating practices.

Paper long abstract:

This work is part of an ongoing study on infant feeding, public policies and daily life of domestic groups users of primary health care centers of the Buenos Aires city. In this presentation, we intend to analyze the ways in which nutritional problems in childhood and, in particular, childhood obesity, are presented as a public health problem at a global and local level from primary and secondary sources.

Stunting (short stature) and low weight (for age) as well as obesity are considered as one of the main ways in which social inequality is expressed.

Obesity has been defined by the WHO as an epidemic, chronic, multi-causal disease, costly for the health system and societies, and preventable. However, the strategies designed and implemented from the various governmental levels have aimed exclusively at modifying individual behaviors of boys and girls and of their mothers, fathers and caregivers.

In response to the obesity epidemic, discourses on healthy eating have built food and nutritional risks that reorient ideas about what constitutes a good meal and eating well. Eating practices as well as physical activity are medicalized, individualized and classified as "good" or "bad", "healthy" or "risky".

Education and prevention programs based on individual approaches for the management of food and risk practices are questioned from different sectors and disciplines since they decontextualize and hold subjects responsible for their actions, neglecting the conditioning of health and nutrition.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on connectivities of minor utopias in childhood education. It zeroes in on the emerging national arts and culture curriculum of primary school education in Timor-Leste that contextualizes permaculture school gardening as ecological and economic powerhouse shaping cultural futures.

Paper long abstract:

In times of overheated circulation of lifestyle desires and future imaginaries of “the good life”, early childhood education has become a site of contested governmental, activist, economic and entrepreneurial initiatives that connect and assemble a grand variety of translocal actors, transnational organizations, philanthropies, and cosmopolitanized imaginatives. This paper focuses on the connectivities of “minor utopias” emerging from within and across borders. It builds on past work in Indonesia as a route into the emerging national arts and culture curriculum pertaining to primary school education in Timor Leste. To theorize the relations and processes that connect translocal actors and communities, I draw on the concept of “worlding”—the continual process of emplacing translocal ideas and assemblages. The paper provokes a discussion on the connectivity and comparison of knowledges from so-called “peripheries” with those from so-called “cosmopolitanism” and “urbanism”.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I will discuss the implications of Yucatec Maya ethnotheories of "development" and the role of home and school in children's lives vis a vis increased schooling. First, the notion of individual destiny versus progress and second the interference with children’s learning at home.

Paper long abstract:

Despite evidence from sociocultural psychology and childhood studies that children are not the same everywhere they go, the Western tenet of development being a universal phenomenon as opposed to a historical one is still ingrained in education policies. It is not enough to acknowledge cultural diversity and develop culturally appropriate materials in different indigenous languages or teaching in those languages while ignoring that development is not a universal concept but a Western construction rooted in the idea of progression. The concept does not exist in any of México’s indigenous languages. Among Yucatec Maya mothers, “development” is conceived as a gradual process towards having understanding (na’at), dependent on individual’s destiny. Mothers consider that both home and school are equally important in children’s understanding and future but identify different yet complementary roles. At home, they learn to be responsible, respectful, and obedient as they learn to work. At school, they learn what it is needed to navigate in the world outside their community, especially getting an office job. In this paper, I will discuss the implications of these maternal ethnotheories vis a vis increased schooling. Firstly, regarding the notion of individual destiny versus progress. Secondly, the interference with children’s learning at home.

Paper short abstract:

In Argentina, the knowledge about the development of children from indigenous and rural communities in remote areas remains still incomplete and fragmented. This paper aims to discuss children´s development issues usually ignored by public policies and academic agenda based on ethnographic data

Paper long abstract:

In Argentina, the knowledge about the development of children from indigenous and rural communities remains still incomplete and fragmented. In those populations, the main concern is about infant mortality and morbidity, associated with endemic and infectious diseases, and barriers to access to health services. However, several problems affecting children’s daily lives are not enough studied and remain misunderstood, and their effects in the medium and long term are unknown. We aim to discuss children´s development issues usually ignored by public policies and academic agenda. We focus on “being asustado (frighten)” as a cultural category of illness in rural communities from Northwestern Argentina. From the local perspective, it has a crucial impact on children´s health, sociability, and success in school, leading to several disabilities and problems that compromise people´s life trajectories. Susto has been extensively studied in Latin American communities as a “folk illness”, even when some scholars have claimed an interdisciplinary approach. Our ethnographic research around this topic supports the need for a comprehensive and intersectional approach to their consequences in children’s development. We argue that these children are “invisible" to several public policies and lines of research that increase children’s inequalities.