Indigenous perspectives on quality and inclusion: a view from the Peruvian Amazon

Taking examples from the Peruvian Amazon, the paper examines different 'regimes' of schooling and understandings of concepts of quality and inclusion. It considers schooling for and by indigenous peoples as a political project... [ view full abstract ]

Taking examples from the Peruvian Amazon, the paper examines different 'regimes' of schooling and understandings of concepts of quality and inclusion. It considers schooling for and by indigenous peoples as a political project and the school as a political space where regimes and their agents negotiate their agendas (Escobar 2000; Popkewitz 2008). Through an exploration of different regimes of schooling, it considers how indigenous peoples' priorities for particular regimes or forms of schooling - with their various conceptualisations of quality and inclusion - have been and continue to be shaped by their histories, epistemologies and socio-cultural-linguistic change. In this Amazon region today, the value of schooling is intimately linked to rapid changes happening in the physical environment through rapacious natural resource exploitation, such as gold, timber and oil, accompanied by large scale in-migration and new kinds of social and economic relations. In this context where indigenous future look far from sustainable, the paper asks what kind of development indigenous peoples are prioritising today and what expectations they have of current regimes of schooling for supporting the kinds of quality education and learning and inclusion they value? The paper draws on long term ethnographic field work in the SE Peruvian Amazon with the Harakmbut peoples.