"Mira a esas cholas!:"i A critical ethnographic case study of an educational community in Arequipa, Peru

• Main Author: Arredondo, Mariella I
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Subjects: education, policy; latin american studies; sociology, ethnic and racial studies
• ISBN: 9781303654718; 1303654717

This dissertation, a multi-layered ethnographic case study of an urban school (the VNV School) and surrounding community in Arequipa, Peru, follows a national policy for "bilingual intercultural education" through its implementation process from the national level to the local school level. Interculturality, the philosophy guiding EBI, is considered by the Peruvian state and civil society an essential principle in making Peruvian democracy viable. Adopting such a robust intercultural approach to education successfully would mean transforming the Peruvian school system and the society that it serves from a history of serving as an instrument of assimilation, stratification, and discrimination, into one that shapes citizens who first and foremost acknowledge the root and the progression of injustice, and actively engage in remaking a more equitable system.
National and school policies have embraced decentralization as a way to implement the intercultural democratic project and improve educational quality and opportunities for Peruvian youth. At the VNV School, certain civic schooling practices juxtapose lessons on democracy practiced autocratically. In other words, teachers in some instances are attempting to teach about democratic participation and offer an intercultural approach to educating students through anti-democratic means rooted in what they describe as "traditional" education.
What I found at the VNV School was the need for the school to reconcile the contradictions between its more recent commitment to intercultural education and democratic participation with the more firmly established authoritarian and assimilatory practices rooted in Peruvian past ideology. This study also describes a school that provides students with a sense of belonging, and imparts a strong regional identity based on pride that foments an educational culture that enables and facilitates social mobility. The VNV School is portrayed as being both supportive and sometimes disruptive of intercultural forms of educating. Moreover, through an analysis of perceptions of race, ethnicity, and class, of middle and upper class urban young people studying in various private elite schools, this study also provides a deeper understanding of how the culturally dominant sector of society socializes its youth to view race and class relations in the city, and how this view in fact shapes class relations. Such perspectives illuminate the structural and ideological obstacles that Peruvian institutions and civil society still face in order to implement effective intercultural citizenship models aimed at transforming inequitable power relations in society.