The SEP, without policies for the training of indigenous education teachers, accuse

Laura Poy Solano

Newspaper La Jornada
Saturday, January 29, 2022, p. 8

Professors and researchers from the National Pedagogical University (UPN) pointed out that the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) lacks a coherent public policy that promotes the training of indigenous education teachers with a true multicultural vision that favors the rescue of their languages ​​and cultures.

In an interview with La Jornada, they highlighted that 40 years after the creation of the Bachelor of Indigenous Education (LEI) in that university, efforts have gone against the current to strengthen the training of primary and preschool teachers for the indigenous environment, but with little or no support, and what is at stake is the preservation of our cultural diversity. Despite this, they indicated, the LEI already has postgraduate studies, in which it has become a benchmark in Latin America.

Nicanor Rebolledo, Macedonio Martín and María Guadalupe Mendoza, UPN research professors in the Mexico City, Mérida and Toluca units, respectively, highlighted that the university was a pioneer in the development of a bachelor’s degree designed for the professionalization of those who would work as teachers of indigenous education. With a bicultural vision, since it was about specializing them in a specific field of education, but at the same time promoting a strengthening of their professional identity.

When the LEI was born There was hardly any talk of indigenous education in university spaces, there was a colonizing vision, and at the UPN a space was opened in the search for multiculturalism, which allowed the creation of bachelor’s degrees in indigenous primary and preschool education in 1990 , which to date has 39 generations of graduatesexplained Professor Rebolledo.

Professor-researchers Dalia Peña, from UPN-Hidalgo; Pilar Míguez, from UPN-Ajusco, and Jaime Manuel Mina, from UPN-Chihuahua, highlighted the importance of strengthening indigenous education in a country that barely constitutionally recognized its cultural and linguistic diversity at the beginning of this century.

The relevance of the LEI of the UPN in the indigenous regions, points out the teacher Peña, It is very important, because with the opening of the telebaccalaureate, many of our graduates are inserted as teachers at this educational level..

Strengthening indigenous education, they affirmed, is a priority, since in many states the UPN It is the only alternative for university training in this field, where the requirement is quality training, which recovers the values ​​and philosophy of indigenous peoples, which dialogues with the original cultures and which does not seek to impose a Castilianization as a condition for learning..