P’URHEPECHA IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION FROM THEIR OWN INTERCULTURAL BILINGUAL EDUCATION PERSPECTIVE

SUMMARY

The "T’arhexperakua - Growing Together" Project emerges in two P’urhepecha primary schools in the centre-west of Mexico’s highlands as an initiative of their indigenous teachers. Due to the high ethnolinguistic vitality, pupils enter school as monolinguals. The common approach to teach nevertheless in Spanish only had yielded widespread school failure. Therefore, the teachers started to teach all content matters including maths, language and literacy in the native language to improve learning in 1995. In 1999 a small team of linguists, educationalists and anthropologists were invited by the schools to implement a study of the project. Subsequently, they engaged in a long-lasting collaboration to improve teaching and to develop an intercultural and bilingual curriculum that persists till today. This article reports on the curriculum development and its practice. It analyses two classes carried out entirely in the native language. The first one deals with the indigenous worldview of the concept of territory and the obligation of its defence. The second class mobilises the rich morphological system of P’urhepecha with its classifiers of size and shape to help learn how mathematical fractions work. Our classroom analysis shows in which way teaches develop a language and education policy that fosters linguistic and ethnic identity through the functionally successful use of P’urhepecha in the high prestige school environment.

Keywords:
P’urhepecha identity; Intercultural Bilingual Education in Mexico; curricular development