3: Rethinking the Role of Indigenous Knowledge in Teacher Training Programs

Over the past decades, there has been an increased demand to address knowledge and power issues and the different ways in which knowledge is produced and conveyed. The re-definition of teacher training in colleges and conventional universities to include Indigenous elders is an important innovation, attempting to open higher education to new actors and voices. My ethnographic research focused on how the Program for the Training of Indigenous Amazonian Teachers (FORMABIAP) teacher training program of the Peruvian Amazon has approached this challenge. This chapter discusses the need for the development of new practices aimed at highlighting the existence of different ways of thinking, alternatives to hegemonic knowledge, and the multiple ways in which knowledge is transmitted in specific cultural contexts. Data includes participant observation, structured interviews with Indigenous teachers and students, and the revision of study plans. This chapter highlights the need for new organizational frameworks, which would allow Indigenous elders to decide what knowledge future teachers should learn and the way to deliver it. The analysis of how this was approached in the program demonstrates the need for significant changes in how learning of Indigenous cultural heritage occurs in teacher training programs and what this implies regarding the use of different spaces and time schedules. It also helps to raise awareness of the risk of circumscribing the transmission of Indigenous cultural heritage to an academic‑based notion of knowledge and learning.