Opportunities and challenges of language planning in Indigenous early childhood education in Mexico

• In Event: Highlighted session: Quality and inclusivity in language education: policy, practice, and potentialities

Proposal

Yucatec Maya is an Indigenous language with high vitality in Mexico, yet recent research reveals that there has been rapid language shift from Maya to Spanish in the Mexican Mayan regions. Moreover, Maya-monolingual communities in the Yucatan Peninsula have followed a historical trend common both in Mexico and throughout Latin America where Indigenous monolingualism is closely tied to high rates of social exclusion and poverty. In light of this, one of the government’s efforts to reverse this poverty trend and language shift has been the introduction of Indigenous early childhood education (ECE) initiatives, which have been branded as societal equalizers through the promotion of school readiness and economic development. These ECE policies, however, have inadvertently diminished the knowledge and use of Indigenous languages since they promote Spanish (and more recently, English) over Indigenous languages as the language of instruction.

Presenting Spanish and English as solutions that will heal social inequalities in Mexico comes as a sharp contrast to the Mexican state’s plethora of language policies promoting justice and inclusion through the use of Indigenous languages in preschools. Indeed, preschools, especially those that serve Indigenous communities, are the social spaces in which these competing language policies come into contact, revealing implementation challenges at this level. For example, preschools that serve Indigenous populations have already struggled to implement Indigenous bilingual programs because textbooks are based on Spanish learning models, and professional development in Indigenous language pedagogies is not considered culturally relevant. Furthermore, when the topic of language enters into debates about the design of ECE programs, it is often used as a proxy for school readiness, thereby precluding any consideration of multilingual education and overlooking the impacts of language policy on families and children in Indigenous communities.

During this talk I will provide an ethnographic account of how different stakeholders in one Indigenous community in the Yucatan Peninsula respond to language policies and ECE initiatives that cloud the promises of quality education under the guise of social justice, inclusive education, and economic returns. When these promises are debated, they often follow a human capital narrative, in which ECE adheres to the values of accountability and developmentally appropriate practices in lieu of learning experiences from a development-in-context perspective. While education by and for Indigenous people has been the object of considerable scholarly attention, one of the least explored phenomena in the literature is the tension in ECE across Indigenous contexts, where educational policies are often at odds with the linguistic and cultural practices of Indigenous families and schools. Language policies and ECE initiatives are, therefore, cultural products whose implementation often overlooks the intricate relationship between educational processes, language, and community expectations.

Author

• Aldo Anzures Tapia, University of Pennsylvania