Content uploaded by Luis Enrique Lopez
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Luis Enrique Lopez on Jun 06, 2022
Content may be subject to copyright.
What is educación intercultural bilingüe nowadays: results and challenges
Abstract
Luis Enrique López
The chapter includes a critical assessment of intercultural bilingual education (IBE), an education
model with at least four to five decades of implementation in Latin America. When the term was
coined and IBE began to influence educational and cultural decision-making Indigenous
populations were mostly monolingual in and Amerindian language and their settlements were
mostly rural and distant from the capital cities and the seats of cultural hegemony and power. Now
the situation is radically different, Indigenous peoples have reached the cities and the centres of
power, are either bilingual in different degrees and even monolingual in the language of power,
although they may now claim their indigeneity more than ever. Looking through these profound
social, cultural and economic changes the evolution of IBE will be examined to determine whether
it still responds or not to the different sociolinguistic scenarios that nowadays coexist in Latin
America due to the wider visibility and political influence Indigenous peoples have gained. Indeed,
Indigenous peoples have become an undeniably key political actor in the continent and their
collective and individual rights have achieved political and social recognition.
The analysis above mentioned will then help us look into IBE from a double perspective. On the
one side, we will examine IBE from the lens of language ideology, policy and planning, while, on
the other, we will analyse IBE from an educational viewpoint. In so doing, we shall establish its
main contributions to both language policy and planning as well as to educational policy and
planning in Latin America. This will be done following a two-fold perspective, a top-down one
which characterises official or governmental IBE and a bottom-up one resulting from the initiatives
and projects carried out by Indigenous intellectuals, communities and organisations. A factor that
will cut across this analysis is the rather recent process of ethnogenesis that Indigenous individuals
and populations are undergoing and which now shapes and strengthens their agency. The chapter
closes with an analysis of the challenges IBE faces to meet the contemporary needs of Indigenous
children, youngsters and adults that now claim their indigeneity, whether they are monolingual in
an Amerindian language, active or passive bilinguals or even monolinguals in the dominant
language that claim their right to re-learn and recuperate the patrimonial language of the
communities they feel entitled to be part of.