“As Soon as I See Is the Letter K, I Get a Headache”: Debates About Writing in Indigenous Languages in Intercultural Bilingual Education in Ecuador

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

My dissertation examines intercultural bilingual education in Ecuador. In 1988 the efforts of powerful indigenous organizations in Ecuador led to institutionalization of intercultural bilingual education for indigenous youth. This advance created a rare case where indigenous leaders were given autonomy over their own educational system. This school system has become the largest employer of indigenous individuals with higher education, often called “professionals,” in Ecuador. In the process, leaders have made careers out of their knowledge of Amerindian languages and cultural education. Kichwa (known as Quechua in other nation-states) is the indigenous language with the most speakers in all of the Americas. It is also the most spoken indigenous language in Ecuador. Paradoxically, Kichwa is rarely spoken in the halls of the National Directorate for Intercultural Bilingual Education and in bilingual schools. The enigma of intercultural bilingual education in Ecuador, a case so widely revered throughout the world, is that many individuals who are “native speakers” of Kichwa promote, plan for, and teach an indigenous language that they rarely use for daily communicative purposes. This dissertation, as a whole, considers this paradox.
In this poster I present a dissertation chapter on the politics of writing in Unified Kichwa, the standardized and most formal register of the language. An important part of planning for indigenous schooling in Ecuador has been teaching the Kichwa alphabet. This endeavor has also involved developing materials for literacy instruction in a traditionally oral language. While few would dispute that these actions are important, many would be surprised by how such initiatives also divide social movements for education in indigenous languages. Educational and political leaders have created the Kichwa alphabet in various meetings over the past 30 years, with many debates along the way. I first show how particular written letters have lengthy social histories and come to signify various notions about indigineity. I then show how a major divide between individuals in the intercultural bilingual school system has involved written Unified Kichwa in the case of pedagogic textbooks. Most Kichwa individuals who receive written materials do not know such social histories, and they struggle to read the materials. They point to particular letters, such as the letter “k,” as marking differences between them and educational leaders. Debates about ways of writing come to signify entire divisions among leaders of intercultural bilingual education, and these divides are linked to different backgrounds in formal education, migration, and changing notions of employability.

Author

• Nicholas Limerick, University of Pennsylvania