User:Mariaalemendo/Intercultural Bilingual Education

Ashleigh Davis- I chose to expand on the introduction (changes/additions appear in bold font) as well as add a subsection about the advantages and disadvantages of different IBE models.

Intercultural bilingual education (Educación bilingüe intercultural) is a language-planning model employed throughout Latin America in public education, and it arose as a political movement asserting space for indigenous languages and culture in the education system. '''However, not all models of IBE promote bilingualism and the use of indigenous languages. Some models, specifically the submersion model and the transition model, instead hold the main goal of promoting monolingualism of the nation’s majority language'''. On the contrary, the immersion model, the maintenance model, and the enrichment model are designed to address the educational needs of indigenous communities, and consist of various bilingual curriculum designs.

Since the late 20th century, IBE has become an important, more or less successful instrument of governmental language planning in several Latin American countries. These include bilingual education in Mayan languages in Guatemala, and Quechua in Peru, and Mayan in Mexico.

Advantages and disadvantages of different IBE models
Since each IBE model holds a specific and unique goal for the student population, the implementation of these programs have varying effects on students. It has been found that IBE programs that support the abrupt shift to the majority language, also known as the submersion model, can result in a decrease in personal student self-esteem. Dr. James Cummins, a professor of language development in education at the University of Toronto, has estimated that children that speak the minority language need at least five years in order to catch up to their peers that speak the majority language regarding literacy and language skills. Dr. Cummins compares the attempts of minority-language children to keep up with their majority-language peers to trying to keep up with a “moving target”. This “moving target” is a metaphor for the content gaps that are seen between these two populations. While the majority-language children are still continuing with their education, the minority-language children have to not only learn the basics of a new language, but also try to catch up to the content level of the majority-language students.

The IBE program that promotes the gradual shift from the minority language to the majority language, also known as the transition model, is similar to the submersion model in that the end goal is monolingualism in the majority language. However, there are more advantages to the student’s overall learning experience when using this model. Since these students are beginning their education in their native language, they are able to communicate easily with their instructor as well as other students, and ask for clarification when there is misunderstanding. These students are also able to use literacy skills that they have acquired from their minority language and apply these skills when learning their new language. While there do appear to be some benefits to the transition model, submersion and transition programs have also been associated with the highest drop-out rates.

IBE programs that promote bilingualism or multilingualism include the immersion model, the maintenance model, and the enrichment model. The end goal of these models is fluency in speaking both languages as well as biliteracy. Research suggests that there appears to be cognitive advantages to receiving bilingual education. These advantages include increased cognitive flexibility as well as reduced global precedence. Research has also shown that children in IBE programs that encouraged multilingualism in Bolivia were found to develop a higher self-esteem on average than children in submersion programs. The enrichment model, which promotes the balanced use of the majority and minority language, is often implemented by having half of the students’ subjects in one language and the other half of their subjects in the other. One advantage of this model is that students are able to provide help to other students that are fluent in another language as well as receive assistance from these same students as they learn more about a non-native language. In this way, native students of both languages are able to practice their own teaching skills as well as receive additional support in learning a language from someone other than their instructor.

Leah Dudley- I am contributing sources from outside Latin America, and ideally outside of the Americas entirely. This wiki article so far has a narrow scope of Central and South American intercultural bilingual education, and while this area is rich with cultural exchange and a multitude of languages, it is not the only area that has considered and implemented bicultural/bilingual education.

Israel
The nations of Israel and Palestine have had an ongoing conflict since the mid 20th century. This has led to a refugee crisis, as Israel has taken over formerly-Palestinian land, and subsequently made Palestinians a vulnerable ethnic minority within the country. As recently as 1984, bilingual Palestinian-Arab and Jewish schools have been established by various NGOs (such as Hand in Hand) as an attempt to extend cultural understanding in the majority-Jewish/Hebrew schooling system currently found within Israel, as well as to foster 'peace education' between the two ethnic groups. Because of these goals, this model is considered an enrichment model of education. Within the now eight bicultural schools in the nation, lessons are taught simultaneously in Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic. Along with focusing on linguistic diversity within the school, these curriculums also place a strong focus on bicultural education (for example through Holocaust and Nakba remembrance days) to promote intercultural sensitivity and awareness, while also understanding the unique and differing feelings Palestinian and Jewish students and teachers have towards these events. Though these programs are generally well received by both Palestinian and Jewish teachers and students, problems within these schools still surface. One such example is the the textbooks and learning materials within the schools; a majority of these instructional resources are written in Hebrew and culturally Israeli and simply translated to Arabic. This allows children from both groups access to uniform academic resources, but leads to possible cultural biases and erasure within the classroom.

