Tuning history in Latin America

Introduction

The 1992 signature of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the USA, Canada and Mexico marked the region's transition to an accelerated process of economic globalization. As a result debate intensified in higher education spheres in Latin America around the urgency for universities to adjust to these changing conditions. International bodies such as the Organisation of American States (OAS) and UNESCO, as well as national ones through ministries of education and associations of universities, therefore sought working practices in accordance with these new demands.

In this context of globalization, the ALFA Tuning Project in Latin America was the continuation of existing cooperation policies between Europe and Latin America in the field of education. It corresponded to new political and economic realities, expressed on the one hand by the need for Europe-wide restructuring implicit in the creation of the European Union and the urgent need to configure a common economic and social space. In this context, the Bologna Process was essential for education systems still fragmented into national spaces. Latin America caught in the accelerated processes of globalization and with a growing demographic and economic weight similarly required new forms of development and co-operation in the educational sector. The accession of Spain and Portugal, reinforced by the signature of the Single European Act of 1986, and by the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) in 1999, thus generated an auspicious atmosphere for Ibero-American universities to reinforce their ties with Europe (Escribano Úbeda-Portugués, 2007).

The Tuning Project stemmed from these processes of bilateral rapprochement between European and Ibero-American educational institutions. The central concerns of the project were the structures and content of higher education studies. The objective was to construct a perspective that differed from those used in previous analyses and collaboration agreements between universities, which had focused on the structures of education systems and the responsibilities of government in educational policies. The narrowing and diversification of the labour market for history graduates pointed to an urgent need for change, to alleviate the intense pressure which higher education institutes operated under in order to improve the coverage and quality of provision. Reviewing and reflecting on the training of historians in the education system was an urgent necessity.

The area of history in the Tuning Latin America Project (2004–2007)

The first meeting of the Tuning Latin America Project, held in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in March 2005, was attended by representatives of the four initial areas (Business Management, Education, Mathematics and History) (Proyecto Tuning América Latina, 2005: 26–42). The two topics which most intrigued the participants were, firstly, the objectives and reach of the project, and secondly, the subject of competences.

For the area of History, there were representatives from 10 Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru. On the European side, there were representatives from Spain, Portugal and Italy. Overall, they represented 16 public and private universities (Proyecto Tuning América Latina, 2005a: 35–36).

The working sessions fostered learning about, and contrasting, the differences between the various academic programmes. Spanish was used as a common language shared by most of the countries participating in the project, and communication in Portuguese, or even portuñol (T’s.N. – a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish), was always possible with participants from Brazil. There was also the base of a common, or closely linked, history. Despite this, there were significant differences. There was no typical curriculum and the professional profiles for graduates were guided by the particular circumstances of national labour markets, which conditioned the main components and basic contents in the training of historians.

One noteworthy aspect was the disparity in the number of programmes for training historians offered per country. The majority had only one, with, at the other extreme, Brazil, offering over 600, or Mexico, with over 40 (Proyecto Tuning América Latina, 2007: 207–210). In most countries, the core curriculum covered areas corresponding to what is usually termed general history, which in practice usually corresponded to a periodization of European history. This area generally included one or two subjects that many of the programmes called Ancient World or Ancient Civilizations or variants on these themes. This area of general history included courses on Medieval, Modern and Contemporary history. Certain countries, such as Cuba, Brazil and Mexico, systematically included history of Africa, Asia and the Middle East (Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, 1996: 3). A significant proportion of the programmes included American history, predominantly focusing exclusively on Latin America; the programmes in Cuba and Mexico included more systematic treatment of the history of the United States of America.

The area of professional training was generally structured into two spheres. On the one hand, the theoretical historiographic, which addressed the contents of the theories of history, methodology and historiography, as well as subjects with links to other disciplines. On the other hand, the instrumental sphere, which focused upon the practical content most closely linked to the labour market (Velázquez Albo, 2011).

