1. Introduction
In his review of bilingual education in the Western ancient world up to the Renaissance, Welsh scholar Glyn Lewis writes:
Polyglottism is a very early characteristic of human societies, and monolingualism a cultural limitation. It is doubtful whether any community or any language has existed in isolation from other communities or languages . . . If there is one thing we learn from a historical study of languages in contact it is that the languages which appear to contribute most and survive longest . . . are usually supported and reinforced by powerful institutions, of which the schools . . . are among the most influential. (Lewis Reference Lewis and Fishman1976: 150, 199)
Although multilingualism and multilingual education have existed for centuries, our 21st century entrance into the new millennium has brought renewed interest and contestation around this educational alternative. Ethnolinguistic diversity and inequality, intercultural communication and contact, and global political and economic interdependence are more than ever acknowledged realities of today's world, and all of them put pressures on our educational systems. Now, as throughout history, multilingual education offers the best possibilities for preparing coming generations to participate in constructing more just and democratic societies in our globalized and intercultural world; however, it is not unproblematically achieved.
Multilingual education is, at its best, (1) multilingual in that it uses and values more than one language in teaching and learning, (2) intercultural in that it recognizes and values understanding and dialogue across different lived experiences and cultural worldviews, and (3) education that draws out, taking as its starting point the knowledge students bring to the classroom and moving toward their participation as full and indispensable actors in society – locally, nationally, and globally.
Beyond these fundamental characteristics, there are many unanswered questions and doubts surrounding multilingual education as to policy and implementation, program and curricular design, classroom instruction practices, pedagogy, and teacher professional development, but there is also much that we understand and know very well, based on empirical research in many corners of the world. Multilingual education is in its essence an instance of biliteracy ‘in which communication occurs in two (or more) languages in or around writing’ (Hornberger Reference Hornberger1990: 213), and I here use my continua of biliteracy framework as implicit organizing rubric for considering some certainties about biliteracy contexts, media, development, and content in multilingual education policy and practice around the world (Hornberger Reference Hornberger1989, Reference Hornberger2003; Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester Reference Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester2000).Footnote 1 I highlight Bolivian and other Indigenous educational experiences with which I am most familiar, and which capture certainties that hold beyond the particular instances I describe.Footnote 2 My emphasis is on what we know and are sure of, and my goal is to convey my deep conviction that multilingual education constitutes a wide and welcoming educational doorway toward peaceful coexistence of peoples and especially restoration and empowerment of those who have been historically oppressed.
2. What do we know about contexts – and spaces – for multilingual education?
I begin with a vignette from a bilingual classroom in Andean South America:
At Kayarani, a new school building was inaugurated last year and the rooms are nice, with tables and chairs that can be set up for group work. Berta, a native of Tarija, has been teaching here for three years, implementing bilingual education under the 1994 Bolivian National Education Reform. She began with her class from the start of their schooling; they are now in 2nd–3rd grade. The classroom is decorated with posters made by the teacher in Quechua, including models of a story, a poem, a song, a recipe, and a letter, as well as both the Quechua and the Spanish alphabets, which the students recite for me later. Also on the wall is the class newspaper, Llaqta Qhapariy [Voice of the People], featuring an article in Quechua written by student Calestino about farmers’ wanting better prices for their potatoes, which constitute their community's subsistence.
A key provision of the 1994 Reform is the establishment of a library in every primary classroom of the nation, each stocked with a collection of 80 books provided by the Ministry of Education under the auspices of UNESCO. Included are six Big Books in Spanish, three of them based on oral traditions in Quechua, Aymara, and Guarani, respectively. This classroom, too, has a library corner housing a small collection including a couple of Big Books, and the teacher calls on a child to come to the front of the class to read from one of the Big Books aloud to his classmates. Later, after the class leaves for recess, a couple of the children notice my interest in the Big Books and gleefully hold the books up for a photo. (Kayarani, Bolivia, 14 August 2000)Footnote 3
This vignette points to two certainties about multilingual education.
