Bilingual education can promote a sense of school belonging for students through a shared valuing of students' home languages and cultures. This article explores how bilingual education contributes to sense of belonging for students who have more than one home language and are becoming trilingual in school. This qualitative study examines how a…

Recent scholarship indicates several benefits of mother tongue education (MTE) in supporting student learning. Within one Mayan community in Guatemala, Ixil is the mother tongue spoken at home and faces extinction due to Indigenous oppression and genocide. This qualitative case study highlights efforts of 13 teachers and administrators at one…

In this public story, we explore challenges and affordances of learning mathematics when the learner's primary language is not the primary language of instruction. We, the authors, are Mary Truxaw, a predominantly monolingual (English, with limited Spanish) mathematics educator and Eliana Rojas, a bilingual (Spanish and English)…

This study analyzed challenges faced by teachers in rural and Indigenous schools, and the impact of pedagogical mentorship in contributing towards more culturally and linguistically relevant education. Using a case from Guatemala, this article explored pedagogical mentorship as an in-service teacher training resource for multi-lingual and…

This paper presents estimates of production functions of reading and mathematics test scores to assess the effects of supply-side interventions, such as the provision of a community-based school management programme, bilingual education and multigrade teaching, on student learning in Guatemala. The efficiency and consistency of the estimates is…

This article is based on results from a baseline study for an intended intervention project in bilingual-intercultural education in the Municipality of San Miguel Ixtahuacan, in the Department of San Marcos, Guatemala. To a great extent the article deals with issues of bilingual education from the perspective of social justice. It analyses the…

In the wake of conversations about integrating macro- and micro-levels of linguistic analysis over the last 50 years, and following theoretical and methodological debates in the 1990s about investigating the dynamics of entire social systems, complexity theory is coming of age in educational linguistics. Central to the application of complexity…

The benefits of bilingual education for a disadvantaged indigenous population as an investment in human capital are significant. Students of bilingual schools in Guatemala have higher attendance and promotion rates, and lower repetition and dropout rates. Bilingual students receive higher scores on all subject matters, including mastery of…

This paper analyses the difference in academic achievement between indigenous and nonindigenous children that attend rural primary schools in Guatemala. The gap ranges between 0.8 and 1 standard deviation in Spanish, and approximately half that in Mathematics. A decomposition procedure suggests that a relatively small portion of the achievement…

This article describes an early childhood professional development project that took place in the summer of 2005 in Guatemala City. Located in Central America, Guatemala has a population of approximately 12.3 million people, including more than two million children under the age of 5 (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2007; UNICEF, 2004). Events…

This study focuses on the research literature available in the United States on the evolution of language policy and planning issues involved in bilingual education programs in Mayan communities in Guatemala. I begin with general comments regarding language policy and planning for bilingual programs for ethnic groups within the borders of…

Analyzed the formulation and implementation of educational policy processes in relation to private schools in Guatemala, focusing on bilingual education in a sample of six private schools. Findings document many characteristics of private schools in Guatemala, including inadequate teacher and administrator training and a lack of cooperation…

Describes the process for developing a bilingual curriculum for Guatemala's four largest Mayan language groups. The process took into account the Mayans' maintenance of a distinct linguistic and cultural identity. The results of this experimental curriculum and the current direction of bilingual education in Guatemala are discussed. (Author/CB)

Discusses presentation given by Rigoberta Menchu, 1992 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, at a meeting with Hispanic child caregivers in California. Discusses family life and childrearing among Guatemala's Mayan people, traditional ceremonies and symbols, becoming a leader, and the Mayan experience of resisting oppression. Discusses implications for…