The greatest convergence of practice was that all the programmes in participating countries regarded national and regional histories as the formative nucleus for training historians. This focus emanated from awareness that national narratives are shaped from their particular histories: the experience of a long process of gaining independence from colonial powers, a cycle that in Latin America lasted over a hundred years and concluded during the first half of the twentieth Century.

Globalisation has presented new challenges for Latin American historians’ daily work. Curricula in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile focus mainly on national processes from the nineteenth century onwards. Overall, barring a few cases in the Andean world, Guatemala, Mexico and the Caribbean, interest in indigenous pasts is a relatively recent result of the eruption of this issue on the political and social scene over the last two decades.

Two initial aspects of the process of discussion are worth mentioning. Firstly, the composition of the participants in terms of their professional position, and the influence of this on the project; and secondly, how representative they were. In the first case, certain participants occupied precarious posts as non-tenured professors with little influence in their field, others were no longer teaching or were close to retirement; a significant nucleus was composed of professors of long standing, dedicated exclusively to this activity and carrying significant weight in their milieu. There were similar situations in the second case, with certain participants having little influence in their institution whilst others occupied key positions in their country as in the case of Cuba. Hence, from the outset, it was noted there was a need to explore effective forms of communication and dissemination at university and national levels.

The initial wariness regarding the notion of competences

An important aspect of the Tuning Project was to include the concept of competences as a means of integrating the notions of skills, capacities and knowledge. This caused differences of opinion between certain representatives of participating universities, particularly in the social sciences and humanities sectors. Here the inclusion of the notion of competence was widely perceived as threatening to academic freedom or, more strongly still, a breach of university autonomy through to close an alignment with the interests of economic sectors. However, incorporating debate surrounding competences turned out to be one of the Tuning Project’s achievements: it facilitated finding a way of working that minimised differences and encouraged closer and more constructive dialogue within the community.

In Latin America, the training of historians is strongly tied to faculties and schools of Philosophy and Literature or, in certain cases, to institutions from the area of Archaeology or Anthropology, the latter being closely linked to the region's ethnic challenges. Their graduate profile is mainly focused on the educational sector, on the administration and preservation of cultural heritage and archives, or ethnic groups, and on the dissemination of historical knowledge. The major employer is the public sector, either in education or in public and social management, and this may explain why the concept of competences faced greatest resistance from the social sciences and humanities (Moreno Olivos, 2010).

Initially, Latin America’s participation in the Tuning Project prolonged the questioning within the social sciences and the humanities about the “globalizing concepts” that encroached on academic decision-making; indeed for some it was perceived as covert interference on the part of so-called first-world countries. By contrast, the profiles of other subject areas were much more focused on the labour market, with emphasis on private economic sectors. Here the notion of competence possessed a positive connotation per se: being competitive was an established value routinely reinforced in the training of these professionals.

In fact, other conceptual options were put forward, not only in the discipline area of History, but also, and more emphatically still, in that of Education; in the latter area, the debate was so heated that certain participants from Latin America desisted from further participation in the programme. Respected scientists such as Angel Díaz Barriga (2006) and Humberto Maturana were cited in support of a critical stance to a term that, they believe, comes with questionable connotations. In fact, certain participants, following the terminology of Humberto Maturana (1992), queried whether valuing competences as a path to success and progress was a “predominant emotion” in society and whether it was pertinent to construct a new premise with the question: to compete or to collaborate? This was the contentious context in which the Tuning Project was launched in Latin America.

György Nováky reveals that initial resistance in the area of History was also evident in the Tuning Project in Europe, due to established practices in teaching History in higher education (Nováky, 2015: 104). In Latin America, this situation was heightened by differences specific to the institutional contexts and traditions of participants, which significantly influenced the debate on competences. Four stand out and are briefly reviewed below:

The first concerned the discrepancy between participants from academics working in strong economies where the universities had a strong presence (for the Latin American context) and those from countries and institutions lacking such opportunities, reflected in the latter’s intermittent participation throughout the project.

