Chapter 5: Thinking from Another Perspective in an Intercultural Bilingual Teacher Education Program

“I have been learning by teaching the classes and by studying the themes to teach. I have started to understand many things that I didn’t understand before. I have also started to accept the differences. When I first came here, I didn’t accept the difference between the Indigenous world and the Hispano world” says Maria, a Spanish-speaking teacher educator who works in an intercultural bilingual education (IBE) teacher education institute in an Indigenous community in the Ecuadorian Amazonia. The students are Amazonian Indigenous peoples (Shuar, Achuar or Kichwa) while the teacher educators are either Indigenous or non-Indigenous Spanish-speaking mestizos.¹ Negotiations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of being, acting and knowing were observed in this institute. Therefore, we view the institute as a borderland (Anzaldúa, 2002; Mignolo, 2000), a space in-between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, space that is both and neither (Bhabha, 1994). Ideally, in such in-between space Indigenous and non-Indigenous teacher educators can encounter one another and work together at the crossroads of Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges (see Grande, 2008).