Teaching through Research: the university for the Latin American diversity

Abstract

To rethink the university facing to the cultural and linguistic diversity present in Latin American countries, we must consider not only intra- -national cases, but also the diversity between the countries themselves. That need arises from the establishment, by MERCOSUL, of some integration politics facing the education sector, covering both the Basic Education and Higher Education. Thus, the MERCOSUR Frontier Intercultural Bilingual Schools Project (PEIBF) and the thematic blocks of the Education Sector of MERCOSUR for Higher Education, namely, recognition, mobility and Inter-institutional cooperation, present themselves as instigators of reflections on how to cover classroom diversity in Latin American educational institutions of member countries. If the requirement of consideration is put, the way Education can work with and for the cultural and linguistic diversity, both in the intra and the inter-national cases, is still being defined. One of those ways is Teaching through Research. But why the Teaching through Research can be considered one of the instruments for the redefinition of the university and schools of the twenty-first century inserting them in a framework of valuing cultural and linguistic diversity? Aiming to answer this question, the work was organized to present the method “Teaching through Research” to then present two contexts in which it is adopted. One of these contexts uses the Teaching through Research for intra-national Latin American diversity, that of the native peoples. The other context encompasses the inter-national Latin American diversity, that between the MERCOSUR countries.