ELT Primary School curriculum design in the 21st century: introducing the intercultural perspective in Latin America

Abstract

In this chapter we describe how we developed an ELT curriculum design for primary school with an intercultural perspective for the context of the Province of Buenos Aires in Spanish-speaking Argentina in Latin America in 2007. English is a foreign language in this country. As we shall explain later, this intercultural dimension turned this curricular document into an innovative initiative in this setting, after a century of conceptualizations of ELT which had focused exclusively on the linguistic side of foreign language learning. We start with a brief outline of some current theoretical developments in foreign language education in general, and ELT in particular, which have motivated this innovative experience and have served as its theoretical foundation at the same time. We then provide a brief description of our context, essential to grasp the challenges involved in curricular development in this region. A significant part of this chapter centers on a detailed description of the processes of conceiving and actually writing the curricular document that we ourselves underwent as curriculum writers. The focus is on how this document has purposefully taken account of this intercultural dimension of ELT in Argentina. Basically, this was done through the ways in which its components were organized and developed. Our task as curriculum developers was to find ways in which this perspective was both explicitly and implicitly stated in the document. On the one hand, explicit information was conveyed with reference to intercultural issues in the introductory part, the objectives, the content, and the teaching strategies presented. On the other hand, there was an implicit treatment of diversity in classroom practices in terms of the ways in which children are expected to learn and teachers are expected to teach from the point of view of a process based methodology. At all times we strive to illustrate these processes with extracts from the curricular document itself. We then proceed to present the concomitant teacher education program especially designed to support this curricular innovation in the province of Buenos Aires. Here we explain our understanding of teacher education, namely a conception that radically distances itself from teacher training. We are particularly detailed in our description at this junction, and this is intentional. The motivation for this is simple: we believe that the professionalization of teacher education, as conceptualized and carried out in our setting, must accompany a curricular innovation like this one for it to be successful in reaching real classrooms and real pupils around our province. Finally, we present a practical example of this teacher education program through an extract of a teacher development session as actually implemented in this setting in 2007.