Decolonization and curriculum: Representations of Chilean indigenous teachers

Abstract

Research on intercultural education, which traditionally focused on the curriculum, has rarely explored the cultural integration present in Indigenous teachers who implement the national educational curriculum based on Eurocentric Western epistemologies in their classrooms. In Chile's Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) program, the principal state program for decolonizing education, approximately 650 traditional educators from Indigenous communities teach Indigenous languages and culture. In contrast to those teachers, this paper analyses the representations of the teaching roles of teachers from the estimated 30,000 teachers who identify as Indigenous but are not part of the IBE program. The methodology is a qualitative study of an exploratory, descriptive-interpretative type. Data collection was through eleven semi-structured interviews and a six-subject focus group. The thematic mixed-coded analysis revealed that the national curriculum forms the central node of the representation of the teachers' role, relegating their commitment to their Indigenous ancestry to the background.