2.1 First certainty: National multilingual language education policy opens up ideological and implementational spaces for multilingual education
Bolivia's 1994 Education Reform sought to implant multilingual education, termed bilingual intercultural education (EIB), nationwide, incorporating all 30 Bolivian Indigenous languages, beginning with the three largest – Quechua, Aymara, and Guarani (Albó Reference Albó1995, Reference Albó1997; Hornberger & López Reference Hornberger, López, Cenoz and Genesee1998; López & Küper Reference López and Küper2004). The new law massively expanded the reach of EIB, from 114 experimental schools in the early 1990s to more than 1,000 by the year 1997 and almost 3,000 schools by 2002, accounting for 22% of the primary school population, and accompanied by dropping school desertion rates and rising graduation rates (Nucinkis Reference Nucinkis, López and Rojas2006, cited in Swinehart Reference Swinehart2007). The 1994 Reform clearly opened spaces for the practice of multilingual education, including actual physical spaces in schools and classrooms, as in the Kayarani instance. This is not to say that these spaces are unproblematically accepted and adopted, however.
2.2 Second certainty: Local actors may open up – or close down – agentive spaces for multilingual education as they implement, interpret, and perhaps resist policy initiatives
The Kayarani teacher depicted in the vignette actively embraced and creatively put into practice the Bolivian Reform's multilingual pedagogy. Where multilingual education policies are in place, spaces like these are opened up for the implementation of multilingual education programs. But top–down policy is not enough: any policy may fail if there is no bottom–up, local support (cf. Hornberger Reference Hornberger1987, Reference Hornberger1988). In other rural Bolivian schools, untouched stacks of the Reform's texts remain in locked cabinets in the director's office and little effort has been made to implement EIB. Uptake of the Reform is by no means a foregone conclusion and a key factor in the Bolivian case has been popular participation via Indigenous Peoples’ Educational Councils (López Reference López and Hornberger2008).
In addition to local communities, local educators at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels may themselves be the ones opening spaces for multilingual education. One of the most interesting, promising, and potentially enduring developments in bilingual education in the Andes in the last few decades has been the master's program in bilingual intercultural education for Indigenous students at PROEIB Andes. The PROEIB Maestría (as it is called), housed at the University of San Simón in Cochabamba, Bolivia, is a consortium effort sponsored by Indigenous organizations, universities, and Ministries of Education in six countries – Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru – with additional international funding from German Technical Assistance (GTZ), UNICEF, UNESCO, the World Bank, and others. Impelled by the vision and energy of Peruvian sociolinguist Luis Enrique López, this program has opened up spaces for Indigenous rights and Indigenous education surpassing even those initially envisioned even in the Reform. It is a case illustrating that ‘[l]ocal educators are not helplessly caught in the ebb and flow of shifting ideologies in language policies – they help develop, maintain, and change that flow’ (Hornberger & Johnson Reference Hornberger and Johnson2007: 527; see also Johnson Reference Johnson2007).
A second vignette from Bolivia introduces our third certainty:
It is the opening session of the four-day 7th Latin American Congress on Bilingual Intercultural Education (VII-EIB), sponsored by the Bolivian Ministry of Education, organized by PROEIB Andes, and convened in Cochabamba, Bolivia, at Centro Portales, a cultural and educational foundation housed in the former home of Bolivian tin baron Simon Patiño. The six hundred mostly Indigenous delegates representing 24 countries sit and chat comfortably in the outdoor amphitheatre among gently dropping petals of the flowering jacarandá trees, awaiting the arrival of Bolivian Minister of Education Felix Patzi, who will give the opening address.
