Critical community solidarity against neoliberal governance in the Americas: Red SEPA and the struggle to transform education systems

Since the 2000s, the Red Social para la Educación Pública en las Américas (SEPA Network or SEPA) has been an organization that, based on a community and cooperative approach, has resisted neoliberal educational policies and governance in the Americas. In recent decades, educational neoliberalism in the region has been expressed both in various educational privatization policies, largely during the 1990s and 2000s (Gentili, Frigotto, Leher, & Stubrin, 2009), and through a set of policies developed in recent years that have shaped a new regime of control, prescribed curriculum and accountability, referred to by Rivas and Sanchez (2020) as a regulatory governance turn.

This paper seeks to provide an analysis of the development of anti-neoliberal politics and policies in education in the Americas, considering their onto-epistemological dimension. To this end, it analyzes the role played by the SEPA Network in promoting alternative educational regulation and governance, in which critical community solidarity (CCS), understood as a form of counterpower that builds bonds of cooperation, respect and mutual learning, is a central element. In addition to its critique of neoliberalism, SEPA’s pedagogical practice has generated profound questions about the different “layers of Western modernity” in education; that is, different manifestations of Christianity, positivist reason, capitalism and liberalism (Edwards, 2025b) that have proven problematic in the construction of an education oriented toward social and cognitive justice. Given that the SEPA Network is a relatively unexplored phenomenon and is therefore a field of study that is still evolving, this article aims to provide new insights and a comprehensive analysis that may prove useful for future studies on globalization, education and resistance in the Americas (Fúnez-Flores, 2023).

The cultural diversity of SEPA has produced an onto-epistemological framework of educational analysis based on what Zemelman (2021) conceptualizes as “epistemic thinking.” The aim of this epistemic approach is not to “placing old names on new things and believing that because they have no name, they are unnameable” (Zemelman, 2021, p. 237). Concepts are constructed as we approach reality, and it is not reality that is constructed from a predefined use of concepts. In this sense, the work within the SEPA Network promotes a constant exercise of “unthinking” (Rappleye, 2025) some ideas, principles and theories, and this is a result of the intercultural and political diversity that can be found in the organization. This takes place through collective discussion of concepts and ideas that might be taken for granted – such as democracy, development, education or school – based on the experiences of the movements that make up the network, which shapes the day-to-day debate within SEPA.

Community-based educational organizations that are anti-neoliberal and decolonial can help to rethink the principles on which the field of global education policy has been built, both in its analysis and in the design of public policies. The study of these organizations allows other relevant topics to be integrated into the academic analysis of educational policies, such as the existence of hierarchies of control in education in terms of class, ethnicity and gender, as well as the diversity of political forces involved in educational governance processes. SEPA has been a space for coordinating different expressions and movements in favor of anti-neoliberal, community-based and intercultural education. It has also been an organization that promotes educational debates based on critical thinking and ancestral knowledge throughout the continent, which has allowed progress to be made in the fight against epistemicide in the education sector, articulating the analysis and action of current struggles with the political heritage of indigenous knowledge in the Americas, from Brazil to Canada.

This study analyses the political-pedagogical project of the SEPA Network as an alternative to neoliberal educational governance in the Americas, based on the creation of forms of solidarity in education. To this end, the article first addresses neoliberal educational governance in Latin America and the resistance to it; it then proposes CCS as a form of counterpower against neoliberalism and highlights the experience of SEPA as a leading organization in these processes. Finally, it presents the research findings and the conclusions.

In 2021, Girinde Beeharry (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Education Program) (2021) published a well-known manifesto in favor of neoliberal governance in education. What Beeharry proposed was nothing new. As a result of the crisis of the welfare state in Europe and the developmental state in Latin America, the market policies adopted were based on the idea that new forms of government were needed in which the public sector, economic agents and civil society could all participate in decision-making processes and service provision, with the aim of maximizing benefits for citizens (Peters, 2005; Aguilar, 2010).

