Intercultural Education

One strategy used by several development initiatives to make their projects more self-sustainable is to promote intercultural education.

This is an educational model designed to offer education that aims to be relevant on two levels at the same time: on the one hand, it speaks to the student’s community, life and locality and, on the other hand, to the global context of which the students and their families also partake. Mexican students from indigenous communities who study under an intercultural education model, for instance, would learn the indigenous language of their region as well as Spanish and perhaps even English to better communicate with people from other parts of their country or the world. They will acquire knowledge that is pertinent to rural life and knowledge that will be useful in other contexts too. In short, intercultural education seeks to expand people’s opportunities as much as possible so that each person can choose the kind of life they want to lead, whether inside or outside their communities of origin. 

Another objective of intercultural education is to empower people to gradually take on the development problems they face and assume responsibilities that help solve them. This is why many of the initiatives that promote this model do so in order to build capacity at the local level, which will eventually help them come up with more comprehensive development solutions that are relevant to the specific context in which they are applied. The idea is that increased local capacity will grant projects more autonomy to negotiate and address the interests and needs of beneficiaries and their communities on more equitable terms. 

For these same reasons, initiatives that promote this model try to share the management and decision-making of educational projects with all the different actors involved: parents, teachers, students, school administrative staff, etc., and also with national or international education organizations. In this way, everyone’s points of view can be taken into account, which allows a project to better address its members’ different needs when adapting programs, teaching methods, schedules, content, and so on, to ensure that students receive an intercultural education. 

Some of the initiatives that decide to promote this educational model –either by adopting it themselves or by supporting other initiatives that implement it– adapt official learning material by incorporating local knowledge, characters or themes to make it more relevant to the children’s immediate context. Others organize participatory activities or dynamics (such as parent or student governments, or events like annual fairs) for local communities to express what they expect from their children’s education and suggest different ways of working, or for the children themselves to convey what they need. Still others link their educational programs with other development initiatives in areas such as health, access to clean water, culture, etc., to ensure that the school and the children’s context are supportive of one another.