Intercultural bilingual education (Educación bilingüe intercultural) is a language planning model employed in public education throughout Latin America. It arose as a political movement asserting space for indigenous languages and cultures in the education system. IBE consists of various bilingual curriculum designs meant to address the educational needs of indigenous communities.
Since the late 20th century, IBE has become an important, more or less successful instrument of governmental language planning in several Latin American countries. These include bilingual education in Mayan languages in Guatemala, Quechua in Peru, and Maya in Mexico.
Types of education in bilingual and bi-cultural contexts
As language planning became more intentional due to indigenous rights movements, theorists adopted standard terminology to classify different types multilingual educational programs. Terminology from bilingual education models, such as Colin Baker's model, has been employed in IBE policy and parallels future models on intercultural bilingual education. Below are the five main types of Intercultural bilingual education. Type of education Learners' mother tongue Language of instruction Social and educational goals Linguistic goalsSubmersionMinority languageMajority languageAssimilationMonolingualism in dominant languageTransitionMinority languageTransition from minority language to majority languageAssimilationRelative monolingualism in dominant language (subtractive bilingualism)ImmersionMajority languageBilingual, with initial importance of L2 (minority language)Pluralism and developmentBilingualism and biliteracyMaintenanceMinority languageBilingual, with emphasis on L1 (minority language)Maintenance, preservation pluralism and developmentBilingualism and biliteracy in indigenous communitiesEnrichmentMinority and majority languageBilingual, with emphasis on creating a multilingual stateMaintenance, bringing multi-linguism into all populationsBilingualism and biliteracy at a national level
Linguistic input Submersion models prioritize teaching in the majority language and conduct all instruction in the majority language, although the students speak a minority language as their native language. These schools prohibit or discourage students from communicating in their first language during class hours and have traditionally employed school-wide policies punishing children for speaking with one another in the minority language during the school day. Transition models, in contrast, do use the student's first language initially as a bridge to monolingual instruction, but ultimately also seek to shift the state to a monolingual and monocultural society. Proponents of these models claim that children may be stigmatized for speaking an indigenous language and that Spanish provides more upward mobility. However, educators in IBE see intercultural education as a way to challenge racism and validate indigenous identities.PROEIB-Andes. (2006). Interculturalidad y bilingüismo en la educación superior: Desafíos a diez años de la PROEIB Andes [Interculturality and bilingualism in higher education: Challenges as PROEIB Andes celebrates ten years]. Cochabamba, Bolivia: PROEIB Andes. Children in IBE programs that encouraged multilingualism in Bolivia were found to develop a higher self-esteem on average than children in submersion programs. Submersion and transition programs are associated with the highest drop-out rates.
In contrast, immersion, enrichment and maintenance models seek to cultivate bilingual and biliterate students. Immersion and maintenance schools seek to value and teach in both indigenous and national culture, and they exhibit the highest graduation rates out of the four models. Immersion programs generally seek to strengthen the minority language in communities where it may be disappearing, whereas maintenance programs serve minority-language speakers. In a 2008 paper, cited by a POEIBE working paper, de Mejía instead groups maintenance and immersion systems together as they are not in widespread use, and excludes them from their typologies; however, there are some immersion schools in use. While theoretically immersion and maintenance schools correspond to the students' first language, in practice this distinction may not be as clear in communities that are undergoing language shift. Such communities may have both children who are bilingual before school, as well as those who speak only the majority or minority language. Mejía also distinguishes enrichment education as a distinct category of IBE in which bilingualism is sought beyond indigenous communities in the greater population.
It is important to recognize the widespread yet false belief that any minority language heritage language instruction will detract from learning and communication in majority language. Studies from the early twentieth century that purported to find an academic disadvantage for bilingual children often lacked controls for socioeconomic class and fluency during testing.
