Drawing on an ethnographic monitoring engagement with Kichwa intercultural bilingual educators in the Peruvian Amazon, we argue for ethnographic monitoring as a method and the continua of biliteracy as a heuristic for mapping biliteracy teaching in Indigenous contexts of bilingualism. Through our mapping, we uncover tensions in the teaching of…

This article provides a descriptive account of the workings of an Indigenous-led teacher training initiative in the Peruvian Amazon (Formabiap) and considers the extent of its transdisciplinary pedagogic approach, with a special focus on the ontological and epistemological stakes of intercultural knowledge exchanges in the context of contemporary…

Yupana Inca Tawa Pukllay (YITP) is a ludic didactic resource based on semiotic alternation that, using the reading of numbers in the Inca numeral system, improves its equivalent Indo-Arabic reading. Twelve children from first to fourth grade of a bilingual (Spanish-Quechua), multi-grade elementary school in a small rural Peruvian community were…

Ticuna (ISO: tca) is a language isolate spoken in the northwestern Amazon Basin (Brazil, Colombia, Peru). Ticuna has more speakers than almost all other Indigenous Amazonian languages and -- unlike most languages of the area -- is still learned by children. Yet academic linguists have given it relatively little research attention. Therefore, to…

In this article, I discuss a pervasive ethical issue when undertaking action research (AR) projects with communities that have been historically marginalized: how outsiders' learned, normative Western thinking makes building equitable relationships difficult. I then offer strategies for researchers coming from privileged, outsider positionalities…

Previous studies have shown that language contributes to humans' ability to orient using landmarks and shapes their use of frames of reference (FoRs) for memory. However, the role of environmental experience in shaping spatial cognition has not been investigated. This study addresses such a possibility by examining the use of FoRs in a nonverbal…

The Shiwiar are an indigenous nation of Ecuador and Peru, and they are one of five ethnic groups collectively known as the Jivaroan people. In stark contrast to the other Jivaroan groups, the Shiwiar have largely been overlooked by local governments until recently and are still popularly considered to be an offshoot of their closely related…

Drawing from long-term ethnographic research in the Andes, this paper examines one Quechua-speaking Indigenous bilingual educator's trajectory as she traversed (and traverses) from rural highland communities of southern Peru through development as teacher, teacher educator, researcher, and advocate for Indigenous identity and language…

This article discusses emerging research on youth and Indigenous languages. Based on a comparative and international Indigenous education study in Peru and the United States, the intersection between Indigenous community spaces, schools, and languages is examined. Given global trends of Indigenous language loss, comparative research provides the…

This paper analyses a "critical moment" in the educational trajectories of young indigenous children in Peru: the transition to primary school. It addresses the inequalities in educational services that affect indigenous children, before looking at the micro-level processes that take place in school settings, through a focus on two…

Much has been written about "indianismo" and "indigenismo" and their literary and social meaning, but rarely have these two "criollo" movements been positioned face to face with actual Indigenous expression. This article attempts a preliminary pass at just such an approach by comparing four indigenous themes…

This article investigates discourses of intercultural education, taking as its starting point two "encounters" in 2010 with contrasting aims and expectations of intercultural education. One is the launch of the 2010 Global Monitoring Report, where intercultural education is viewed as a means of overcoming marginalisation and promoting…

In the Andes, a phonological transference known as "motoseo" has acquired ideological weight. People think that bilingual speakers of Quechua and Spanish "confuse" the vowels when speaking Spanish and that they are inferior to the ones who do not. In this article, I analyze the ideological agenda of the racialized verbal…

The Peruvian national indigenous federation established a bilingual, intercultural teachers' training program to counter stereotypes of indigenous people portrayed in the authoritarian, monolingual Spanish national curriculum, and to enhance language preservation, ethnic mobilization, and cultural survival. A complementary transitional bilingual…