A new program in Bolivia will teach elementary school teachers to provide multilingual instruction to students in Spanish, a local indigenous language, and English. 

Bolivia’s Minister of Education Roberto Aguilar says the idea is to foster an intercultural education model. “For a teacher who is trained in a monolingual context with a hispanicized understanding of things and a centralized approach, in this intercultural context their training must obviously be supplemented in the areas of language and culture in order to develop this historic objective we are working towards, which is the decolonization of education,” he said.

Many schools already provide multilingual education, and the government hopes that by institutionalizing the practice, students will graduate with better language skills for both within Bolivia and abroad. 

Jose Boyan’s children attend a private school in the administrative capital of La Paz that includes introductory courses in the Aymara language, the dominant indigenous language spoken in the La Paz region. Jose says, “I think it’s good that in my children’s school they have implemented instruction in Aymara, I think this helps us, especially in these times of change, to integrate ourselves with those who speak these languages because many of us have lost this knowledge.”

The Avelino Siñani­ Elizardo Perez education reform law passed in 2010 has sought to redefine Bolivia’s education model and introduce a new curriculum that adheres to the country’s new constitution approved by popular referendum in 2009. The law establishes the fundamental cultural pedagogy of the new education model as an education that is “intracultural, intercultural, multilingual and mindful of the environment and biodiversity.”  With the new lessons provided to teachers, the Ministry of Education hopes to continue advancing in the implementation of Bolivia’s new educative model.