The purpose of this analysis was to study the linguistic features of Kaqchikel, a Mayan language currently spoken in Guatemala and increasingly in the United States, in an effort to better prepare teachers of English as a second language (ESL) or English as a foreign language (EFL) to address the distinct needs of a frequently neglected and…

Theories of language acquisition have highlighted the importance of adult speakers as active participants in children's language learning. However, in many communities children are reported to be rarely directly engaged by their caregivers. This raises the possibility that children in these communities learn language from observing 3 rd party…

Community-based forestry has received much recent attention as an effort to protect threatened Southern forests by linking conservation with sustainable livelihoods. Many researchers have emphasized the importance of effective organization for successful community-based forestry. While significant attention has been paid to community-level…

The Maya civilization developed from about 300 B.C., predating the Aztecs who flourished in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. One of the challenges of this lesson is to present a cohesive history of the Maya to fourth- and fifth-graders within the context of an art lesson. A glyph is a symbol. A symbol is something that represents something else,…

This research created a technology-based learning environment at two schools belonging to the National Council of Educational Development (CONAFE) for indigenous children in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. The purpose of the study was to describe the educational impact of using the Classmate PC netbooks and the Sugar Educational Platform in the…

This article examines sign languages that belong to a complex of indigenous sign languages in Mesoamerica that K'iche'an Maya people of Guatemala refer to collectively as Meemul Tziij. It explains the relationship between the Meemul Tziij variety of the Yukatek Maya village of Chican (state of Yucatan, Mexico) and the hitherto undescribed Meemul…

In Mexico almost ten million people speak an indigenous language. Recognizing the pluralistic nature of the nation, the Mexican Constitution mandates bilingual-intercultural education; in reality, however, the school system typically imposes the Spanish language and dominant culture on indigenous children. For these children their academic success…

This study used oral survey methods to examine first the diversity of Meso-American languages and second the potential language maintenance or loss of these languages among Meso-American language speakers in Wiregrass country (North Florida-South Georgia). Language shift, the process of gradually changing from one first language to another first…

Students at Tucson High School in Arizona, part of Tucson Unified School District's highly successful Mexican American Studies (MAS) K-12 program, the largest in the nation, are taught Indigenous concepts, including Panche Be (seek the root of the truth), and the Aztec and Maya calendars. The author speaks to the students about the relationship…

Many Mayan languages make use of a special dependent verb form (the Agent Focus, or AF verb form), which alternates with the normal transitive verb form (the synthetic verb form) of main clauses when the subject of a transitive verb is focused, questioned or relativized. It has been a centerpiece of research in Mayan morphosyntax over the last…

Educators in the field of "family literacy" have identified multiple approaches to family literacy programs (FLPs), and have underscored the need to identify and make explicit the philosophical orientations of their own programs. This was the task undertaken in this article, which focused on a FLP in south Florida that served the needs…

Early journalistic reviews (e.g., Gold, Ebert, and Kael) of "El Norte" (1983), Gregory Nava's first major film, identify it as an epic. In "El Norte" the siblings Enrique and Rosa, two Guatemalan Amerindians, leave their native village on a quest to what for them is the mythical land in the North. Although "El Norte"…

Indigenous education in Guatemala is currently undergoing a massive overhaul in the depth and breadth of its reach in Maya areas. Although much can be said about the re-evaluation and incorporation of indigenous culture, language and worldview into the schools' curricula, it is still failing to reach the country's adult population. As a result of…

This article consists of more than fifty interviews with Spanish and Yucatec-Mayan men from Yucatan, Mexico, to the United States. Based on interview responses, I contend that Yucatec-Mayan immigrants support Jeffrey Cohen's (2004) "household model" and use a ch'i'ibal-centered, or family-centered, decision-making process to frame…

In this article the author describes a project in which professors and preservice art educators from Northern Illinois University (NIU) collaborated with teens and members of the DeKalb Latino local community center to create a mural celebrating a traditional Aztec narrative. The mural project involved professors, university students, teenagers…