Social Science Research Council

"In School but not of it: Challenging Social Structures through Kuna-Language Education."

My dissertation research focuses on Kuna education in Panama as a space where Kuna and Western ideas of schooling are coming into contact, analyzing how education in Kuna classrooms is structured and performed as both indigenous and Western through language.  This research has two specific foci: the way in which educational programs are being conceived by Kuna educators and community members ideologically, and the way that everyday language in the classroom is producing and reproducing language ideologies. My research relies on ethnographic approaches to language use, focusing on classroom discourse in two different Kuna schools, one in Kuna Yala and one in Panama City, over the course of 12 months. This research will examine the ways that these two schools have dealt with the differences between Kuna education and Western schooling in Kuna Yala and the urban context.  Utilizing these research strategies, my project seeks to document the process of developing an indigenous language education program in order to obtain a complex understanding of how language and language ideologies structure and are structured by schooling. Through documenting classroom interaction in Kuna schools and analyzing specific instances of discourse, this research reveals how everyday classroom language both determines and is determined by larger questions of language, gender, ethnicity, culture and power.