Teacher Training in Bilingual Education in Peru
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TEACHER TRAINING IN BILINGUAL EDUCATION IN PERU
INTRODUCTION
Peru is a multilingual society in which around 40 different indigenous languages struggle to survive. In an attempt to come to grips with this linguistic diversity and to offer a high quality education to its population, different experiments with bilingual education involving Spanish and indigenous languages have been implemented in the country. Although since the decade of the 1920s some concern was aroused regarding the education of the indigenous population (Vich, 2000) and later on some experiments were implemented in the Amazonian region (Citarella, 1990), it was not until the educational reform of 1972—and the official recognition of Quechua in 1975—that the first National Policy on bilingual education was proposed and this type of education started taking place in primary schools. For a long time, teachers who were involved in the bilingual framework had not been formally trained in this educational approach. In the best cases, the ones who were already working in bilingual schools received a whole week’s training twice a year but this was clearly not enough for them to understand the program and to be able to respond to the challenges posed by this type of schooling. In the case of the Andean region specifically, this type of specialization in most institutions of higher education approximately started only five to ten years ago, although in the Amazonian region it had started earlier. Due to the fact that these two regions constitute very different realities in terms of linguistic and cultural dynamics and that this type of education has followed distinct paths in both of them, this review will describe both experiences separately. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
Some universities in Peru offer a specialization in Bilingual Education for the indigenous population. Since 1985 the University of Altiplano in Puno and the National University of the Amazonia have offered— respectively—the Masters in Andean Linguistics and Bilingual Education and an undergraduate specialization in Bilingual Education in its Faculty of Education. Both universities could be considered pioneers in teacher training in Intercultural Bilingual Education (hereafter, IBE) N. Van Deusen-Scholl and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 4: Second and Foreign Language Education, 293–308. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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in Peru. Nevertheless, other universities have started to offer specializations in IBE only a few years ago (since 2000) and have not had much sustainability. Some of them have even tried to open a Masters program in IBE but have not reached the amount of students needed. Training in this kind of education is imparted mostly by what are known as the “Institutos Superiores Pedagógicos” (hereafter, ISP), institutions—with a non-university status—that report directly to the Ministry of Education, in which people study to be teachers during five years. This pre-service teacher tra
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