This article critically examines bilingual, intercultural education policies and practices in the context of the implementation of these policies in early childhood education. Specifically, it seeks to provide ethnographic background on the incorporation of Indigenous communities into preschools, through the participation of the Indigenous Culture…

Chile is a well-known country for its socio-economic and racial inequalities, especially in education. Despite it being prolific, research on educational inequalities has neglected the question about the persistence of colonial dynamics in the educational sphere and how the experience of colonisation has shaped contemporary social relations.…

The article analyses the Mapuche language and culture teaching practices of a rural school in the Chilean Araucanía region run by Mapuche teachers, aimed at reinforcing the language, culture and identity of children. Based on a comparative study of two school ethnographies, the article shows and discusses the ways children learn to be Mapuche by…

As colonial legacies, racial dynamics, lingering discrimination, and even violence against Indigenous people and children, especially the Mapuche people (the focus of this study and the largest Indigenous group in the country), continue in Chilean society, research on how their teachers learn and how they perceive their learning has become even…

This article examines from a historical and contemporary perspective the political, educational and linguistic demands of Mapuche intellectuals and organisations and how they have been addressed by public policy in Chile. In particular, the article focuses on the Araucanía Region, part of the ancestral territory of the Mapuche people. We adopt a…

The Aymara of the Andes use absolute (cardinal) frames of reference for describing the relative position of ordinary objects. However, rather than encoding them in available absolute lexemes, they do it in lexemes that are intrinsic to the body: "nayra" ("front") and "qhipa" ("back"), denoting east and west,…

In this paper, we analyse the cultural models (or folk theory of language) that the Mapuche intellectual elite have about Mapudungun, the native language of the Mapuche people still spoken today in Chile as the major minority language. Our theoretical frame is folk linguistics and studies of language ideology, but we have also taken an applied…

This article illustrates how Mapuche Indigenous knowledge (Kimun) and language (Mapudungun) incorporated into an Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) program of a school within a Mapuche context in Chile creates decolonizing counter-hegemonic narratives as forms of culturally relevant pedagogy. Based on a six-month school ethnography, this…