Towards the resignification of writing: Literacy among teachers of Indigenous Education

Abstract

The growing and accelerated expansion of Spanish, as well as the progressive displacement of indigenous Mexican languages in our country is a phenomenon that has drawn the attention of researchers in recent decades. Various movements have supported the preservation and empowerment of indigenous Mexican languages, pointing to their writing as one of the main strategies. Nonetheless, the development of a writing system has often been complicated, discontinuous and has commonly neglected the presence of teachers and the spea-kers. This article shows that through the reflective exercise of writing in indigenous Mexican languages, it is possible for bilingual teachers, in indoamerican languages and Spanish, to build their own frames of reference. The task of “thinking about writing” in indigenous languages has allowed teachers to be aware of the place their languages occupy within the diverse linguistic panorama in Mexico and to ge-
nerate proposals that strengthen the habits of written culture in indi-
genous languages, including didactic sequences, school supplies and regional workshops. The evidence presented here comes from a series of Workshops on pedagogic and linguistic basis for the Indigenous Language Subject that were taught in 2018 to indigenous teachers of basic education, speakers of 18 indigenous languages. The Project was coordinated by a multidisciplinary, multicultural and multilingual team, from the Nanginá Laboratory of ciesas in agreement with the dgei.