The second involved the most influential historiographic traditions in participants’ institutions. There was clearly a greater concentration of those from various schools of critical thinking, the Annales School (in its Latin American nuances), traditional political history, in certain cases ethnohistory, and a bare minimum of more contemporary historiographic theories, such as New Cultural History; there were no representatives of economic or quantitative history. Most participants focused on the national history of their own country; there was a single case whose focus was the history of Latin America.

The third issue was the generation gap. Most participants were academics of long standing, which is being the reason they were chosen to represent their institutions. Early career historians did not have a constant presence or active participation: indeed, some of these only joined towards the final phase of the project.

Finally, there were differences in the academic interests of participants for the area of History. In most cases, their activities were focused more on thematic, diachronic and methodological concerns related to their research, not on the results, evaluation and scope of the learning process. This was another obstacle to achieving a common language based not on historians’ traditional debates but on student learning which was at the heart of the Tuning process.

The specific competencies for the area of history

Once initial reticence towards the concept of competencies was overcome, the subsequent Tuning meetings focussed on discussing their content more specifically. After the generic competences were identified, between August and September 2005, the specific competences for the area of History were drawn up and a final list was approved, to proceed with a survey in three sectors: undergraduates, graduate students and academics from the participating Latin American countries. This survey was carried out between 15 October and 6 December 2005, using three channels: live, by post and online. The sample comprised 992 interviewees, of which 278 were academics, 293 graduate students and 405 undergraduates (Proyecto Tuning América Latina, 2006: 187–211).

The results of the survey brought the Tuning project closer to the universities and areas in each participating country, as they encouraged and promoted direct communication: these could now voice their opinions on topics related to their professional tasks and field. Consulting graduate students, undergraduates and employers fostered reflection on the subject and its relevance for professional life and offered opportunities for strong communication and feedback between Tuning and its Latin American recipients.

There were questions about the validity of the results from Argentina and Brazil, who interviewed nine and 20 academics, respectively; figures smaller than those required for the sample. By comparison, the two countries which consulted the most academics were Chile and Mexico, with 45 each (Proyecto Tuning América Latina, 2006: 187), which matched the sample requirements. An element of contrast is the information provided by the representatives of Brazil themselves, who said the dimensions of their discipline: ‘there are 610 university courses in the area, with almost 160,000 undergraduate students of History’ (Proyecto Tuning América Latina, 2007: 207). As regards students, they had surveyed 32 undergraduates and 42 graduates. On the other hand, Chile interviewed 107 undergraduates and 58 graduate students. Three countries provided 47% of the total responses throughout Latin America: Chile, Ecuador and Mexico (Proyecto Tuning América Latina, 2006: 187).

The identification of each specific competence required extensive debate in which arguments for and against were presented. Despite the marked differences between participants surrounding the relevance or definition of certain competences, all were approved and, as previously mentioned, the survey proceeded with the three chosen sectors. The result was the definition of the following 27 specific competences for the area of History:

Understanding the social role of the historian.

Correlations were observed in the responses from all three sectors. It revealed that the competences most frequently ranked as important were:

23. Capacity to identify and appropriately use sources of information: bibliographic, documentary, oral testimonial, etc. for historic research.

There was even greater consensus as to the least important:

3. Ability to use specific techniques necessary for studying documents from specific periods, such as palaeography and epigraphy.

The specific competences most linked to national spheres obtained the highest ranking in the surveys. In contrast, despite the urgency to prepare to integrate into the globalization process, it was surprising how little importance was given by all sectors to speaking a second language.

From the point of view of importance, the competences specific to the discipline are all centred on national histories, in combination with those more focused on developing theoretical and instrumental skills, whilst not forgetting those related to scientific and civic values. In sum, the combination of attributes represented by the professional competences involved spheres of knowledge and action, as well as circumstances and attitudes in the educational process and, fundamentally, in society and at work.

