‘Recuperando la dignidad humana [Recovering human dignity]’: Shuar mothers speak out on intercultural bilingual education

Abstract

This paper presents findings from interviews conducted in December 2011, with seven Shuar mothers of children in an intercultural bilingual school in the southern Amazon region of Ecuador. This study had two objectives: (1) to foreground the perspectives of Shuar parents towards intercultural bilingual education (IBE) as implemented in the Shuar pedagogical institute, and (2) to collaborate as an intercultural research team (North American-Shuar) to ensure linguistic and cultural authenticity of data collection, and analysis. As a Shuar mother herself, the co-author shares the same language and culture as the participants, which led to a deeper level of trust and openness in the interviews. Current studies claim that IBE is losing ground, partly because parents want their children schooled in Spanish – the language of power – and see the IBE system as inferior. However, these Shuar mothers expressed a different concern: IBE has been too intertwined with Salesian missions and must become decolonized in order to reflect authentic Shuar cultural values and educational practices.

Keywords:

• intercultural education
• bilingual education
• indigenous education
• decolonizing education
• parents’ perspectives
• cross-cultural research

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the University of San Francisco Jesuit Foundation and built upon an earlier study supported by the Fulbright Foundation. The authors want to express special gratitude to Steven L. Rubenstein (1962–2012), who made all of this possible.