Jialynn Huang- Adding information in history section, changes/additions in bold, adding citations where there aren't any

History in Latin America
'''Latin America is one of the most linguistically diverse areas in the world, with 550 languages spoken across the continent and an indigenous population of approximately 50 million belonging to around 500 different ethnic groups. ''' This immense linguistic diversity is what in part gave rise to demand for programs that would integrate indigenous languages into educational policy. Brazil, for example, has the largest number of indigenous languages with approximately 180. Additionally, in some nations, the majority of speakers natively speak one or more indigenous languages that are not the prestige language. An exception is Paraguay, where despite its indigenous population making up only 2% of the total population, the majority of the population is bilingual in Guarani and Spanish due to its bilingual education system.

With the rise of indigenous activism in the 1970s, and controversy about multilingualism and previous bilingual education projects, a new education model of language maintenance and development emerged. This included an embrace of cultural aspects that were not exclusively linguistic: teaching aspects of everyday life culture, traditions, and world concepts. From the beginning of the 1980s, bilingual intercultural education was being developed in Latin America.

Government
After the nation states gained independence in Latin America at the beginning of the 19th century, the elites imposed a model of unification based on the Criollo culture and Spanish or Portuguese language as used by the colonial rulers. This system reached only the privileged classes and those parts of the mestizo population speaking Spanish or Portuguese. The bilingual programs were all developed as transitional models, with the end goal of integration of the Indigenous peoples into the wider population. Thus, they contributed to a more widespread use of Spanish as the common language. These were experimental projects of limited extension and duration, enabled by international aid, such as the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) or the United States Agency for International Development (US-AID).

'''As early as the twentieth century, educators were already implementing indigenous bilingual education in Mexico, Peru, and Ecuador. However, the aim of this was not actually to preserve indigenous languages but instead to enforce assimilation, or''' hispanization (castellanización) of the indigenous peoples. Spanish was used as a language of instruction for learner groups, although few among more isolated indigenous communities understood it. Indigenous students did not have much success in learning, leading to high rates of class repetition, dropouts, and expulsions, making them illiterate and subject to stigmatization. The use or even knowledge of an indigenous language became a social disadvantage, so many people stopped speaking them, but had sub-standard Spanish. Because of such language issues, for instance among indigenous peoples who moved to cities, they became uprooted, belonging fully neither to the indigenous or to the dominant culture.

Over time this shifted to intercultural bilingual education, as studies showed that children learning in their indigenous language performed better on tests compared to children in monolingual Spanish schools. Since the 1980s, many countries have passed laws recognizing linguistic and cultural rights. In countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico, constitutional reforms were realized that recognized indigenous languages and cultures. In most Latin American countries, IBE is under control of the Ministry of Education. '''Thus, the focus has shifted from assimilation to incorporating indigenous knowledge and culture into the school curriculum, giving it the name it is known as today: intercultural bilingual education. This attention to indigenous language has led to language development, as there needed to be a standardized writing system and new words to express concepts in today's society.'''

In most countries, such bilingual/cultural education does not reach the majority of the indigenous population, who often live outside the major cities, or in more isolated urban communities; in addition, it is applied only in primary education. Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico have passed laws directing such education of all indigenous speakers, and Paraguay intends for the entire student population to receive bilingual training. However, there exists a shortage of teachers and professionals who are trained for the bilingual curriculum. In addition, teachers often have their own prejudices against indigenous dialects. The training programs run by the government often overlook this aspect and other biases that potential educators may have against indigenous languages. This often leads to the burden falling on indigenous educators to fulfill.  '''In Chiapas, Mexico, this can be seen in the form of mismatches, where a teacher is placed in a community whose language they do not speak. This is because experienced teachers have the ability to select schools and thus most often choose teach in communities closer to towns and cities, while the inexperienced are left with the most rural areas that might not speak the language they do. There exists a large gap between the government policy of intercultural bilingual education and the reality of its implementation in indigenous areas.'''