These discussions also gained momentum in the education sector in the 1990s, when, at the global level, certain educational ideas derived from New Public Management (NPM) (a trend in public administration schools that recovers managerial elements in the organization of the public sector) began to take on greater relevance. Policies based on NPM principles, such as school autonomy, standardized evaluation and teacher accountability, were introduced into educational governance globally (Verger & Curran, 2014). Neoliberal forms of governance and the accompanying educational privatization policies managed to impose themselves through different trajectories (Verger, Zancajo, & Fontdevila, 2016) in diverse geographical areas.

The effects on global education, linked to political, economic and cultural changes that are widespread in society, have made educational governance a “contested space” (Edwards, 2024, p. 5). Various actors, such as multilateral organizations, national governments, think tanks, corporations and global civil society organizations, as well as trade unions and educational movements, intervene in the educational sector with the aim of promoting certain educational policies at the global level, which are associated with different political principles. In recent decades, it has been possible to see the development of neoliberal educational governance at the global level, linked to the strength of privatization and managerial government policies.

Global educational governance has been constructed through the development of global educational coordination institutions and principles, linked to a multilateral structure. Within this institutional design, global governance has been constructed, involving the “development and proclamation of shared norms, goals and rules” (Smith, Ehren, & Grek, 2024, p. 533), as well as a set of common problems that need to be resolved. In recent decades, these norms, goals and principles have been closely associated with neoliberal hegemony, which can be found, for example, in the importance given to the theoretical foundations of human capital theory (more recently referred to as knowledge capital), as well as in the “economization of education” in general (Spring, 2015; Hanushek & Woessman, 2023). This trend has heightened the economic expectations of the educational process, increasing the responsibility of schools for the competitiveness of countries and regions in the global economy.

At the same time, this neoliberal global governance has promoted a set of principles that are not openly pro-market, such as the Sustainable Development Goals and global citizenship education. Instead, these proposals have been developed with an approach that generally fails to consider the cultural diversity or epistemic capacity of historically oppressed peoples (Romo, 2024; Peraza, 2025).

Dominant global educational governance strategies and approaches show a preponderance of Western onto-epistemological principles in the various educational policies and initiatives adopted around the world, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or Global Citizenship Education (GCEd), which maintain Christian-positivist-liberal and capitalist foundations (Saito et al., 2023). These elements are also present at the core of the set of policies known as the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) (Saltman & Means, 2019). This set of policies has involved governance schemes for their implementation, which, being influenced by Christian-positivist-liberal and capitalist principles, tend to deepen exclusion in different areas of educational life by presenting as “global” educational foundations that were conceived and produced in a specific context. The Eurocentric nature of mainstream educational governance has historically encouraged the idea that what is possible and convenient is generally produced or implemented in the West, both in the field of educational policy and in educational research, which maintains a provincial analytical influence, a legacy of nineteenth-century thinking (Rappleye, 2025).

Neoliberalism, as a secular religion, has also reflected a type of ritual governance (Edwards, 2025a). In other words, it is shaped not only by a rational dimension of governance but also by onto-epistemic, cosmological and religious-spiritual components, which reflect a strong reliance on market mechanisms to resolve various issues. This can be verified when considering that international education is dealing with a context with a strong presence of fundamentalist market perspectives, in which the defense of the “Christian-Western” civilizational order is intertwined with the vindication of market radicalism. It is therefore essential to consider dimensions that have not been explored in conventional forms of regional educational governance, as well as in resistance and alternatives. More fully, in a global context where the climate emergency, the spread of armed conflicts and the emergence of a new cycle of reactionary politics pose new challenges for education, it is necessary to broaden our perspective on which policies to adopt and promote in education, in order to build forms of educational governance that go beyond market-driven and managerial criteria. We need to promote educational approaches in which alternative epistemologies, non-Western forms of knowledge and educational practices based on solidarity allow us to move closer to caring for nature, building community, and defending individual and collective rights.

Educational governance in the Americas has been developed in parallel with the creation of global governance institutions, with significant participation from multilateral entities, which has taken shape through various forms and mechanisms (Dale, 1999). These include forms of direct pressure aimed at structural reforms, such as those that followed the economic crisis of the 1980s, as well as new consensual mechanisms for consultation and the transfer of educational knowledge from multilateral organizations or development banks, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) or the World Bank, to national governments.