After several introductions and greetings from conference sponsors and hosts, as well as a brief ceremony of burnt offering for an auspicious gathering, Patzi arrives and greets the delegates with a roll call of the two-dozen countries represented, a communicative act that serves to reinforce the shared sense of an important international gathering of Indigenous educational leaders. Patzi, an Aymara sociologist, goes on to speak at some length on decolonization and interculturality. He affirms that Indigenous peoples must decolonize education such that not only European but also Indigenous knowledges are included, that interculturality is not only about respect and tolerance for the other but also about democratizing cultures and equalizing cultural conceptions, and that the status of Indigenous languages must be raised by people speaking them not just within their own communities, but beyond. (Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1 October 2006)
2.3 Third certainty: Ecological language policies take into account the power relations among languages and promote multilingual uses in all societal domains
Among the decolonizing reforms introduced by Bolivia's first Indigenous president, Evo Morales, since taking office in January 2006, is a new education law proposed by Patzi at the June 2006 Bolivian National Congress of Education. Named in honor of two early 20th-century Bolivian Indigenous education reformers, Avelino Siñani and Elizardo Pérez, the proposed law has as its stated objective the construction of an education that is ‘communitarian, decolonizing, scientific, productive, intracultural, intercultural, and plurilingual’.Footnote 4 Patzi had criticized the 1994 Reform as being too focused on language rather than culture and epistemology, and as contemplating only a one-way interculturalism rather than a truly democratizing two-way equality among cultures.
Yet, despite the Morales administration's initial rhetoric about reversing all policies associated with the previous neo-liberal administration (López Reference López2005, Reference López and Hornberger2008), the new proposed law is best seen as building upon and expanding the achievements of the existing bilingual intercultural education reforms rather than abandoning them altogether. Certainly the emphasis on two-way interculturalism and its necessary complement, intraculturalism, were very much part of the practice of those who took up the 1994 Reform (e.g. Hornberger Reference Hornberger2000; Hornberger & Hult Reference Hornberger, Hult, Spolsky and Hult2008: 292). The founder of PROEIB Andes, Luis Enrique López, puts it this way:
Before opening oneself to discussing relationships among diverse peoples, cultures, and identities, colonial oppression creates a necessity to first reaffirm oneself as Indigenous . . . Bolivian Indigenous leader Froilán Condori puts this clearly when he speaks of intraculturalism – that first there must be a strong phase of intraculturalism before undertaking dialogue among cultures. He affirms that we can't speak as equals if I have always been told that mine is of no value, but the other's is. (L. E. López interview, 26 June 2005; my translation)
Opening up spaces for multilingual education is about taking into account all languages in the ecology and recognizing that those languages are situated in social spaces and contexts. Planning for any one language in a particular social space necessarily entails planning for all languages and social influences in that space; this is especially true in the case of planning for endangered or dominated languages since the fortunes of any one language necessarily hinge on those of other languages in its context.
In Bolivia, at one end of the spectrum, a June 2006 decree makes knowledge of an Indigenous language prerequisite for any public office (‘El bilingüismo’ 2006). At the other end, the 2006 proposed Education law explicitly adds English to the multilingual education mix while maintaining a strong emphasis on Indigenous languages: all teachers are required to speak English as well as Spanish and an Indigenous language, and instruction is to be trilingual.
Bolivia's proposed new trilingual education could be seen as a step in the right direction for Bolivia's increased presence on the world stage, since it includes English, the increasingly undisputed tool of access to a globalized world, along with Spanish and the Indigenous languages. On the other hand, language planning for the management of linguistic diversity, in Bolivia as elsewhere in the world, is susceptible to the discourses of linguistic hierarchy which privilege English as a global language, leaving many challenges ahead for giving real attention to minority mother tongues and achieving an ecological balance for a truly sustainable multilingualism (cf. Hult Reference Hult2007: 314–316, on Sweden).
3. What do we know about media – and modalities – of multilingual education?
I begin this section on the media of biliteracy with a third vignette, this time from a Māori immersion school in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
We three – my colleague Stephen May of the University of Waikato, his colleague Karaitiana Tamatea, parent and former whanau ‘extended family’ leader at the school, and I – enter the kura kaupapa Māori ‘Māori immersion school’ following the traditional powhiri ‘protocol’, which means that the assistant principal (in the principal's absence) greets us with a chant while we are still outside the premises, and then we slowly enter, exchanging chants with her as we do. After a continuation of this protocol inside one of the classrooms where all 80 children (grades 1–6) are gathered for our visit, we are invited to a different room for refreshments. Because of the strict prohibition on the use of English anywhere on the school premises at all times, this is the only room where I, a non-Māori speaker, can have a conversation with teachers, staff, and leadership of the school.
