Communication, interaction and dialogue. Contributions from Latin America to Educommunication [Bilingual edition: Spanish – English]

Abstract

The objective of this article is to review theoretical contributions from Latin American authors to the field of study of educommunication. The premise that guides these reflections states that some of these authors have made pioneering contributions to the educational processes that are based on dialogue and horizontal communication.

In a very early state of the matter we are able to recall names such as Paulo Freire, Mario Kaplún, Juan Díaz Bordenave, Ismar de Oliveira, Jorge Huergo, Guillermo Orozco, Daniel Prieto Castillo, Roberto Aparici, Carlos Valderrama, among others. For the proposed article, it is fundamental to place the contributions from these and other authors within a wider framework: The Latin American communicational thinking, emergent from historic-social and cultural conditions which allowed for a critical and reflective approach to educommunication.

We consider that the contributions from Latin America do not arise as isolated expressions, but rather are the result of a weaving of ideas and viewpoints located in different historical moments. From this predetermined reality, these authors thought, not only from different theoretical viewpoints, but as singular mechanisms in order to face concrete processes which were being carried out in societies lacking dialogue and participation.

Currently, and after more than five decades since the first contributions surrounding dialogicity as a basic element of educommunicational processes, it is necessary to review them in order to rethink them in the context of digitalization. To formulate today dialogue and horizontal communication in education might seem as a simple matter of adapting certain technical developments to pedagogic conditions. However, before thinking about these adaptations, it is necessary to reconsider the history of the Latin American educommunicational thinking, to revise it and reinterpret it, in order to avoid the linear educational and communicational models, in which still prevails the perspective of repeating, submitting and adapting.