ConStrat Blog

Digitally Preserving and Sharing Indigenous and Afro-descendant Latin American Cultures

Diverse peoples make up Latin America’s cultural heritage, and preserving those heritages is paramount to understanding and embracing the pluralistic identities in the region. Education is one of the foremost mechanisms for promoting and preserving the region’s indigenous and Afro-descendant cultures.

With that in mind, the Latin American Network of Education Portals (RELPE), with funding from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), procured ConStrat’s services to populate web-based education portals. The multicultural RELPE project emphasized the promotion of Latin America’s diverse cultural heritage through language, literature, art and interactive games. The educational content was largely defined by members of traditional communities, who addressed their own ethnicities and national identities in the e-learning materials.  Indigenous and Afro-descendant participants developed thousands of digital resources for educators and students, which are made globally accessible via the web portals of the region’s Ministries of Education.

While approaches to multicultural and ethno-education in Latin America are still evolving, ConStrat used cutting-edge digital techniques for content creation with this project. Once ConStrat’s experts generated the content, a technical team structured it according to language, grade level, country of origin and other criteria. In many cases, the content was ordered within teaching sequences, allowing educators to approach vast topics, like racism, one lesson at a time. The content was packaged and delivered to the IDB and RELPE according to SCORM standards, which made it compatible with any number of learning management systems (LMS).  

Thanks to the rise of ITCs, many new tools exist to further the goal of teaching diversity in the classroom. Interactive education portals like RELPE serve as tremendous resources for students, teachers, parents and education experts alike. They also enable increased collaboration among countries with scarce resources to invest. As an example, Mexico’s Afro-descendant communities can benefit from regional materials on Afro-descendant peoples on Central America’s Caribbean coast, like the Garífunas and the Mezquitos. Educational materials in Q’eqchi and Kiche can be used in several Central American countries where these Mayan languages are spoken. Guarani children on the border of Brazil and Paraguay can be taught the names of local plants in Guarani, Spanish and Portuguese.

Interactive puzzles, crosswords, and quizzes were developed in dozens of languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Garífuna, Palenquero, Kaqchiquel, Mam, Kalapalo, Tupi Guaraniand others. Presentations on traditional medicine and teaching guides on discrimination were created for a range of primary and secondary school levels. Games requiring students to “catch” Guarani words for food items with the mouse as they floated down the computer screen reinforced earlier vocabulary lessons. Mayan glyphs were used in a game that helped students write their own story, and culminated in the story’s animation across a hilly landscape.

ConStrat considers its work to have been a first step down the right path towards promoting multicultural and ethno-education. Teachers will need to be trained and accompanied through the process of incorporating new content into the curriculum. The materials created will need to be updated eventually, and RELPE member countries will need to build upon the resources ConStrat developed to encompass a greater number of the region’s ethnicities. This is especially true as access to reliable electricity and information technologies improves. Much more must be done to address educational disparities in Latin America, which have serious implications for the health and economic development of its Afro-descendant and indigenous peoples. 

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