Regional and international differences between specific competencies for history

Despite having established a common point of view and language, the prevailing differences in the History group were highlighted when defining certain competences and their scope. This was the case for Competence 16, “Knowledge of native languages”, where discussion led to the addition of the clarification “where relevant”. Representatives from countries with a strong pre-Hispanic past found this competence necessary as many of their students came from places with a high indigenous population. This was the case for Peru, Guatemala and Mexico (Bolivia did not participate in the project), joined by other countries that were sensitive to this need for inclusion. Indigenous uprisings have led to a noteworthy prioritizing of their social inclusion and the preservation of their cultures by universities in Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru and Mexico. Indeed, native languages are accepted by many Mexican universities as a second language for aspiring postgraduates.

The opposition to the inclusion of the history of indigenous populations came from two sources: firstly, institutions for which the indigenous issue was deemed irrelevant and which were therefore not very sensitive to this discussion; secondly, representatives of national contexts where absorption and marginalization of indigenous cultures is part of government policy, and “Spanification” remains a priority action. Ultimately, whilst these differences were clearly revealed in the survey of academics, graduates and undergraduates, it was deemed the least important competence.

There was a correspondingly low ranking given to Competence 12, “Capacity to know, contribute to and participate in, sociocultural activities of the community”. The majority of those surveyed were academics, graduates and students living in urban areas, whilst the sense of community, as still understood in many parts of Latin America, is linked more to rural communities and peoples. In fact, a perception of progress and modernity influences their distancing themselves from communal, agrarian traditions, which are still strongly adhered to by their parents and grandparents.

It was surprising that Competence 7, “Ability to handle information and communication technologies to develop historical data, or related to history (such as statistical or cartographic methods, databases, etc.)”, and to a certain degree 8, “Capacity to read historiographic texts and documents in another language.” were deemed less important: after all, speaking a second language and utilising technology are sine qua non prerequisites for membership of the new, global labour market. Nováky (2015: 112–113) has rightly highlighted the differences here between Latin American Tuning and that in Europe and Central Asia.

The lesser importance given to these competences reflects both the conservative mentality of public policies and universities at that time (2006). It also demonstrates the gap between those academic sectors dedicated to research or graduate studies – whose international activities led them to use technology intensely and speak another language – and the majority of bachelor degree students and professors focused more on regional and national topics, using traditional technologies and procedures. Here again, the absence of specialists in economic or quantitative history among the Tuning Latin America collective was felt.

Another discrepancy worthy of attention between the Tuning Europe and Tuning Latin America results is the number of competences for History. Whilst Latin America had the aforementioned 27 (Beneitone et al., 2008: 200–202), Europe had 30 (González and Wagenaar, 2004: 179–180). This arose because academics from Latin America considered that five of the European competencies had no relevance for the region, and at least 10 could be integrated into a larger competence.

Many perspectives and practices have undergone change in Latin America since 2006: there is, for example, a growing interest in the value of speaking a second language, as well as increased awareness of the need to be technologically literate. And especially, there is greater appreciation of the need for an education that engages more closely with the outside world. Most History programmes in Latin America now require a second language for degree-level study and the use of information technology and social media is increasingly widespread. Those historiographic traditions which centred their actions on regional and national histories, where the only novelty was whatever methodology was fashionable at the time – Marxism, Annales, Microhistory, New Cultural History or Conceptual History – now express willingness to focus the historic process, and how it is taught, in relation to global trends.

Tuning Latin America: Educational and Social Innovation (2011–2013)

The second Tuning Latin America Project was called Educational and Social Innovation (Campos Rodríguez et al., 2013). It was launched in Bogota, Colombia, in May 2011, with 12 working groups from the 2004–2007 phase and the addition of three new areas: Agronomy, Psychology and Information Technology. The project’s general objectives were defined in terms of contributing to the construction of a Latin American Higher Education Area through curricular convergence (Proyecto Tuning América Latina, 2011a: 15). The initial task to complete this objective was to develop a regional map of professional profiles for each area, and present a proposal related to academic credits at the regional level.