Through the intervention of these multilateral organizations and development banks, neoliberal forms of educational governance gradually displaced other approaches based on community logic or even on processes of revolutionary and autonomous political organization (Edwards, 2018). Community-based forms of decision-making, such as the “school assembly,” or educational cooperation, such as the “tequio” (a community-based and unpaid work), have been gradually displaced by instrumental managerial operating structures, in which the fundamental principle is administrative efficiency and accountability over representation, collaboration, or democracy. And with that, the social and community movements and organizations that had promoted popular and community educational projects were also displaced. The displacement of community educational initiatives was accompanied by the displacement of the social actors who promoted them, which created a favorable environment for the consolidation of educational governance centered on multilateral organizations and non-state actors linked to the private sector (Moschetti, Martínez, Bordoli, & Martinis, 2019).

Although the group of progressive governments that emerged in the 2000s in Latin America, known as “marea rosa” (Pink Tide), has promoted social policies with a rhetorical stance against neoliberalism (Bentancur, 2022), some managerial principles have remained (Moschetti et al., 2024). In this same context of progressive governments in Latin America, various organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the OECD have intervened, as well as development banks such as the World Bank and, in the case of Latin America, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). The persistence of managerial trends in education is largely due to the establishment of neoliberal educational governance in Latin America, which is constructed in a heterarchical manner, within which it is possible to find strategic connections between multilateral organizations and intermediary organizations that operate as brokers with schools and other structures of educational systems (Jarquín, Díez, & Palomo, 2024; Peroni, 2018).

Grassroots organizations have chosen to resist this trend by recovering indigenous knowledge and the lessons learned in the heat of struggle. In this sense, communities and social movements also express themselves as a locus of social knowledge production (Torres, 2020; Muhr, 2021; Novelli et al., 2024; Sánchez, 2024). In the Americas, particularly in Latin America, it is possible to find a large number of educational experiences of resistance (Ahenakew, Andreotti, Cooper, & Hireme, 2014; Mejía, 2015) which are nourished by a wide repertoire of strategies ranging from the educational experience of the agrarian struggle to processes of community organization (Martínez, 2009; Colin, Velázquez, & Baronnet, 2025). These are experiences of resistance, understood as the construction of opposition to capitalism (and therefore to neoliberalism) from a position outside the state (Wright, 2020). These experiences have helped to “rethink” (Rappleye, 2025) the theoretical references on which the production of educational knowledge is traditionally based in the dominant paradigm, with the aim of constructing analyses that are built from the diversity of the territories, often inspired by popular education (Díez-Gutiérrez & Jarquín-Ramírez, 2023), decolonization and ancestral knowledge (Roberts, 2024).

One of the effects of neoliberalism on education is the creation of competition at different levels: (a) between countries, in what some authors have called the global education race (Sellar, Thompson, & Rutkowski, 2017); (b) between teachers, particularly as a result of accountability policies; and even (c) between students, due to the unintended effects of policies aimed at generating instrumental learning. This is also encouraged by a recurring atmosphere of “educational crisis” (Elfert & Balakrishnan, 2025), often promoted in both the Global North and the Global South by corporate actors, pro-market think tanks or other interest groups seeking to promote conservative or commodification-oriented educational reforms.

In the face of this trend toward neoliberal atomization, building solidarity is not only a strategy for grassroots organizing to maintain community ties and collective work but also a form of counter-power against neoliberalism and its forms of governance. The recovery of Mordacci’s work (2024) is useful for understanding this form of solidarity in education, which is built, with the aim of challenging hegemony in education, for example, through the creation of other forms of regional educational governance, in which the voices of indigenous peoples, unions, pedagogical movements, students and educational communities achieve greater relevance in the public discussion of important issues in the education sector. This exchange of perspectives provides a space for the development of a critical interculturality (Walsh, 2010), understood as a dialogue on an equal footing that fosters a respectful exchange of knowledge among different cultures; this perspective emerges from historically marginalized groups, in which the issues of power and culture in/through education are critically examined.