I am introduced to the current whanau leader. Here, as is the case for the 58 other kura kaupapa schools in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the whanau has been indispensable in the establishment and existence of the kura kaupapa. The school exists in the first place only by initiative of the whanau; and only after two years of running the school themselves may they appeal for government recognition and support. This school was founded in 1995 and gained recognition and its own school building and grounds several years ago. The whanau leader asks me ‘What do you think of bilingual education?’ As I formulate my answer and engage in further dialogue with him, it suddenly dawns on me that for him, bilingual education and Māori immersion are opposites, while for me they are located on a continuum. Māori-only ideology is of such integral and foundational importance to Māori immersion that the use of two languages suggested by the term bilingual is antithetical to those dedicated to Māori revitalization. (Hamilton, Aotearoa/New Zealand, 28 June 2002)Footnote 5
This vignette points to two more certainties about multilingual education.
3.1 Fourth certainty: Models of multilingual education instantiate linguistic and sociocultural histories and goals in each context
As my conversation with the whanau leader made clear, Māori immersion is different from other bilingual education. Māori immersion is also different from Canadian French immersion. In the latter, English-speaking children are immersed in French, but later also take up reading and writing in English, usually beginning in third grade, in a 50–50% proportion. In contrast, when the Māori immersion movement started in the 1980s, Māori communities opted for exclusive use of Māori language in formal education – enforcing a total immersion model of multilingual education, in which use of the dominant language, English, is in principle prohibited within the school precincts, and the separation of languages is meant to be absolute and sequential between Māori in school and English in the surrounding environment (May Reference May and May1999; Hornberger Reference Hornberger2002; May & Hill Reference May, Hill and Hornberger2008).
These programmatic differences in Canadian and Māori immersion models, insofar as simultaneous vs. successive acquisition along the media of biliteracy, are based in different sociocultural and linguistic histories and goals in each context. The history of writing in Māori goes back to 1825, before New Zealand became a nation. Nevertheless, Māori was prohibited from use in school and was on the way to extinction when revitalization efforts began in the 1980s; the immersion schools were a key component of those revitalization efforts. The initiative taken by Māori elders and parents in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the 1980s to establish pre-school language nests, kōhanga reo, to teach their children the ancestral language that was being replaced by English and in danger of disappearing, was a crucial step toward Māori language revitalization. That initiative gradually expanded and today encompasses Māori-medium education at all levels as well as official status for the language since 1987 (May Reference May and May1999, Reference May2002; May & Hill Reference May, Hill and Hornberger2008), overseen by national-level bodies such as the Education Review Office, which takes up both status and corpus concerns.
3.2 Fifth certainty: Language status planning and language corpus planning go hand in hand
The aims of Māori-medium education have been first and foremost the revitalization of the language, at which considerable success has been achieved; only more recently has a complementary focus on the educational effectiveness of Māori-medium education begun to emerge (May & Hill Reference May, Hill and Hornberger2008), while simultaneously, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of Māori language revitalization efforts not only in formal education but also in home and community (M. K. Hohepa Reference Hohepa2006).
Literacy has been acknowledged to play an integral role in Indigenous language revitalization – or regeneration, as Māori scholar and parent Margie Hohepa prefers to call it since regeneration suggests ‘growth and regrowth, development and redevelopment’ (M. K. Hohepa Reference Hohepa2006: 294; following her linguist father's usage, cf. P. Hohepa Reference Hohepa2000). In her estimation, print literacy in the Indigenous language validates and gives status to the language, supports the preservation of past traditions for future generations, ensures a wider variety of functions for the language, and recreates the language within a changing culture and society (M. K. Hohepa Reference Hohepa2006: 295).
Print literacy and the use of a language in teaching and learning imply a writing system, standardized grammar, and elaborated vocabulary. If these do not exist, they must be developed. Planning for a language's status as medium of education and developing its corpus for those uses go hand in hand (Fishman Reference Fishman1980). Examples abound of the challenges involved, and these ‘problems in the socio-educational legitimization of languages/varieties’ have always accompanied the introduction of vernacular languages into education (Fishman Reference Fishman1982: 4). The challenges are neither rare, unexpected, nor insuperable. We have many evidences of successfully completed and in-progress production of educational and print literacy materials in Indigenous languages (Châtry-Komarek Reference Châtry-Komarek1987, Reference Châtry-Komarek1996, Reference Châtry-Komarek2003), including Māori.