In the five-year gap between projects, significant changes were observed: the participating Latin American universities were totally receptive to taking part in change; the prejudice against competences had decreased, or was no longer explicit. The participating universities themselves were in the thralls of intense changes, with many of the topics broached during the first Tuning project now widespread and accepted.

The new History group for this second phase was initially composed of representatives from eight universities in six Latin American countries (Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico) and two nominated European universities, though, in practice, only the University of Pisa, Italy, was present (Proyecto Tuning América Latina, 2011a: 43–44). Brazil joined at the second meeting with one university (Proyecto Tuning América Latina, 2011b: 31–32). For the area of History, only six participants from the first phase continued in the second. This meant that broaching new tasks fell primarily to those who had already participated.

This second phase also involved a qualitative survey of academics in Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico. It also included academics in the USA dedicated to studying or teaching about Latin America. This survey had three focuses: (a) A classification of possible future scenarios; (b) How they envisaged future professional scenarios; (c) What competences will be required for these future scenarios and professions (Proyecto Tuning América Latina, 2012: 169–179).

A noteworthy common accord in the survey results was the importance given to teaching and learning history in order to better engage with issues of concern in society. Rising poverty, inequality and the transience of democratic forms of life constituted common causes of concern among the historians surveyed.

These three facets confirmed the relevance of the Tuning Project’s proposal on the centrality of competences for teaching future historians and also corroborated the influence and changes that the project was facilitating. One of the axes of competences vis-à-vis future scenarios, as seen in the survey, indicated that professionals of History “should be more international, speak several languages and be able to travel, so as to understand current global problems” (Campos Rodríguez et al., 2013: 46). It has become clear that as Latin American societies transition to more cosmopolitan forms, these “will demand a greater historical conscience (…) [while] the crises will provoke a need to creatively change the dominant paradigms” (Campos Rodríguez et al., 2013: 46).

Conclusions

In sum, the Tuning project has raised awareness and stimulated constructive discussion about the relevance of competences as a central element in the training of historians in terms of the wide spectrum of skills, values and attitudes required today. One of the notable results of the Tuning projects has been the strengthening of communications between Latin American universities responsible for training future historians. In contrast to traditional events for historians, which emphasise communicating the results of research per topic and lines of investigation, there has been reflection on the present and future of the discipline amid globalized and constantly changing educational conditions.

The Tuning project has also revealed that the majority of institutions in Latin America have seen, over little more than a decade, radical changes. This is the case, for example, in relation to increased student enrolment, greater demands for evaluation and higher-standards in the quality of provision, the shortening of the training period for undergraduate and postgraduate studies and the need to accommodate the impact of new technologies in educational provision. Thus, the Tuning project may have helped to reinvigorate history education and make history graduates more employable. However, the discussions that arose from the project have also illuminated existing differences between diverse national historical traditions in Latin America, and thus the challenges in studying, designing and implementing global educational systems.

Today there is constant reference to the Tuning Project and its documentation in institutional and academic meetings and in transformation programmes – whether in relation to educational policies or specific university syllabi. The same is true for educational research. Most of the educational reforms now implemented in Latin America are centred on the concept of competences and use the Tuning methodology, particularly the survey method. At the same time, however, the impact of the project has gradually weakened over time. On the one hand, after the end of the project in 2013, there was no follow up of the synergies that arose from the previous stages. On the other, the current crisis in Europe, particularly in Spain (due to its impact on Hispanic America), and the challenges faced by its educational sector and labour market, are alarm bells that demand closer analysis in relation to the impact of the Bologna Process and the Tuning Project.

The Tuning project has left two main remaining challenges: first, to research into and follow up on the correlation between the educational reforms implemented in Latin America and the recommendations made by Tuning; and second, to seek and design new ways of cooperation that further and enhance what was achieved up to 2012 by Tuning Latin America. It remains striking that in this region, as in Europe, the area of History was a founding participant in the Tuning project. It reminds us the field’s importance as a powerful force for cultural dialogue and for public identities. But if history is to fulfil that role, it is imperative that we address the challenges of training the new generations of historians in a globalized context.