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.

ConStrat Supports Humanitarian Mission in Haiti

Twenty-four ConStrat personnel supported community relations for Task Force Bon Voizen (“Good Neighbor”) from April to July 2011 in Haiti’s Artibonite province, as well as in the capital city of Port-au-Prince and the city of Gonaïves. Much of the province has been battered by one natural disaster after another, including two tropical storms that caused catastrophic flooding in 2004 and 2008. Some of the resulting damage remains, and a vast lake still stands a few miles outside of Gonaïves in an area where storm water flowed down from the mountains into a previously dry savannah. It was here that US, Canadian and Colombian forces set up the 2011 Bon Voizen joint humanitarian assistance and training task force with ConStrat’s support.

Bon Voizen operates under the annual New Horizons humanitarian assistance program, which US Southern Command has conducted in Latin America and the Caribbean since the mid-1980s. ConStrat’s interpreters, hired directly from the Artibonite province, used English and Haitian Creole to assist the Louisiana National Guard and other foreign medical /dental personnel as they treated patients from Gonaïves to Saint-Marc. Aside from the provision of much-needed medical and dental care, Task Force Bon Voizen partnered with NGOs already active in the area to ensure that those who lived nearby or traveled from afar to receive consultations had access to clean drinking water. The Artibonite province is where the Haitian cholera epidemic first broke out in late 2010.

Day in and day out, all through the summer, ConStrat’s interpreters worked for up to twelve hours at a time to ensure that the foreign medical personnel could communicate with the local population. Medical Readiness Training Exercises (MEDRETEs) and Dental Readiness Training Exercises (DENTRETEs) were executed together with local dentists and physicians. Several of the interpreters also worked with the US Army at construction sites where the Bon Voizen partnersbuilt schools.

The mayor of Gonaïves appeared at the Forward Operating Base on the interpreters’ first day. He told ConStrat staff that health care and jobs were the community’s most pressing needs. Fortunately, Task Force Bon Voizen provided both health care and jobs during its activities in Haiti. Local residents with whom ConStrat spoke expressed their gratitude for the United States’ assistance, and looked forward to the US Army’s return in future years.

Afro-descendants and Indigenous in the Americas will be the focus of New Digital Educational Resources

The websites of the Latin American Network of Education Portals (Red Latinoamericana de Portales Educativos, or RELPE by its acronym in Spanish) are public repositories of educational materials maintained by ministries of education throughout the Americas. From Cuba to Chile, the autonomous, nationally-run RELPE sites (see www.relpe.org) already offer thousands of interactive resources for educators, students, and parents. However, a relatively small number address issues of cultural diversity, and fewer still exist in the native languages of the many indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples who represent at least a third of the region’s population. The struggles and contributions of these traditional peoples to the broader society have often been overlooked in the classroom. Hence, the need arose to create appropriate didactic materials by and for ethnic groups, as well as multicultural educational materials that might help teachers impart lessons from the perspective of marginalized groups, reduce the “digital divide,” and promote active student participation.

ConStrat and its team of experts from across the Americas will develop 2,000 digital learning resources for RELPE under a new contract with the Inter American Development Bank (IDB). By requesting the creation of multicultural educational materials, the IDB, as a major funder of the RELPE project and other education initiatives, has shown its commitment to recognizing the diversity of the students in the region. Although racial and ethnic inequalities manifest themselves differently across different countries, minority ethnic groups’ frequent lack of access to information & communication technologies (ICTs) in the classroom constitutes a challenge to achieving universal education. The creation of complex digital content has been a difficult task for developing countries due to lack of financing and technological resources -- hence the notion of a network of web portals that can produce content to be shared and exchanged among countries. Through RELPE, diverse ethnic populations in the Americas will benefit from unified and coordinated Internet portals.

ConStrat’s general objective will be to develop educational resources that take Latin America’s multicultural background into account, and provide teachers and students with a framework to build educational spaces where cultural pluralism, tolerance, and the social inclusion of the “other” are encouraged. In addition to resources that address specific ethnicities in Spanish, Portuguese, and indigenous languages, the ConStrat team will also produce materials that explore multiculturalism.

A major strength of the program is that many of the team members who will create the learning materials are themselves indigenous or Afro-descendant. Team members also come from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, education and ICTs. Through the resources that are created, ConStrat hopes it can help ministries of education promote a more tolerant and pluralistic collective conscience among students, provide guidance on the study of cultural differences, and demonstrate that diversity is an enriching factor rather than a source of conflict. Respect for the cultural identity of all students will be the overarching theme of this important project. The ConStrat team is optimistic that its resources will help teachers recognize and overcome the challenges that can arise from cultural differences in the classroom, since the materials will be available to all Latin Americans.

Dr. Abraham M. Smith, ConStrat’s Senior Advisor for Western Hemisphere Affairs, points to Marcus Garvey who once said, "A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots." Dr. Smith interprets that statement to mean that when “people know their history, they can begin to know that their ancestors were an integral part of the creation of their nation. At the same time, they can become proud of who they are so they themselves can contribute to their uplifting.” The message is particularly resonant this year, since the United Nations declared 2011 the International Year for People of African Descent.