A fourth vignette, from a site of multilingual Indigenous teacher education in Amazonian Brazil, introduces our sixth certainty:
Every year since 1983, an Indigenous teacher education course sponsored by the Comissão Pró-Indio do Acre (CPI) has been held during the summer months (January–March) in the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil. The 1997 session is attended by some 25 professores indios ‘Indigenous teachers’, representing eight different ethnic groups whose languages are in varying stages of vitality, from those with about 150 speakers to those with several thousand. One of the striking features of the course is that the professores indios are simultaneously learners and teachers-in-formation; that is, they are simultaneously learning the school curriculum themselves for the first time, while also preparing themselves to return to their aldeias ‘communities’ to teach it.
Another feature of the course is the mutual multilingual understanding among the professores, in that the Indigenous languages are not only encouraged and used as medium and subject of instruction in the course and later in their own schools, but also the professores encourage and exchange among each other across their different languages. Although they do not necessarily speak or understand all the other languages spoken and written by their peers, they read, listen, and look at each other's work. To facilitate mutual understanding, they at times use Portuguese as lingua franca, at times draw on the geometric designs and illustrations that are an integral part of their writing, and at times simply rely on their shared intra-/inter-ethnic experiences. One activity in which these features converge is in their authorship of teaching materials in the Indigenous languages which are reflective of Indigenous culture, history, and artistic expression. These materials serve as documentation of the teachers’ own learning while also later serving as a teaching resource for their own classrooms. (Rio Branco, Brazil, 23 January 1997)Footnote 6
3.3 Sixth certainty: Communicative modalities encompass more than written and spoken language
The multimodal, multilingual, mutual comprehension among the Amazonian Indigenous teachers is particularly striking given the great diversity of languages in the group and the salience of multimodal drawing and geometric design in their writing practices. Each written assignment bears the complex and colorful geometric designs and maps that are, as Monte (Reference Monte1996, Reference Monte2003) and Menezes de Souza (Reference Menezes de Souza and Canagarajah2005) demonstrate, not merely illustrations to accompany the alphabetic text, but integral complements to it; and these multimodal expressions contribute to the Indigenous teachers’ mutual understanding across language differences as well as to the development of their writing in those languages and in Portuguese.
A similarly multilingual and multimodal ecology of languages characterizes classroom practices at the PROEIB Andes Maestría, in ways that strengthen each individual participant's linguistic repertoire while simultaneously fostering peer interaction and cooperative learning, or interaprendizaje (L. E. López interview, 26 June 2005), as shown below.
4. What do we know about the development – and transfer – of language and literacy in multilingual education?
I begin this section on the development of biliteracy with a vignette from a workshop on ethnographic methods with the 42 students in the Maestría's fourth cohort. The Maestría faculty practice and promote an ethnographic, social constructivist, and interpretive research orientation, which goes against the grain of more positivist academic traditions at San Simón and other universities in Latin America (and the world). Knowing my own research experience in the Andes and my continuing commitment to ethnographic research, the faculty had asked me to conduct workshops on ethnographic research, first with the faculty themselves, and subsequently with the students. In this session, I asked the students to collaboratively analyze a two-page excerpt from an interview in Quechua and Spanish.
The Maestría students formed four groups of 7–8 each, making sure there were one to two Quechua speakers in each group. The task was to describe, analyze, and interpret a segment of the interview, following guidelines I had presented earlier. I used a transcript from my recent interview with Justo Ramos in Kinsachata, 22 years after my initial study of bilingual education there when he was a 5th-grader. There turned out to be a wide range of approaches in the four groups. One group in particular seemed very efficient and focused, moving systematically through the steps of segmenting the transcript, choosing a segment to analyze, applying some of the tools of discourse analysis and then Hymes’ (Reference Hymes1974: 53–62) speaking heuristic. In my observation, they were helped by the fact that one of them had taken very clear notes on my lecture in Spanish and referred to them throughout, and another was able to read and interpret the Quechua fluently and quickly.