In contrast to the community disarticulation promoted by neoliberal educational policies, pedagogical movements in the region have sought to teach solidarity. Mordacci (2024) conceives critical solidarity as a form of active respect, that is, a set of relationships in which other people are considered ends in themselves. In this way, communities are engaged in shared struggles, with the aim of winning them collectively. Solidarity in education, then, manifests itself on three levels: (a) a reflective attitude that seeks to denounce injustices in society and education; (b) the construction of educational intervention projects that seek to overcome these injustices; and (c) the implementation of specific actions to overcome unfair circumstances. The creation of such acts of solidarity in a political sense also implies consideration of the means and methods of struggle, aligned with the ends of political intervention.

The development of solidarity in education requires a set of assumptions that allow for the building of bridges of dialogue in which there is an exchange of experiences, knowledge and cultures by actors who, despite their different histories and origins, communicate on a horizontal level; that is, through a sense of community. Forms of political-educational articulation based on respect, horizontality and participation in common projects under community logic can be understood as CCS. CCS can be seen as a practice of active respect built on mutual recognition; that is, a conception of life in which the collective well-being of community members is a prerequisite for the well-being of each individual within the community. Thus, a commitment to caring for the community's living conditions represents both a demonstration of collective respect and a manifestation of commitment to one's own well-being.

CCS in education becomes possible as those involved in initiatives for change are nourished by different forms of critical intercultural dialogue (Gallardo & Rosa, 2022). CCS cannot be built through the imposition of a set of change programs generated by an intellectual locus, whose program must be followed by all those sectors that do not have their own initiative. On the contrary, this kind of solidarity is built from the ground up within communities, through ongoing dialogue centered on the human needs of those who inhabit educational settings. This perspective is rooted in a decolonial approach to education and community knowledge (Baronnet, 2012); in other words, it is grounded in a stance that fundamentally challenges the colonial legacy in the education sector, and with it the existence of social hierarchies based on racial or cultural criteria, which lead to the disintegration of communities. Among the set of projects and organizations that have promoted this type of initiative, SEPA Network is a strategic case.

This research aims to develop thick knowledge regarding CCS policies against neoliberalism promoted in the Americas, taking the case of the SEPA Network as a reference. To this end, it starts with an epistemological position that considers the creation of knowledge (and discourse) as a political act. In contrast to the positivist tradition, which considers that social and educational analysis must be conducted “without bias” and from a neutral position, this research considers that positionality (Merriam et al., 2001) is fundamental to understanding the subject of research from a situated perspective, especially when the context and the set of struggles of class, ethnicity, gender, etc., that occur within it are shared.

With the above in mind, this article seeks to answer the following questions:

1. What discursive resources does the SEPA Network employ to inform practices of resistance to neoliberalism in education?

2. What are the social conditions in Latin America that influence the construction of a non-neoliberal educational governance initiative in the SEPA Network?

3. How does the SEPA Network structure its educational practices based on solidarity?

These questions reflect the purpose of this study, as they allow for an exploration of the social conditions that drove the formation of the SEPA Network, its political-pedagogical discourse and an analysis of its educational proposal based on CCS. To answer these questions, a qualitative study has been conducted to analyze the experiences, knowledge, perspectives and voices of those who are protagonists of the phenomenon to be studied.

This study uses two sources of data to achieve a systematic analysis of the experience of the SEPA Network in its fight against neoliberalism. The first is a content analysis of documentary sources, mainly materials produced by the SEPA Network, particularly articles published in Revista Intercambio, which is the SEPA's official publication. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with six key members of the SEPA Network from different countries and organizations who have also experienced different moments in the organizational process (Fontdevila, 2019). The interviewees were selected through purposive sampling based on their participation in SEPA, as shown in Table 1.

The interviews were conducted based on the following themes: (a) the perception of SEPA members of neoliberal educational governance; (b) the history of the organization; (c) the importance of solidarity as a form of counterpower to neoliberalism; (d) intercultural dialogue and (e) the scope and limits of the organization in the face of neoliberalism. The interviews were conducted on Zoom, lasted between 45 and 90 minutes, and were conducted in both Spanish and English. The interviews were transcribed with the consent of the participants. I will refer to the interviewees by name in the findings section.

