Formación del profesorado en la lengua y cultura indígena: Una histórica demanda educativa en contexto Mapuche

Abstract

This article brings the results of a study whose purpose was to construct with teachers working in a Mapuche cultural and educational context what they demand from educational institutions according to the needs for their performance. Teachers' current requirements are correlated, in a historical perspective, with the demands of a group of teachers from this indigenous people witnessed in the 1930s and 1940s. The study has been developed with a mixed social research methodology of historical character to focus on the Mapuche teachers' demands, and with a communicative methodology to collect current teachers' demands. For the latter, a mixed research model with a sequential integrated typology was implemented, in which different data collecting techniques were used (communicative questionnaires, interviews, and discussion groups). The results of both corpora of requirements converge on the need for teachers with training in Mapuche culture and language, so that they can deal with the cultural and linguistic characteristics of Mapuche students. In other words, they demand teachers be qualified to develop culturally relevant education.