Indigenous teacher training: tensions between curriculum and educational practice in Chalchihuitán, Chiapas

Abstract

This article examines the tensions between curricular discourse and educational practices in Indigenous contexts, focusing on the Tsotsil case of Chalchihuitán, Chiapas. It analyzes the relevance of both pre-service and in-service teacher education in addressing the challenges posed by the 2006, 2011, 2017, and 2022 national curricula within the framework of the Nueva Escuela Mexicana. Drawing on an ethnographic and sociolinguistic approach, the study identifies a disjunction between the intercultural and multilingual paradigm promoted at the policy level and its enactment in school practices, where a Spanish-dominant logic continues to subordinate the Tsotsil language (bats’i k’op) to instrumental uses. Findings indicate that this gap is linked to structural limitations in teacher preparation, particularly in the development of linguistic and pedagogical competencies for bilingual education, as well as to the scarcity of contextually relevant teaching materials and the lack of sustained pedagogical support. In this context, the vitality of Tsotsil largely depends on teacher agency and community-based practices. The study concludes that teacher education must be reconceptualized as a situated and ongoing process aimed at integrating pedagogical, linguistic, and community knowledge, while fostering critical biliteracy in pursuit of linguistic justice.