The information obtained was analyzed using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Van Dijk, 1997; Fairclough, 2023), an approach that has proven relevant in the study of critical education, as well as in the analysis of some experiences of educational resistance and the construction of alternative projects to neoliberalism (Díez-Gutiérrez & Jarquín-Ramírez, 2023). CDA is a component of critical social analysis which aims to examine the ideological dimensions of discourse present in social structures, practices and events (Fairclough, 2023). This approach was chosen because it allows for an analysis of the discursive complexity of the actors under study, as well as the implications of the broader context on their discursive production. CDA is useful for identifying categories and concepts relevant to the construction of educational discourse by SEPA members at a time when neoliberal governance has become consolidated due to the end of the progressive cycle and the growth of political proposals that promote conservative and market-based educational notions.

The information extracted was systematized using the following steps:

1. Contextualization: Analyze the locus of discursive production present in the analyzed documents and interviews (actors, context, forms and purposes), taking into account the social contexts in which the analyzed materials were produced.

2. Categorization: (a) Retrieve key concepts and words, searching for nouns, verbs and adjectives that occupy a central place in the discursive production of the actors. From these words, those with a semantic charge that is key to outlining the meaning of the interventions are extracted. This allows us to obtain central concepts in the construction of discourse. (b) Identify the contextual thematic networks in which these concepts are articulated by grouping related words that appear in the discourse construction; this allows one to identify the set of meanings that shape the discourse of the actors studied. And (c) establish fundamental categories of analysis, based on conceptual repetition and the place they occupy in discursive production, which emerge from the retrieved concepts and their thematic networks of development.

3. Deepening: (a) Develop inferences about the ideological assumptions of the discursive production and the interventions of the actors analyzed; (b) identify the elements absent from the discourse (silences); (c) identify contradictions present in the discourses analyzed and (d) identify elements related to solidarity, non-neoliberal governance and indigenous knowledge.

The SEPA Network is a continental alliance of trade unions and grassroots organizations that have developed projects in defense of education as a right. It was created at the conference entitled “Democratic Initiative for Public Education for the Americas,” held in Quito, Ecuador, in 1999, with the participation of 53 organizations from across the continent, with the aim of bringing together different civil society organizations in the Americas under the common principle of combating neoliberalism promoted by US trade policies, as well as “the threat that they posed to public education” (Stewart) in the region.

Arriaga Lemus and Isch raise two important considerations for the formation of the SEPA Network: First, the 1998 Tri-National Coalition Conference in Defense of Public Education organized by teachers’ organizations in Mexico, the United States and Canada in response to the US government’s proposal to create the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The SEPA Network emerged as a follow-up to the Trinational experience at the continental level. The second important point is that those who formed the network sought to create an international organization that would be different from Education International (a worldwide federation of teacher unions), without having to compete with it. They sought to create a network with the capacity to respond quickly and support educational movements in times of repression. As two of the interviewees, Isch and Trejos, explain, the aim was not specifically to create a trade union front, but rather an organization made up of both teachers and students, with the participation of the Caribbean and Latin American Continental Student Organization (OCLAE), a student organization that brings together dozens of student federations across Latin America in support of public education.

As mentioned by another interviewee, Ramos, who is working on systematizing the history of SEPA, the original membership of the network was large, including education unions and community social organizations. The creation of SEPA was important in consolidating an incipient sense of international political work. SEPA maintains a simple but well-defined structure:

1. Coordinating Committee establishes guidelines for campaigns in defense of education through consensus-based mechanisms.

2. Research Team: Produces analyses and provides arguments for the struggles.

3. Continental Network of Indigenous Educators (REI): Organizes educators from across the continent in campaigns for education that respond to the needs and aspirations of indigenous peoples.

4. SEPA's main activities consist of conducting research, creating communication networks between its member organizations and movements, activism in solidarity with educational struggles across the continent, publications and hemispheric campaigns, through which it seeks to strengthen public education, reclaim ancestral knowledge and fight against neoliberalism. The organizations that make up SEPA (see Table 2) generate knowledge from their struggles and thus feed into the diversity of regional educational projects. In addition, groups that are part of and engage in dialogue with SEPA have developed their own educational proposals, largely based on the recovery of indigenous knowledge.

