Assessment of Intercultural Bilingual Education in the Brazilian State of Amazonas

Abstract

In Brazil, and more generally, in Latin America, the struggle of the indigenous movements for the demarcation of their ancestral land and the development of an intercultural education contributed to the constitutional changes of the 1980s, which led these states to regard themselves as a multicultural nation and to recognize specific collective rights to native people and tribes living on their territory. This dynamic deals with the scope of a democratic transition and a decentralization process which characterizes a new form of governance of almost all Latin America countries where the indigenous territories and the resources at their disposal can be preserved. By giving the possibility to formulate another vision of the school education based on a dialectic between indigenous knowledge and school knowledge in a sustainable developmental perspective of the indigenous territories, new experiments started to be expanded from the 1990s. This article advances the discussion between globalized and localized educational practices. It enlightens the debate between the homogenization of school systems and other alternatives such as the use of traditional knowledge. It focuses on socio-cultural knowledge and its intersection between formal and informal education. The first section of this paper presents the theoretical framework of my research and its methodology. The second section discusses, in a historical background, how the Brazilian indigenous public policies were implemented. In the third section, I use my fieldwork data to examine and analyze the advent and the development of intercultural bilingual education (IBE) in two regions of Amazonas state (Alto Solimões and Alto Rio Negro) among the Ticuna, Baniwa, and Tukano people during the 1990s and 2000s.