Online hate speech against the Mapuche people: pre-service history teachers’ educational responses to a teaching scenario

Abstract

Introduction Hate speech directed against the Mapuche people, historically perpetuated through the media's mechanisms of racialisation, has found a powerful platform for amplification on social media. This article analyses how trainee how history teachers conceptualise this phenomenon from a pedagogical perspective and what analytical and pedagogical strategies they employ to address it in the classroom. Methods A qualitative-interpretative approach was adopted, using an integrated case study design, in which each of the 22 written responses from trainee history teachers at a university in southern Chile constituted a unit of analysis. Participants were selected through purposive sampling from an intact cohort, and their consent was obtained once the coursework had been marked. The analysis combined deductive and inductive coding, carried out independently by two researchers, with discrepancies resolved through discussion and, where necessary, through the arbitration of a third party. Results The participants broadly recognise the descriptive components of hate speech – stigmatisation, generalisation, dehumanisation and the association between Mapuche demands and al violence – but make little reference to the frameworks of structural racism, coloniality and racialisation, and only marginally to Mapuche knowledge and studies; furthermore, a technical-instrumental conception of digital citizenship predominates. Two exploratory findings emerged from the inductive phase: the spontaneous the appearance of the expression `thieving Indians' in five responses, indicating that the phrase is culturally recognisable to the participants, although there is no evidence of its circulation within their social circles; and the reported use of generative artificial intelligence in six responses, which was examined without any controlled comparison and is therefore regarded as hypothesis-generating. Discussion The implications for initial teacher training are analysed, in particular the interaction between critical media literacy, a decolonial perspective and the development of professional judgement in digital environments, as well as the educational tensions associated with the use of generative AI.