LANGUAGE POLICY, CULTURE AND IDENTITY IN INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES AT UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE

INTRODUCTION

Social inclusion as a policy at the Universidad del Valle has been always a utopia because there are many possibilities to enter here, but not to keep studying until finishing. In the case of indigenous communities they are a synonym of resistance, in spite of many years of violence, destruction of their habitats, forced displacement, cultural extinction, they have been fighting in silence, in peace with the only weapon they have: their knowledge.

Although their knowledge is not enough at the time to begin and to continue a professional career, can we ask why? That is because social inclusion inside Universidad del Valle beyond more that just the access to the institution, it is necessary politic policies in which these communities can find the recognition of their culture and their language as a reflection of that culture.

In this complex situation, indigenous have been working in the process of professionalization of their members who are bilingual teachers, through CRIC (Consejo Regional Indigena del Cauca), but the tensions arising from the linguistic policies in which Spanish is the predominant language, left as a result, a high level of desertion in the university. Therefore this paper is an approximation to understand this context in which the language policy, culture and identity are a system of domination, still alive here in our university.

BACK TO HISTORY: EXPERIENCES AROUND THE PROBLEMS INDIGENOUS STUDENTS HAVE WITH OUR CULTURE

In 2007 I worked with professor Luis Emilio Mora and Esperanza Arciniegas in a program of Spanish for indigenous communities called “Proyecto universidad y culturas” in which the point was the creation of this program in order to help indigenous who were studying here without possibilities to understand Spanish courses, in there I met Gabriela Patiño Lakatos a psychology member of the group “Cultura y desarrollo humano” that belongs to Psychology Institute in Universidad del Valle, nowadays directed by Maria Cristina Tenorio, teacher of this Institute, in this proposal I knew the experiences of Gabriela Patiño with Veronica Guerrero a student of psychology from Nasa Yuwe ( Resguardo Nasa de Miranda Cauca) in a mentoring of development of writing and reading skills.

Through this experience we realize there was a problem beyond inclusion at the university, she had been studying in a program of the university focused on training in western music, after that she was fighting with the teachers of Psychology Institute because she was in front of at least two big problems: the reading of complex text and the references unconnected with her personal experience and school education.

But the complications around the problems in writing and reading of indigenous students led as a result the creation of intensive Spanish course focused on reading comprehension and expressive writing for the students of the first three semesters.

Common writing problems: from a philosophy of life that turns in spiral

Writing as a complex process requires a constant exercise, more than that, writing is a process that includes a personal experience, particular knowledge’s, motivation and some other things referring to this process.

According to Gabriela Patiño and her experience with Veronica the Nasa Yuwe student, she had many difficulties at the time to read a text, like these:

· Decoding problems

· Problems with the meaning of punctuation marks

· Nothing of importance to specialized words

· Non-Western cultural references

· Sensitivity problems around the topics the text are talking about

· Problems to abstract the relation between the parts of the argumentative structure of the text

· Difficulties in relation with the style of the author

Gabriela Patiño continues in the description of these problems including a reference of George Steiner, On difficulty and other essays in which the difficulties presented by Veronica are identified and described by Steiner:

Decoding: Basic difficulties in the correctly recognition of the letters in a word.

Interpretation of the punctuation marks: If the reader is not conscious with the sense and the function of the punctuation marks, it is impossible to understand the meaning of the author.

Contingent: It comes when the reader does not understand the words and language used by the author.

Modals: The text is always based on ideas, concepts, judges that imply another point of view of thinking and feeling.

Structural abstraction: It consists in problems of the reader to abstract the structure of the text, it not enough to understand some idea, it is necessary articulated them in a unity, the reader can be able to abstract the narrative development or argumentative development of a text, the purpose and point of view of the author, and to identify examples.

George Steiner, On difficulty and Other essays. Oxford University Press, New York y Oxford 1978.

In the higher education context we found all these problems, but if these problems are terrible for us, for indigenous are worse. The need of a pedagogy that take into account their context is extremely important, because they need to understand the context around them and they need professional careers according to their life, most of the programs university offers are not applicable to them.