Multilingual Speaking and the Promotion of Indigenous Education in Ecuador

• In Event: 32.063 - Undertaking and Remaking Identity Politics in Educational Institutional Practice

Abstract

Increasingly, social movements must invoke official discourses of multiculturalism in order to be recognized by governments. Social movements for education especially depend upon such processes of recognition, where “intercultural” education has become a common means of educating diverse groups in liberal multicultural democracies (Hornberger 2001, May 2008). Based on two years of ethnographic research with upper-level state planners of intercultural bilingual education in Ecuador, this paper considers how official multiculturalism is enacted by Kichwa individuals who direct this social movement for education from the Ministry of Education. It shows how bilingual speeches are key events in which intercultural education is promoted. In Ecuador, Kichwa was recognized as an “official language of intercultural relations” in the 2008 Constitution, and directors of Indigenous education find this designation useful in the search for educational rights and recognition.

Building on linguistic anthropological research of indirect or “meta-” communication (Agha 2007, Lucy 1993, Reyes 2011, Silverstein 1993), a framework which has become increasingly common in educational research (Moore 2013, Wortham 2008, Wortham & Rymes 2003), this paper examines recordings of public speeches to analyze how multiculturalism intersects with educational politics. It finds that certain framings for describing the language Kichwa have become key to advancing Indigenous education. Essential to this argument is that EIB state planners’ language use in large public-speaking events references a pre-established connection of language as a Kichwa identity marker to make—or regiment—vastly different spoken varieties of Kichwa into a single, pure language of standardized language ideological convention.

The empirical data for this presentation includes excerpts of three recordings of Kicha state planners, and follow-up interviews about the speeches. I selected the data as representative from hundreds of hours of transcribed recordings that I collected through ethnographic research. Through discourse analysis of these three pieces of data, this presentation will show two key steps in which multilingualism intersects with identity politics. First, directors of EIB strategically describe the language Kichwa as a single, bounded language that is spoken by a homogeneous group. Such a description contrasts with their daily lived experience in which they speak quite different varieties of the language, varieties which are mutually unintelligible. Second, they demonstrate this belief in their bilingual public speeches, speaking in Kichwa and in Spanish in an ordered and separated fashion. Such ways of speaking allow non-Kichwa speakers to follow their talk. The presentation will show that such seemingly subtleties of bilingualism extend the state discourses to intercultural bilingual education. In the process, many Kichwa teachers decry such ways of speaking as insufficient for a school system devoted to teaching the language Kichwa.

Author

• Nicholas Limerick, Teachers College, Columbia University