This SEPA study allows us to discuss the field of educational policy in the Americas, considering the onto-epistemological and cosmological dimensions that are relevant for understanding the origin and cultural implications of proposals in formal education (Saito et al., 2023; Edwards, 2025a, b). This study is also an attempt to harmonize different experiences of political-pedagogical struggle against neoliberalism, where everyone fits in, “where we are all together,” which proved to be “extremely important in terms of the lessons of struggle” (Isch) since the organizations SEPA have been able to build channels of dialogue between educational movements in Latin America, Canada, and the United States, which have traditionally been disjointed. Due to its constitution, SEPA is not a homogeneous organization; within it there are different debates and differences, for example, when it comes to the position of progressive governments in Latin America, although on educational issues there are usually solid agreements.

SEPA has promoted a model of educational governance in the Americas on two levels. The first is built within SEPA, through the participation of educational organizations and their grassroots communities; at this level, a general program of intervention in regional education is developed on specific issues, such as education and gender, defense of the public sphere and teacher professionalization. Through a consensus-based process, the Coordinating Committee develops general guidelines for regional education intervention campaigns based on the considerations and requirements of local organizations belonging to SEPA and allied organizations. These campaigns are taken up – or not – by local organizations, which carry them out autonomously, except in cases where “continental days of action” are agreed upon, when organizations act at the same time (Isch).

A second level of building non-neoliberal educational governance is based on SEPA's intervention in formal public policy decision-making processes. SEPA's goal is to change education in the region. Stewart explains that an alternative to neoliberal governance is for Ministries of Education to engage in dialogue and listen more to community organizations, although “it's not a whole new form of governance, because that requires a whole new, different kind of government.” It is on this proposal that the participants in SEPA have built certain successful experiences. One of these was the creation of critical training spaces, in conjunction with the national government of El Salvador, particularly the Diploma in Non-Sexist and Inclusive Pedagogy, created with the participation of members of SEPA in collaboration with the FMLN government.

SEPA's pursuit of an alternative education is based on two fundamental premises: establishing CCS as a counter-power to neoliberal governance and building an intercultural education system. Both are discussed below.

In practical terms, CCS is a transnational counter-power strategy to confront neoliberal Western education governance in the Americas. The interviewee from Argentina explained that, in the face of neoliberal governance, the network produces ongoing criticism in different countries, generates knowledge, which is published in the Revista Intercambio (Exchange Magazine), as well as political education spaces.

From the beginning, solidarity among community organizations was fundamental to SEPA. As Arriaga Lemus states: “The solidarity we had in mind was not charity [...] sometimes people think that solidarity means giving someone help because they have no resources or are very weak, or because they are victims. That was not the kind of solidarity we wanted to build.” The SEPA Network did not seek to build “solidarity from the strong to the weak,” but rather a collaboration built on diversity and heterogeneity, based on the realities of different countries. There have been very important expressions of solidarity within Latin America, from North to South, but also from South to North, as discussed in what follows.

In this sense, Duhalde affirms that “one of the most fundamental points of the SEPA Network is international solidarity, where it has had the greatest impact and level of collaboration.” Duhalde continues, “Every time a right is violated in the Americas, we find out about it through the SEPA Network.” SEPA's solidarity has also supported resistance campaigns by the Confederation of Education Workers of the Argentine Republic (CTERA) in Argentina, particularly during Mauricio Macri’s terms in office and, currently, in the face of Javier Milei’s “anarcho-capitalist” policies.

It is easy to recall significant events of international solidarity. Arriaga Lemus remembers the series of protests at the Canadian Embassy in Mexico in 2015 to demand attention to the financial needs of Canadian teachers in British Columbia. Arriaga Lemus recalls that when the members of SEPA arrived at the Canadian Embassy, the staff came out to greet them and asked, “What can we do for you? Do you want us to talk to your government?” And they replied, “No, we want you to solve the problem you have in Canada with the teachers in British Columbia.” Similarly, SEPA took action to support student mobilization against the increase in higher education fees at the Quebec consulate.

There have also been episodes of solidarity between Canada and Mexico, such as when the Mexican government arrested teachers from Section Nine of the National Coordination of Education Workers (CNTE), who were fighting against the 2013 education reform, and the British Columbia Teachers Federation (BCTF) sent a solidarity brigade to accompany the Mexican teachers’ protests.

