The inclusion of the Mapuche Language in the Curriculum of Schools with Intercultural Education: a more than methodological problem

Abstract

In this article we aim at underscoring sensens, motivations and meanings
underlying the insertion of the teaching of the Mapuche language in schools, located in Mapuche Huilliche territory, that are submitted to intercultural education programs, and put them into play with ideologies that underpin the curriculum, and articulate the school concretions of the teaching of the language. As part of our findings, we claim that in schools where the educational emphasis is on the revaluation of the politicalcultural identity of the Mapuche people, the teaching of the language is resituated in a
liberating perspective; whereas, in schools where identity is individualized and worked out on a cultural curriculum devoid from history, the Mapuche language education counts only upon fragmented spaces, discontinued in time, which in turn, is subjected to traditional disciplinary contents of the official school-curriculum, reassuring -against expectations - its status of subordinate language.