Minorities' languages face transformation processes and struggle against many social and linguistic limitations. Education systems in these languages are not optimal to promote the teaching of ancestral knowledge and scientific research. This is the case of Kichwa, an Ecuadorian native language that more than half-million people speak with…

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…

This systematic literature review examines the panorama of interculturality in rural contexts of bilingual education in Latin America. It aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge in Latin America and identify key themes, challenges, and gaps in the field. The review highlights the importance of recognizing and…

Coloniality in education and language policies continues to impact Indigenous communities in implicit and complex ways. In this article, we describe the case of Colombia where, like in many other countries in the Global South, educational policy messages are contradictory. While ethno-education policies purport to sustain Indigenous languages and…

One of the central paradoxes of textbook authorship in Indigenous languages is that some of those for whom the textbooks are intended find it challenging to read them. Here, through examining cases of Quechua across the Andes in Peru and in Ecuador, we consider the role of orthography in this paradox. Textbook authors must decide on an alphabet…

In Ecuador directors of Indigenous education administer a Kichwa proficiency exam as a requirement for employment. This article considers promises and challenges of the exam, such as how standardized language ideologies manifest in it, and what it says about how institutional knowledge is classed, racialized, and urbanized. Furthermore, though…

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…

Indigenous education increasingly seeks to reclaim the institutions of state assimilation as spaces for the dissemination and support of localized forms of knowledge and language use and the valorization of alternative citizenship identities. In this study, I compare two schools in Ecuador to show how divergent ways of teaching Kichwa promote or…

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…

This study examines the motivations of learners studying Welsh in the city of Esquel, Argentine Patagonia. Welsh is considered a heritage immigrant language in this region, given the fact that a group of Welsh settlers arrived in 1865 and established successful settlements. After a flourishing period, the process of acculturation reduced the…

Public education policies governing language revitalization and the teaching of indigenous languages have been in place for more than 20 years in Chile. In this journey, there has been considerable progress nationwide in the education of a generation of children in an intercultural socio-educational environment. However, there still exist…

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…

The National Bilingual Programme was launched in order to promote English learning in Colombia. The failure of this programme and subsequent iterations is well-documented, and research has also examined some of its negative effects for different societal groups. However, a comprehensive study of the social justice implications of Colombia's…

This article offers a critical appraisal of "educación intercultural bilingüe," an educational model with at least five decades of implementation. When this term was coined, Indigenous populations were mostly monolingual and their settlements mostly rural and distant from the seats of cultural hegemony and power. The situation is now…