Bilingual Education and Language Policy in the Global South

Jo Arthur Shoba, Feliciano Chimbutane, Jo Arthur Shoba, Feliciano Chimbutane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135068851
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume considers a range of ways in which bilingual programs can make a contribution to aspects of human and economic development in the global South. The authors examine the consequences of different policies, programs, and pedagogies for learners and local communities through recent ethnographic research on these topics. The revitalization of minority languages and local cultural practices, management of linguistic and cultural diversity, and promotion of equal opportunities (both social and economic) are all explored in this light.

Section 1

Language-in-Education Policy across Cultural and Historical Contexts

1 ‘El Niño Debe Aprender En Su Idioma’

A Teacher’s Approximations to Language Policy in an Indigenous Peruvian School

Laura A. Valdiviezo

INTRODUCTION

Research into language policy (LP) in the multilingual Andes entails taking a sociohistorical perspective and examining macroprocesses involved in the construction of the asymmetrical statuses of languages and the effects of such inequalities on their speakers and society. This direction constitutes only half of the journey as inevitably this research needs to be about local implementations of policy, which represent not only the interpretation of LP in thought and action in specific spaces but also its contestation and thus the creation of policy from the ground up. In this perspective, a focus on local teachers’ discourses (beliefs and practices) continues to be central to understanding LP. This chapter discusses research that employs a multidirectional and multidimensional (vertical/horizontal) analysis of LP (Valdiviezo 2013) and thus aims at understanding macro- and microprocesses that have impacted current efforts for the revitalization, maintenance, and development of Indigenous languages through intercultural bilingual education programs in Peru.

In the context of multiethnic and multilingual Peru, educación intercultural bilingüe (intercultural bilingual education, EBI) as public education offered throughout the entire education system (General Education Law, Article 20) remains largely associated with programs that focus on Spanish and Indigenous language teaching and learning for rural Indigenous populations. EBI’s creation as official education policy in the mid-1990s was preceded by a history of predominant ideologies of language homogenization—where until the mid-1970s constitutional laws declared Spanish as the official language of the country. EBI is also influenced, although to a much lesser degree, by more recent discourses of linguistic pluralism. Certainly, a failed first attempt to have Quechua—the most widely spoken Indigenous language—share official status with Spanish in 1975 was followed almost two decades later, in 1993, by a constitutional law that mandated the official status of Spanish as well as Quechua, Aymara, and all Indigenous languages in regions of the country where they have predominant use. Framed in a commitment to create a more unified and democratic society, the promotion of linguistic pluralism by the government has developed along with other ‘on paper’ initiatives that symbolize a change toward an explicit de jure endorsement of diversity. For example, the Peruvian government declared 2012 Año de la Integración Nacional y el Reconocimiento de Nuestra Diversidad, or year of national integration and the recognition of our diversity. However, the intercultural discourse that seems to illuminate official initiatives supporting issues of pluralism remains one-sided. This limitation is evident in the definition of EBI as public education for the Indigenous but not for the Spanish-speaking sector, the latter remaining unaffected by intercultural initiatives that could meaningfully connect schools and multilingual education in all rural and urban sectors.

Arguably, forces of homogenization and pluralism continue to coexist in characteristic tension in current EBI policy. Evidence of this tension has been clear in ethnographic studies that have focused on LP and bilingual education not only in Peru but also in other countries of the Andean region in Latin America (Hornberger 1988; King 2001; Valdiviezo 2006). (Also see studies on the politics of bilingual education by García [2003]; Arnold and Yapita [2006].)

To analyze a complex setting characterized by the dynamics of multidirectional and multidimensional forces, I draw on postcolonial approaches to education (Willinsky 1998) and on seminal work on linguistic anthropology (Hymes 1980, 1996). Additionally, the frame of my analysis employs contributions from ethnographic research that has studied the normalization of language homogenization as an ideological mechanism to structure inequalities in schools and society (McCarty et al. 2011). This analysis also draws on the work of Peruvian educators concerning language and intercultural discourse in bilingual education and education policy (Zúñiga and Gálvez [2002] develop a thorough analysis of discourse in bilingual education legislation from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century). Within this framework, I pay particular attention to the exclusion of Indigenous languages from official and institutional spaces, a form of systemic exclusion that has allowed building the dominance of Spanish—a colonial language that was spoken at first by only a small sector but that is now spoken as a first language by an estimated 84 percent or more of the population, this in a country where dozens of Indigenous languages are spoken, even after the disappearance of many others (Escobar 1972; Pozzi-Escot 1998; Chirinos Rivera 2001).

