High‐Stakes Tests as de facto Language Education Policies

Indigenous Mexican Teachers and Decolonial Thinking: Enacting Pedagogies of Reclamation

“…Volume 54, 2023 148 policy in the classroom (Menken and Garcia 2010), yet, there is little research on how teachers legitimize or reclaim Indigenous languages in the classroom (Guerrettaz 2015), and even less so analyzed through the theoretical lens of Indigenous and decolonial perspectives.…”

“…Indigenous teachers negotiate national and local curriculum and pedagogy through their active embodiments as proud and proactive advocates for their cultural and linguistic continuity (Phyak 2019). The sophisticated sense‐making of IBE policy by Indigenous teachers illuminates teachers themselves as policy makers who are frontline mediators in the process of figuring how Indigenous language and identity “show up” in the social process of schooling (Menken and Garcia 2010). National language policies that support multilingual education, such as the case of Mexico, struggle to interrupt long‐standing deficit assumptions about Indigenous languages and their place in the broader society (Cortina 2014).…”

“…While multilingual linguistic policy can open ideological and implementational spaces (top‐down) for Indigenous language use, reclamation as a paradigmatic umbrella concept highlights “the self‐(re)empowerment of Indigenous peoples in the continuance of their languages, lands, and life‐ways” (McCarty et al 2019, 3). In anthropology of education, scholars contend that language policy “comes to life” through the ways teachers' enact policy in the classroom (Menken and Garcia 2010), yet, there is little research on how teachers legitimize or reclaim Indigenous languages in the classroom (Guerrettaz 2015), and even less so analyzed through the theoretical lens of Indigenous and decolonial perspectives.…”