Don\u27t you want your child to be better than you? : Enacting ideologies and contesting intercultural policy in Peru.

The shifting agendas of international organizations during the 1990s emphasized universal educational access, or education for all, as the path towards poverty alleviation and development. Facing the effects of the lost decade and in the midst of civil war, the fragile Peruvian state struggled to maintain a compliant visibility in the international community. A new constitution in 1993 stressed pluralism at the root of the democratic nation and placed indigenous peoples, at least nominally, at the center of the state’s effort to expand educational access and to democratize the country. Officially, bilingual intercultural education (BIE) was delineated as the government policy advocating for embracing cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity and indigenous revitalization. This chapter draws on an ethnographic study of the implementation of BIE in Quechua, rural schools in southern Peru. Particularly, it focuses on teachers’ notions and practices in BIE as a way to make meaning of the policy not only in the context of the classroom but also in the complex political and socioeconomic landscape surrounding the indigenous school. The central analysis presented in this chapter draws on how teachers, as political actors, interpret official policy aimed at the educational access of marginalized peoples, within the dynamics of institutional exclusion and inclusion of indigenous language and culture