While language dominance per se does not constitute a negative outcome, it ought to be contextualized in the structures and processes that shaped it, including the ideologies of exclusion that justified this dominance as well as the marginalization of speakers of other languages, particularly ethnolinguistic minorities. The understanding of complex ideologies at play in EBI warrants the analysis of beliefs and practices enacted in the local Indigenous schools. In this chapter, the focus of this analysis is the case of Blanca, an EBI third-grade teacher and school principal whom I observed and interviewed as part of a larger ethnographic study (Valdiviezo 2006, 2009a). Data analyzed for this chapter include interviews with Blanca in Spanish, interview notes in English (taken alongside voice recordings of interviews), field notes from classroom observations of Blanca’s teaching, and observations of events outside the classroom. I translated all data from Spanish into English.

Blanca’s case study reveals LP in tension in the EBI classroom as it also allows a deeper understanding of the crucial role of teachers in policy implementation in programs that serve historically and socioeconomically excluded populations. As such, while not generalizable, Blanca’s experience resonates with that of the Andean teacher more broadly, as well as with the experiences of the many teachers across the world who teach culturally and linguistically diverse students who are speakers of nondominant languages.

HOMOGENIZATION AND MESTIZAJE IN LP

Official LP discourse in Peru may reveal a tension between forces of homogenization and pluralism, but overall, this discourse has tended to reflect the prevalence of a homogenizing colonial project that has left indelible marks in the thinking and practices that permeate inequalities in institutions and society today. Interestingly, the metanarrative of mestizaje, which portrays national Peruvian identity as a harmonious mixture of Spanish and Indigenous culture, has been an important part of this project. As with other processes of colonialism across the globe that construct the political, epistemological, economic, cultural, and linguistic hegemony of colonial powers (Blaut 1993; Willinsky 1998; Mignolo 2000), mestizaje in the homogenizing colonial project in Peru has been successful at establishing the dominance and authority of non-Indigenous sectors to the grave socioeconomic and political detriment of ethnolinguistic minorities. Ethnolinguistic and racial minorities constitute the peoples most severely affected by political violence, poverty, lack of educational access (including the provision of quality education and infrastructure), and lack of services that can be taken for granted by other sectors—generally, Spanish-speaking urban sectors—in the country.

In the genesis of the colonial project about 500 years ago, Indigenous languages, cultures, literacies, and knowledges seemed doomed to disappear. However, as a postcolonial reality, the Andean region continues to be vastly diverse multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual in ways that transcend national boundaries (López 2001). Moreover, there is undeniable evidence of mixtures and interrelations that have shaped the multicultural, multilingual, and multiethnic identity of Peruvian society, which should be taken into account when analyzing LP, as this evidence allows transcending a tendency to dichotomize the conceptualization and implementation of LP. Thus, far from limiting this view to an oppressor-oppressed/colonizer-colonized dichotomy or to an idealized harmonious diversity, the intention in this chapter is to emphasize mixtures and conflict as a common part of the discourse, beliefs, and social practice reproducing and reinterpreting LP.

A range of ethnographic work conducted in the Andes has found how intercultural processes have permeated and influenced the epistemologies, literacies, and cultural practices of different (dominant and subaltern) groups (Stobart and Howard 2002), or what the Afro-Peruvian writer and folklorist Nicomedes Santa Cruz reconceptualizes as a dynamic and broad definition of the process of mestizaje. Such important realizations, however, face the historical construction of well-engrained ideologies that tell a different story. Certainly, mestizaje in public and particularly in influential literary and political discourse has constituted a metanarrative about the diverse nature of the Peruvian identity, limiting it to the mixture of Spanish and Indigenous heritages, where the Spanish heritage has unquestionably prevailed. As De la Cadena (2001) asserts, through the work of intellectuals the project of mestizaje established and reaffirmed Western hegemony and the dominance of a Spanish-speaking elite in the country. The writer and anthropologist José María Arguedas (1975) has analyzed the work of generations of intellectuals in the Indigenismo movement in this respect. Moreover, Santa Cruz qualifies mestizaje as a semiotic trap that blurs intercultural as well as historically conflictive relations between groups (Santa Cruz 2004). In a similar critical vein, Cornejo-Polar (1997) declares that mestizaje not only in Peru but also in Latin America more widely has turned into an ideologized concept in the extreme, a concept that explains diverse sociocultural strata as harmonious uncontested space.