SEPA has also maintained campaigns in support of the National Union of Educators (UNE) in Ecuador. In 2016, when Rafael Correa’s government repressed the union, seized its facilities and refused to recognize it as a representative organization of teachers, SEPA issued statements that were circulated by organizations across the continent and held acts of solidarity at Ecuadorian embassies in different countries in the region. Arriaga Lemus adds that “the best solidarity is that which is built on a common agenda of struggle. And when there are struggles, for example, for budget increases, we must also fight for budget increases in our own countries, not just in the union and the country that is struggling.”

Solidarity has spread to other areas, such as when, in 2009, SEPA joined the Honduran teachers’ protests in opposition to Juan Orlando Hernández’s coup d'état against Manuel Zelaya. This resulted in the arrest of Steve Stewart, one of the founders of the network. This solidarity has spread to other organizations that are not part of the network, such as the Single Union of Education Workers of Peru (SUTEP), which offered expressions of political support during times of political mobilization.

However, solidarity has also been limited by the objective circumstances of SEPA's work, particularly the funding required for its activities. Duhalde considers that due to issues such as lack of financial resources and logistical difficulties, “the possibility of intervention is limited. Sometimes it is not possible to provide more support due to financial difficulties, and therefore solidarity sometimes falls a little short.”

The construction of an intercultural educational paradigm in which indigenous knowledge occupies a central position.

In Issue 16 of Revista Intercambio, it is stated that, despite the resistance of indigenous peoples in the Americas, “we remain embedded in an education system that is not designed based on our own reality but is a faithful copy of [foreign] models” (Red Sepa, 2021, p. 3). Based on that reflection, it could be said that the current education circumstances in Latin America are a result of one of the layers of modernity: positivism, a perspective that denies or fails to recognize the creative power of the ancestral knowledge of indigenous peoples, as well as their abilities to understand the world.

Within the structure of the SEPA Network, there is the Continental Network of Indigenous Educators (REI), which brings together community, student, and teacher organizations that promote an education that “responds to the cultural needs, worldviews and aspirations of indigenous peoples as part of public systems” (Chen, 2013, p. 1). This network considers that explanations constructed about nature, the world and life are elements specific to each culture, and generate different ways of interpreting the world (Jiménez, 2013).

Stewart recalls that the First Meeting of Indigenous Educators was held in Oaxaca (Mexico) in May 2006. The host organization was Section 22 of the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación – National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE), and at that meeting, the delegates decided to form a continuous collaboration network. The first members were indigenous educators from Canada, Bolivia, Guatemala and Mexico.

Among other things, this initiative was conceived as a means of vindicating and defending the ancestral pedagogical knowledge of indigenous peoples. Chen (2013), a member of SEPA, argues that, in Latin America, “the state of each country designs curricula that vaguely include indigenous cultural elements, which become merely ornamental” (p. 1). Chen (2013) further believes that “educators must facilitate exchange in order to systematize ancestral knowledge” in order to preserve them (p. 1). The systematization of such knowledge has also brought together and promoted the exchange of different indigenous education organizations, such as the Consejo Nacional de Educación Maya – National Council for Maya Education (CEM), the Coalición de Maestros y Promotores Indígenas de Oaxaca – Coalition of Indigenous Teachers and Promoters of Oaxaca (CMPIO), the Consejo Nacional Indígena del Cauca – National Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) and others.

SEPA's work constantly denounces the “ornamental” status of indigenous knowledge in national education curricula. To this end, it has created opportunities for in-depth discussion of indigenous knowledge in the field of education. The results of these discussions feed into the network's educational initiatives. This activism is a key feature of the organization. According to Arriaga Lemus, the SEPA's continental work “has allowed us to recover and value the richness of the thinking and construction of our colleagues, teachers of indigenous education.”

