Interculturalism and bilingualism: between functional normativism and emerging positions in the official curriculum design for teacher training in intercultural bilingual education in Peru

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to review the educational approaches to interculturalism and bilingualism in the intercultural bilingual education (IBE) syllabus of the National Basic Curriculum Design (DCBN) for initial teacher education (ITE). The Peruvian State, faced with the cultural and linguistic diversity expressed in 55 native peoples who communicate in 48 languages, applies IBE policies to the students from these peoples with teachers who have a higher education. Through documentary analysis, the information was organized to describe, analyze and interpret using categorization and codification by means of the deductive-inductive criterion. The results highlight the effort of the official document to incorporate interculturalism and bilingualism approaches, including the contributions of current trends. The relevance of normative-functional interculturalism is a proposal of the ITE only for indigenous people, since this curricular design, due to its national scope, has limitations to interculturalize teacher training from a more critical stance. When dealing with native languages in IBE and Spanish, it strives for technical-curricular goals of oral and written skills, neglecting the rescue and recovery of the oral, written or textualities of indigenous peoples, ignoring their social and dynamic use.