The critiques of the project of mestizaje as a metanarrative confirming the natural supremacy of the Spanish identity prove useful to the examination of LP. Understanding mestizaje as colonial project allows uncovering the purposeful construction of dominance, not only of a group of people but also of a specific language, culture, literacy, and worldview associated with them. Mestizaje portrays a mask of diversity that fits the imagined head of homogeneity always gazing to the north. In this light, it is possible to argue that LP policy in Peru has tended to respond to a colonial project of homogenization as much as to an ideologized concept of mestizaje. For LP analysis, these critiques as well as Santa Cruz’s reconceptualization of mestizaje as a dynamic and broad concept represent a counterhegemonic proposal that acknowledges the multilayered coexistence of ideologies, conflict, and power inequalities in a diverse Peruvian society.

THE ROLE OF EDUCATION

Much of the knowledge achieved through conquest and colonization was understood to legitimate the political and cultural domination of imperialism. The resulting perspective on the world formed an educational legacy that we have now to reconsider. (Willinsky 1998: 3)

The ideologies permeating conflict and mixtures in the Peruvian society have been central to defining education, schooling, and teaching as the means to build an imaginary homogenous society that acknowledges a mestizo identity as a merely racial mixture of Spanish and Indigenous features that recites one creed, embraces an occidental worldview, and speaks the Spanish language (Valdiviezo and Valdiviezo Arista 2012). (See discussions on the project of castellanización, or of language homogenization as a colonial and postcolonial project, in Valdiviezo [forthcoming]. In a similar vein, see studies on colonial Hispanization like Fossa [2005]. Also find a discussion of educational policy as colonial project in Willinsky [1998]; Wiley [2010].) Constructed as such, the mestizo identity not only renders invisible the contributions of African, Middle Eastern, and Asian peoples to the past and present of the Peruvian society, but it also confines identity to the necessary dominance of an imaginary single (non-Indigenous, non-African, non-Asian, etc.) language, culture, and epistemology. Bilingualism or multilingualism may have a place in this project in the form of the European languages of the former colonial world powers.

As discussed above, historically these ideologies have aided in the construction of discourses of deficit in relation to Indigenous languages, cultures, literacies, and worldviews. Debates surrounding the rights and citizenship of Indigenous people, particularly when attached to economic interests associated with the exploitation of their land, continue to be central in Peruvian politics. In its most extreme version, as current television and radio interviews with politicians and authorities, including the clergy, make evident (field notes on interview to President Alan García, Willax TV January 28, 2011), the Indigenous has often come to represent the cause of social, economic, and political problems that ought to be extirpated through education. The ideologies of exclusion present in these debates are not unique to Indigenous people in Peru, as research in other regions of the Americas and the world reveals (Lomawaima and McCarty 2006; McCarty et al. 2011). In EBI, such ideologies coexist with de jure policy promoting Indigenous languages and cultures, a discussion I undertake in my analysis of Peruvian education and LP legislation in the following section.

General Education Law, Article 20—EBI

In the Peruvian General Education Law, EBI refers to the preservation of Indigenous languages and to the promotion of their practice and development. EBI policy takes into account neither issues of language loss such as the recovery of endangered languages through their inclusion in the education of heritage speakers, nor the teaching of Indigenous languages to non-Indigenous populations. While not specified through written law, it is also important to note that the issue of Indigenous language development may depend on decisions over the creation and standardization of a writing system. Altogether, these decisions continue to be part of much-heated debates among language experts and classroom practitioners in Peru (Valdiviezo 2006).

Two important overarching topics permeate the five mandates concerning EBI in Article 20 of the General Education Law: the nature of the provision of language education (i.e., language used as medium of teaching and learning, or as subject of study) and the incorporation of Indigenous knowledges in the curriculum alongside Indigenous languages in education.

In Article 20 of the General Education Law, bilingual...