This claim is shown by both the theoretical developments in education generated by indigenous peoples (such as the communal experience in southern Mexico) and by the experience of various indigenous educational projects throughout the Americas, such as the experience of the Nasa people and other indigenous peoples of Cauca, Colombia, in the development of curriculum construction (Campo, 2021). All these experiences have led to the construction of “own forms of education” (Isch). Although there are projects and initiatives focused on community-based curriculum development, heavily influenced by indigenous knowledge – such as the Plan for the Transformation of Education in Oaxaca (PTEO) in southern Mexico – the development of an alternative education system specific to indigenous peoples is a work in progress.

For decades, neoliberal governance has prevailed in Latin American education, focusing largely on the efficiency of educational processes. This agenda has been promoted by multilateral organizations, development banks and local organizations, generally linked to the private sector and promoters of managerial educational projects, driven by national educational policies (Vidal, 2018; Jarquín, 2021). One effect of this neoliberal governance has been the displacement of various forms of educational organization based on community, cooperative and decolonial criteria (Guzmán, 2023). These alternative educational projects are promoted by local pedagogical movements, teachers’ unions, student organizations, and community and grassroots organizations, which are often critical of neoliberalism in education. These actors have also been largely displaced from educational governance through policies that have considered them as objects of intervention rather than subjects capable of producing a valid pedagogical discourse.

In this context, the SEPA Network is highly relevant to regional education. SEPA is both a collective actor resisting neoliberalism in education and a locus to produce regional educational meaning, based on a critical perspective with significant decolonial content. In its work, it has succeeded in promoting an educational agenda for change, in which the voice of marginalized sectors plays a leading role. SEPA’s activities have been carried out independently of the region’s progressive governments, which has enabled it to remain autonomous and allowed it to engage with community networks as it sees fit.

SEPA's experience is fundamental as a counterweight to neoliberal educational governance, and the construction of an intercultural educational paradigm, with a focus on indigenous knowledge, is essential. The development of the CCS within SEPA has fostered the spread of a paradigm of solidarity that serves as the foundation for a platform against neoliberalism in education, while also enabling the production and dissemination of knowledge aimed at transforming education. This is evident in the theoretical and practical critique that SEPA formulates against the layers of modernity – Christianity, positivism, capitalism and liberalism (Saito et al., 2023) – through the dissemination of indigenous knowledge, the fight against the commodification of education and the strengthening of community-based principles in education. However, despite the scope and community benefits of solidarity within the network, certain limitations persist that hinder the educational and social transformation project, such as the difficulty of securing stable financial resources to carry out activities (resources which come from solidarity agreements among the organizations that make up SEPA) and logistical problems stemming from geographical distance.

As the editors of this Special Issue point out, the categories that compose the layers of modernity are often taken for granted or not studied. However, educational experiences such as SEPA allow us to see how much modernity-coloniality (Quijano, 1992) is also combated from communities both in theory and in practice. At the same time, despite SEPA’s contributions to educational struggles in the Americas, there is still much work to be done. This is mainly due to the need for financial resources to sustain educational activities and mobilization. Although SEPA's international cooperation has provided the necessary resources for some campaigns, these are often insufficient. Nevertheless, SEPA's activities continue to expand, now toward the construction of a continental educational project that seeks to address the growth of the far right in education, an increasingly widespread phenomenon.

This article analyzed the SEPA Network as an organization that, through the construction of CCS, has sought to confront neoliberal governance in education in the Americas. SEPA is the heir to a set of critical and decolonial educational and political traditions that have been confronting educational neoliberalism in Latin America for decades, and it is also one of the key players in that process. In its work, the diversity of organizations and individuals that make up the network, the generation of common projects, and the promotion of the ancestral educational knowledge of indigenous peoples have been of great relevance. Currently, educational governance in the Americas continues to be a “contested space” (Edwards, 2024). Thus, a dispute is unfolding in the realm of educational governance, in which a wide variety of actors participate, but where certain sectors stand out, still promoting policies that favor the permanence of managerial models in education, while others seek to transform regional education in an anti-neoliberal direction and vindicate the ancestral knowledge of the region’s indigenous peoples.

At this historic moment, when a conservative, market-friendly educational narrative has emerged in various parts of Latin America, both CCS and the critical interculturality promoted by SEPA offer valuable approaches for building an education that meets the needs of educational communities. However, SEPA's limitations also prompt a discussion of the long road that still lies ahead in building an education system oriented toward the common good.