CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

Indigenous peoples around the world are calling for control over their education in order to reaffirm their identities and defend their rights. In Latin America the indigenous peoples, national governments and international organisations have identified intercultural education as a means of contributing to this process. The book investigates education for and by indigenous peoples and examines the relationship between theoretical and methodological developments and formal practice. An ethnographic study of the Arakmbut people of the Peruvian Amazon, provides a detailed example of the social, cultural and educational change indigenous peoples are experiencing, an insight into Arakmbut oral learning and teaching practices as well as a review of their conceptualisations of knowledge, pedagogy and evaluation. The models of intercultural education being promoted by Latin American governments are, nevertheless, biliterate and school-based. The book analyses indigenous and non-indigenous models based on different conceptualisations of culture and curriculum in the context of the Arakmbut search for an education which respects their dynamic oral cultural traditions and identity, provides them with a qualitatively relevant education about the wider society and addresses the intercultural lives they lead.

Repensando pedagogías y prácticas interculturales en las Américas es el resultado de un ejercicio de reflexión y documentación de proyectos de investigación y programas de formación en educación superior que se han desarrollado con estudiantes indígenas y afrodescendientes, desde una lectura crítica de las políticas de educación intercultural bilingüe (EIB) en Centro y Sur América. Se busca poner en debate múltiples procesos educativos, políticos y epistémicos que, desde finales del siglo XX y bajo el impulso de lo que conocemos como EIB, se han desarrollado con la participación de actores diversos: docentes, académicos, activistas, comuneros, estudiantes, agencias gubernamentales y no gubernamentales. Esta apuesta surge del diálogo entre docentes y estudiantes que trabajamos en tema de la formación de docentes indígenas y profesionales indígenas para el campo educativo, en instituciones con larga data en estos procesos como la Universidad Politécnica Salesiana (UPS) de Ecuador y la Universidad Pedagógica Nacional (UPN) en México.