Contextualización transformativa de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe: A migrant Indigenous Andean community in the Galapagos Islands

ABSTRACT

Latin American countries have experienced demographic and linguistic changes since Educación Intercultural Bilingüe (EIB) was first developed. Yet, ministries of education continue to impose generic models that do not reflect the realities of migrant Indigenous groups, who experience linguistic and ethnic minoritisation processes. Based on our ongoing work with a migrant Salasaka Indigenous community from the Ecuadorian Andes living in Galapagos, a region in which the majority of the population does not identify as Indigenous nor speak Kichwa, we propose Contextualización Transformativa de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe (CTEIB). CTEIB 1) considers processes of enacting Indigeneity in migratory contexts; 2) reflects the dialogic influence of place on migrant Indigenous communities’ languages, traditional ecological knowledge, and culture; and 3) acknowledges the agency and creativity of Indigenous groups as transformative agents in maintaining their languages and Indigeneity outside their ancestral lands. This paper describes the theoretical underpinnings of CTEIB by building on the work of the Salasaka community in contextualising and adapting the Ecuadorian EIB programme to Galapagos. Beyond the importance of this work for migrant Indigenous communities, this work advocates for EIB programmes to address Indigenous migration in their design and implementation with implications for educational researchers, policy makers, and educators.

KEYWORDS:

• Educación Intercultural Bilingüe
• migration
• Indigenous education
• contextualización
• transformativa

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Salasaka community in Galapagos and our non-Indigenous teacher participants for sharing their experiences and time with us. We would also like to acknowledge the work of Amparo Naranjo who helped us in previous versions of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We decided to put forth the name of this framework and its acronym in Spanish because EIB programs are implemented mostly in Spanish-speaking regions of Latin America.

2 The varieties of Quechua spoken in Ecuador are known as Quichua, and the unified spelling is Kichwa (Haboud and Toapanta 2014; Muysken 2019).

3 We use migration to highlight the act of moving from one place to another and diaspora in reference to being away from, but still having an orientation towards a homeland, as well as a sense of group identity (Grossman 2019).

4 All quotations were originally in Spanish and Kichwa, and all translations are ours.