Intercultural aspect With this observation in mind, IBE models plan not just the linguistic input in the student's education, but also the cultural input. Intercultural education presents different “systems of knowledge, civilizational patterns, cultures and languages … in complementary distribution.” Immersion, maintenance, and enrichment models promote this method of learning. Submersion and transition models intend to assimilate indigenous communities into the mainstream culture.
There are disconnects between this theoretical model and how it is implemented pedagogically and politically. For example, teachers may have been personally educated in a submersion or transition model, as these are the oldest models, and may carry these elements into immersion or maintenance education. Additionally, some researchers question whether some IBE teachers have access to training in intercultural teaching or communicative-focused L2 instruction. While many Latin American universities have designed and support certification programs, training of IBE teachers in immersion or maintenance models is an ongoing challenge, as discussed below. Beyond this disconnect between the ideal model and its implementation, IBE also assumes that children are monolingual when they enter the education system. In areas such as the Mosquito Coast, children often are acquiring multiple languages before school begins. IBE's lack of power divisions between minority languages, and focus on bilingualism when more than two languages are present, may not serve the community's needs appropriately.
History in Latin America The immense linguistic diversity in Latin America is what in part gave rise to demand for programs that would integrate indigenous languages into educational policy. Brazil, for example, has the largest number of indigenous languages in the region with approximately 180. Additionally, in some nations, the majority of speakers natively speak one or more indigenous languages that are not the prestige language.
With the rise of indigenous activism in the 1970s, and controversy about multilingualism and previous bilingual education projects, a new education model of language maintenance and development emerged. This included an embrace of cultural aspects that were not exclusively linguistic: teaching aspects of everyday life culture, traditions, and world concepts. From the beginning of the 1980s, bilingual intercultural education was being developed in Latin America.
Influences
Government After the nation states gained independence in Latin America at the beginning of the 19th century, the elites imposed a model of unification based on the Criollo culture and Spanish or Portuguese language as used by the colonial rulers. This system reached only the privileged classes and those parts of the mestizo population speaking Spanish or Portuguese. The bilingual programs were all developed to be transitional, in order to prepare pupils for unilingual secondary and higher education in the dominant language. They contributed to a more widespread use of Spanish as common language. These were experimental projects of limited extension and duration, enabled by international aid, such as the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) or the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
In the 20th century, governments' attempts to educate the whole population in each country was based on a goal of assimilation. In other words, attempts to expand access to schooling to the whole population had the explicit goal of Hispanicization (castellanización) of indigenous peoples. Spanish was used as a language of instruction for learner groups, although few among more isolated indigenous communities understood it. Students did not have much success in learning, and there were high rates of class repetition or dropouts. The speakers of indigenous languages left school as illiterate and were stigmatized as uneducated indios. The use or even knowledge of an indigenous language became a social disadvantage, so many people stopped speaking these languages, but had sub-standard Spanish. Because of such language issues, for instance among indigenous peoples who moved to cities, they became uprooted, belonging fully neither to the indigenous or to the dominant culture.
Since the 1980s, many countries have passed laws recognizing linguistic and cultural rights. In countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico, constitutional reforms were realized that recognized indigenous languages and cultures. In most Latin American countries, IBE is under control of the respective country's Ministry of Education.
In most countries, bilingual/bicultural education does not reach the majority of the indigenous population, who often live outside the major cities, or in more isolated urban communities; in addition, it is applied only in primary education. Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico have passed laws directing such education of all indigenous speakers, and Paraguay intends for the entire student population to receive bilingual training.
NGOs Many non-governmental organizations aided in the development of intercultural bilingual programs throughout Latin America with varying levels of involvement and different motives. These included the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) as well as USAID and the World Bank's PEIA.
SIL The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), an evangelical institution based in Dallas, Texas, was the first institution to introduce bilingual education in Latin America for indigenous peoples. It had goals both of evangelization and aiding in the creation of intercultural bilingual programs. The first bilingual education programs of SIL started in Mexico and Guatemala in the 1930s, in Ecuador and Peru in the 1940s, and in Bolivia in 1955.
GTZ