In contrast, two of the groups seemed to get bogged down in the task of literally reading and translating the transcript before they could get to work on the assigned task. This made me partly regret that I had given them a transcript with so much Quechua, but the combination of Quechua and Spanish provided rich material for analysis in terms of code-switching and use of linguistic resources. To their credit, both these groups persisted, asking me lots of questions, and I think actually learned a lot even though they didn't get ‘as far’ as the first group.
The last group also made good progress and had some excellent interpretive insights. They asked, for example, whether Justo himself had been in the bilingual education program, since he makes reference to his own writing in Quechua. In fact he had not, but their question points to an interesting insight, in that Justo's younger siblings were in the bilingual program in his school while he was there in an upper grade, and through them, he may have picked up some Quechua reading/writing and exposure to Quechua texts. This information is not explicit in the transcript, but their analysis led them to infer that it might have been the case, perhaps a reflection of their own experience transferring Spanish reading and writing to Quechua reading and writing fairly readily. (Cochabamba, Bolivia, 11 September 2004)
This vignette, and the Brazilian one above, point to a seventh certainty about multilingual education.
4.1 Seventh certainty: Classroom practices can foster transfer of language and literacy development along receptive–productive, oral–written and L1–L2 dimensions, and across modalities
The workshop interaction exemplifies some of the ways the Maestría students’ classroom practices regularly enabled them to draw from across their multiple languages and literacies in accomplishing academic tasks collaboratively. Three PROEIB Maestría participants have written specifically about strategies of interdialectal communication in Quechua within PROEIB (Luykx, Julca & García Reference Luykx, Julca and García2005); and there is a rich repertoire of strategies for multilingual communication as well.
Such hybrid multilingual classroom practices, recently eloquently theorized and documented as translanguaging practices (Baker Reference Baker and Hornberger2003; García Reference García, Makoni and Pennycook2007, Reference García2008; Creese & Blackledge Reference Creese and Blackledge2008), or bilingual supportive scaffolding practices (Saxena Reference Saxena2008), offer the possibility for teachers and learners to access academic content through the linguistic resources they bring to the classroom while simultaneously acquiring new ones. These biliteracy practices incorporate aspects of what have also been referred to in earlier bilingualism literature as passive bilingualism, receptive bilingualism, and dual lingualism (Lincoln Reference Lincoln1975).
Theses of the Maestría provide further evidence of the productive multilingual, multimodal mix that nurtures these Indigenous educators in their pursuit of graduate studies. In addition to various theses exploring Indigenous language use, identities, and ideologies in classroom and community, or the production of written texts in Indigenous languages, a number of theses explore other communicative modes in the Indigenous repertoire, including textile weaving (Castillo Collado Reference Castillo Collado2005) and the traditional Andean musical form, huayño (Tito Ancalle Reference Tito Ancalle2005); and one student wrote her entire thesis in Quechua, in an explicit act of language planning designed to explode the myth that it cannot be done and showed that it is indeed possible to extend the use of Quechua to new domains, and to expand Quechua vocabulary in authentic contexts, i.e. to intellectualize the language (cf. Garvin Reference Garvin and Fishman1974: 72).
5. What do we know about content – and identities – in multilingual education?
This last section, on the content of biliteracy, begins with a last vignette, also from the PROEIB Andes workshop on ethnographic research methods.
My final unit with the 42 students was on the Indigenous research agenda proposed by Māori researcher Linda Tuhiwai Smith in her book Decolonizing methodologies (Smith Reference Smith1999). She talks in terms of four ‘tides’ or conditions in which Indigenous peoples live – survival, recovery, development, and self-determination; four directions or processes through which they move – healing, decolonization, mobilization, and transformation; and 25 projects they undertake, such as reclaiming, renaming, remembering, revitalizing, networking. I wasn't sure how this would go over, but I guessed it might be very interesting for these Indigenous educators learning to be researchers.
