Negotiating Decolonial Biliteracy Strategies in Maya Communities

• In Event: Race, Indigeneity and Resistance

Proposal

Indigenous peoples in Guatemala, which account for nearly 50% of the population, face numerous threats imposed by coloniality, including the endangerment of languages and cultural practices and access to culturally and linguistically sustaining education (Cojti Cuxil, 2015; Montejo, 2005). Moves toward decolonial education practices aim to disrupt prevalent assimilationist educational policies, structures, views, and practices around language and literacy instruction. Yet, decolonial options are often complicated by features of coloniality and development (Esteva, 2018). For indigenous populations, the national education sector has long “served as a space of physical and epistemic violence that views Indigenous knowledge, culture, and history as backwards and irrelevant” (Batz, 2018, p. 105). Since the mid-1990s, Guatemala has aimed to establish the status, respect, promotion and use of indigenous languages and promote bilingual education intercultural (EBI) in national languages for all citizens, albeit with contested success (Cojti Cuxil, 2015). It is in this complex post-Peace Accords context that I explore how bilingualism is indexed and experienced by some of the newest actors in the national education system – instructional coaches and other leaders within National System of School Mentorship, which began in 2018. Specifically, I ask: How do indigenous peoples embedded within the Guatemalan state (coaches and local Ministry of Education officials) working with primary school teachers in Maya communities understand, negotiate, and challenge international- and state-driven narratives around language and literacy? Drawing on decolonial education studies, the anthropology of education policy, and the literature on bilingual intercultural education and data from a 14-month ethnographic Comparative Case Study (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017), I examine the varied “symbols of Indigenous persistence and renewal” (Allen, 2007, p. 69) employed by Maya coaches to promote (bi)literacy. I argue that coaches’ strategies not only vary, but also that such variation is informed by their own experiences with the perpetual (dis)continuities of “education projects” (Bartlett, 2007) in Guatemala (e.g., instructional coaching, literacy, and bilingual intercultural education) and divergent orientations around the “settled expectations” (Bang et al., 2012) around language and literacy. In considering the broader structures in which various efforts to redress educational and ethnolinguistic inequality are embedded, this research generates insights regarding the challenges and potentials of coaching reforms in Maya communities.

Author

• Ariel Borns, University of Wisconsin-Madison