Multilingual Literacies in National Guatemalan Schools

• In Event: Navigating “Schooled Literacies” Across Contexts

Proposal

In Guatemala, like other multilingual contexts, high quality, early-grade literacy instruction is intertwined with efforts to provide linguistically and culturally relevant education for Indigenous populations, who comprise over 50% of the population. Despite official policies in support of bilingualism, the framing of Indigenous multilingualism as a “problem” (Gustafson XX; Ruiz XX) and Indigenous erasure, particularly related to language, remains prevalent in national schools (Barillas Chon, 2022). When it comes to literacy instruction, primary school teachers and instructional coaches navigate competing literacy models (Street, 1993; Bartlett, 2007) and a proliferation of early-grade literacy actors (USAID, 2018). It is in this complex landscape that I draw on data from a larger 14-month ethnographic comparative case study in Guatemala, to examine the “varied social lives of Indigenous languages” (Kroskrity & Meek, 2023, p. 16) as they relate to literacy practices that emerge from different discourses, language ideologies, and identities. In so doing, I build on sociocultural approaches to multilingual literacies (Hornberger, 2003; García et al., 2007) with a focus on multilingualism in Indigenous contexts in Latin America (Lopez, 2021, Limerick, 2023) to show how three approaches to multilingual literacies have been embraced by teachers and coaches in Spanish- and Maya-speaking public elementary schools: the valorization of variationism (Kroskrity, 2009), critiques around standardization (Lane et al., 2018), and efforts to address families’ transnational linguistic realities and desires. I highlight how these more fluid and situated approaches that educators engage with involve negotiation with more narrowly defined official discourses and policies around language and literacy instruction in Guatemala.

Author

• Ariel Borns, University of Wisconsin-Madison