They were extremely attentive, taking notes as I presented this Indigenous agenda and although there was not a lot of discussion, there were clear moments of resonance and response. For example: (1) connecting – in the sense of connecting people to each other and to the earth – the students really buzzed among themselves when I told them of Linda Smith's example of reinstituting the traditional Māori practice of burying the afterbirth after the child is born; in Māori the word for afterbirth and earth is the same; (2) renaming – given the example of Indigenous people renaming places and people with their original Indigenous names, the students came up quickly with their own examples, e.g. Aguarunas reclaim their own name, Awajun; (3) envisioning – the students got very actively involved in helping me find the right Spanish translation for this concept, which is more real than soñando ‘dreaming’ but less concrete than proyectando ‘planning’ – we ended up with visionando though some were not sure that's really a word.
There was also humor along the way, such as with my (bad) translation of gendering as engendrando ‘engendering’, which René then joked meant peopling the earth with more Quechua, Aymaras, etc. At the end, I asked ¿Qué les parece? ‘What do you think?’ and the students immediately replied Estamos con la Linda! ‘We're with Linda!’ – a resounding endorsement. (Cochabamba, Bolivia, 11 September 2004)
This vignette points to three final certainties.
5.1 Eighth certainty: Multilingual education activates voices for reclaiming the local
Indigenous educators participating in the workshop resonated with Linda Smith's notion of connecting – in the sense of connecting people to each other and to the earth. When in later interviews I asked these educators what it meant to them to be Indigenous, the first and most prominent responses were about living close to the land, speaking one's native language, and experiencing discrimination by others. These themes, about affirmation of one's own ways of doing, being, and speaking, that is, about activating one's voice (cf. Hornberger Reference Hornberger2006) – and at the same time experiencing discrimination by others for those very practices and voices – were foremost in the collective story of these individuals’ experiences of and reflections about being Indigenous.
Local knowledges, local identities, local languages, local practices, local voices, local literacies, local standards, local demands, local experiences, folk wisdom and native representations are among the things local being reclaimed by Indigenous educators at PROEIB (cf. Canagarajah Reference Canagarajah2005). Reclaiming the local is, moreover, fraught with challenges for these Andean Indigenous educators, just as it is for the Cajun French poets and singers (Ryon Reference Ryon and Canagarajah2005), Kashinawá writers (Menezes de Souza Reference Menezes de Souza and Canagarajah2005), New York Dominican community (Utakis & Pita Reference Utakis, Pita and Canagarajah2005), international TESOL professionals (Lin et al. Reference Lin, Wang, Akamatsu, Riazi and Canagarajah2005), Brunei teachers and pupils (Martin Reference Martin and Canagarajah2005), and Chicana language and literature students (Mermann-Jozwiak & Sullivan Reference Mermann-Jozwiak, Sullivan and Canagarajah2005) whose accounts we read in Canagarajah (Reference Canagarajah2005), for whom local contents are multiple and diverse, continuously evolving and negotiated, contested and hybrid, riddled with internal contradictions, and enmeshed in global politics and transnational movements of people and labor.
5.2 Ninth certainty: Multilingual education affords choices for reaffirming our own
Renaming places and people with their original Indigenous names was another of Linda Smith's projects that captured the imagination of the Indigenous Andean educators. Renaming and reaffirming one's own names, places, and ways, as a kind of coming back to one's identity by choice (cf. McCarty Reference McCarty2006), figured prominently in the educators’ reflections on what it means to be Indigenous and to carry out research in one's own Indigenous communities.
Nery, a Peruvian Quechua from Callalli and Cuzco, talks about the importance of revitalizing languages in Indigenous communities, language being for her one of the most visible elements of Indigenous identity, a cultural resource to be devolved and protected just as much as or even more than lands or material and cultural artefacts; and she contemplates the role of research in opening Indigenous eyes to look at and reaffirm one's own language and its expressive resources (N. Mamani interview, 26 June 2005).
5.3 Tenth certainty: Multilingual education opens spaces for revitalizing the Indigenous
Envisioning and building an Indigenous future was another theme that resonated with the Andean educators, closely linked to reclaiming their locally rooted practices, renaming their world, and revitalizing their Indigenous identities. And they emphasized again and again that it was in the texts and encounters around PROEIB's multilingual education that these themes emerged and became meaningful for them.
