The construction of interculturality: An ethnography of teachers' beliefs and practices in Peruvian Quechua schools

This dissertation explores the beliefs and practices of teachers who are implementing the Bilingual Intercultural Education (BIE) government policy in Quechua communities of the southern Peruvian Andes. I examine how a top-down educational policy supposedly aiming to revert the socio-economic and political marginalization of indigenous people is interpreted by teachers who are also educated in a top-down system with complicated ethnic, language, and class ideologies. Through the lens of socio-cultural approaches to policy, as well as critical and constructivist views, the analysis developed in this ethnographic study follows teachers' involvement and participation in both BIE training and program implementation as contesters, interpreters and architects of educational policy. BIE teachers' beliefs and practices are also explored as they enact ideologies exposing cultural, ethnic and linguistic stigmatizations intimately tied to practices of socio-economic and political marginalization of indigenous people. Overall, this study highlights the centrality of the creation of spaces for social analysis and sustained dialogue through education, in particular through an intercultural education policy which is inspired by human rights for socio-economic and political equity, justice and transformation.