Indigenous Knowledge and Language: Decolonizing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in a Mapuche Intercultural Bilingual Education Program in Chile

This article from the Canadian Journal of Native Education is based on a six month school ethnographic study that was conducted at an Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) program in Chile. The objective of this program was to show that schools could be a good venue for cultural, linguistic and ethnic identity reconstruction. This article shows that many indigenous groups are beginning to take a stand and develop programs to help address the problems they are facing and to reconnect with their cultures. This IBE program in Mapuche, Chile centered in on how the Kimun Indigenous knowledge and the Mapudungun language could be embraced to create culturally relevant pedagogy which would help in the process of decolonization. In this program, an ancestral educator was used as an agent for cultural and linguistic transmission through the process of using indigenous knowledge as his curricular objective.

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