Maestría students give great credit to their experiences at PROEIB for the strengthening of their Indigenous identities. Summing up his sense of what it means to him to be Indigenous, Moisés, a Peruvian Aymara from Puno and Lima, touches on all three certainties above – reclaiming, reaffirming, and revitalizing:
Para mi, [ser indígena] significa identificarse con mi pueblo étnico, con el pasado, la historia, cosmovisión, lengua; en el presente, hacer labores que reivindican sus derechos, comprometerse; y en el futuro, proyectarse a que nuestro pueblo étnico tenga un futuro con igualdad de oportunidades con otros pueblos del país.
[For me, being Indigenous means identifying with my ethnic people, our past, our history, our worldview, our language; in the present, working to reclaim our rights, being actively committed; and in the future, projecting that our ethnic people might have a future with equality of opportunities with other peoples of our country.] (M. Suxo interview, 10 February 2005; my translation)Footnote 7
Moisés’ commitment is to take and use his present graduate studies to improve the lives of his people, drawing on their collective past to project toward the future. Through both lived experience and intellectual study, he and his peer Indigenous educators are fully aware of the enormous structural obstacles and historical oppressions they face and they consciously choose the path of transformational resistance – often at great personal cost, in the sense Brayboy (Reference Brayboy2005) highlights in relation to American Indian students in the U.S. They opt to, as another PROEIB student says, aprovechar el espacio que el Estado nos da ‘exploit the space the nation-state gives us’ – through multilingual education – to work toward the future equality and dignity of their people and thereby of all people.
In this, the Indigenous educators’ experience is both profoundly different from and profoundly the same as that of other multilingual educators. Varghese (Reference Varghese2000, Reference Varghese2004) has written about the highly politicized nature of bilingual education in the United States and the contestation around language policy and professional roles that goes on even among bilingual teachers and teacher educators. She argues, on the basis of her ethnographic study of a bilingual professional development institute in Philadelphia, that because of the marginalized nature of their profession and the multiple roles they are expected to play as teachers of both language and content, and as advocates for their students and families as well as for bilingual education, bilingual teachers’ professional development settings might usefully become productive sites for dialogue around these contested bilingual teacher professional roles, making explicit that bilingual teachers are agents – and often advocates – who make situated choices in a contested terrain.
It is that advocacy for the oppressed – and Indigenous peoples are arguably the most deeply oppressed of all peoples – that makes multilingual education so politically controversial and at the same time why it offers so much hope for a better and more just future for all peoples. I presented an earlier version of this talk as a plenary at the 7th Congress mentioned above, on a day that happened to be the anniversary of Gandhi's birth, 2 October. In honor of his birthday, and his life and work devoted to building a more just society, I quoted words Gandhi often repeated in the non-violent fight for a free and independent India: ‘Until we stand in the fields with the millions that toil each day under the hot sun, we will not represent India – nor will we ever be able to challenge the British as one nation’. Multilingual education is, for me, all about standing in the oppressed places of the world, under the hot sun with the millions that toil each day, in the non-violent fight for a liberating education. And it is not so much that I have strength to give them, but rather the reverse – that I am continually renewed by the unfathomable energy, vision and forgiveness of those who toil.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Nina Spada for inviting and encouraging me to give this plenary at AAAL 2008, and to Luis Enrique López for having invited me to give its predecessor mirror version, in Spanish, at the 7th Latin American Congress on Bilingual Intercultural Education in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Thanks to all who listened and commented on those occasions and subsequently at Indiana University's School of Education, University of Washington's Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the University of Limpopo in South Africa. My sincere thanks also to Graeme Porte and four anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.
Nancy H. Hornberger is Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She has published widely on multilingualism and education, with special attention to Indigenous and immigrant languages, grounded in her long-term, in-depth experience in Andean South America and urban Philadelphia, PA, and comparative work in Paraguay, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Africa, among others. Her recent publications include Can schools save Indigenous languages? Policy and practice on four continents (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and the ten-volume Encyclopedia of language and education (Springer, 2008).
