My Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad: Teaching the Andes

Redefining the Common Good and Reclaiming the Public Square

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TeachingTheAndes

6 min readJun 18, 2017

As I write, I’m sitting at the airport in Columbus, Ohio waiting to leave on a 4-week Fulbright-Hays group project abroad to South America, first to Ecuador and later to Peru!

I’ll be traveling along with 11 other passionate, dynamic K-12 Educators from a wide variety of disciplines ranging from Spanish to English to Geography to Art History, and I could not be more excited to learn from and with them as we conduct all kinds of cultural site visits, study an indigenous language (Quechua, more below), and create curriculum for other K-12 teachers to use to teach their students about the Andes region.

Here is some more info about the program from the OSU CLAS (Center for Latin American Studies) Teaching the Andes website:

Funded by the Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad, this four-week program will take twelve K-12 educators in various disciplines to Ecuador and Peru, June 16 — July 16, 2017. Participants will benefit from a wide variety of activities that explores the history, politics, language, and culture of the Andes while developing innovative approaches to teaching and studying the region, in addition to Quechua language instruction.

Key Program Features:

Lectures and workshops on Andean history, culture, society, religion, and economics
Educational site visits including colonial Quito, Cotacachi Cayapas Natural Reserve, Hot Springs in Intag, Sacred Valley of Peru, Machu Picchu, and Lake Titicaca
Participation in local customs and cultural activities, including annual festivals, ritual baths at Cascada Peguche, taking of the square, and many more
Language training in Quechua
Participation in curriculum development projects
Fully paid international airfare, ground transportation, lodging, meals, and some cultural activities

Why Teach about the Andes?

The past two days, we’ve been spending 8+ hours at The Ohio State University for our pre-program orientation, so we now know each others’ names, a bit about one another, and, perhaps most importantly, why this program is so important.

Yesterday, an OSU librarian specializing in Latin American studies came to introduce to us to the landscape of what resources already exist to teach about the indigenous people and cultures of the Andes mountains, and it became readily apparent just how underrepresented this region and its people are.

Very few resources exist to raise awareness of this area of the world, its people, their traditions and way of life, and language, particularly curricular resources for K-12 teachers to use in the classroom. Therefore, while it’s a huge honor to have been selected as a Fulbright participant, I also realize now what a great responsibility this is, as the onus is truly on me and other participants to create useful, flexible, engaging curriculum for K-12 teachers to use to teach about the Andes.

Did you know that most of the information you find online (especially information that is academic in nature) comes from very few countries and languages? Namely, countries with many English speakers and countries with high levels of socioeconomic development contribute a huge majority of the information we find when we conduct research online.

Check out the “Listen to Wikipedia” resource below for an interesting audio-visual way of experiencing concretely the overrepresentation and underrepresentation of various languages and cultures when it comes to online access to the world’s information:

Listen to Wikipedia — every bubble you see is a change that has just been made to Wikipedia, with the size and color of each bubble having something to do with the amount edited; you can click on a bubble to see edits being made in real time. If you scroll down, you’ll see that the music and visuals you’re watching and hearing (turn on audio!) represents the changes being made to the English Wikipedia. Now, try changing that to another, less common language, to hear the music change, and likely fade away to some extent — the fewer edits that are being made in, say, Bulgaria, the less music and visual changes you will see, which is a fascinating way of showing how most of our world’s information is being contributed by English speakers, resulting in underrepresentation of speakers of other languages).

More about the Language and People of the Andes

Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire, is the most commonly spoken indigenous language in the Americas, with 8–10 million Quechua speakers living in Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and of course Ecuador and Peru! There are numerous varieties of Quechua which are not necessarily mutually comprehensible. Most native speakers of Quechua are bilingual, speaking Spanish in addition to their mother tongue.

Our language learning will emphasize participatory pedagogies, such as use of Andean musical instruments, song, dance, culturally authentic material objects, and more:

I was in Peru in February of 2017 for about 10 days on my own for my sabbatical travel, but it was such a whirlwind — just 10 days spent between Lima, Cusco, and the Sacred Valley / Machu Pichu area. Between the 3.5 days of altitude sickness I experienced and the time lost to travel back and forth between Lima and Cusco, I walked away with just a tiny taste of the wonder that this part of the world has to offer. Thus, I’m incredibly excited to be going back, for an extended period of time, with planned instructional objectives and programming, a packed itinerary of site visits and language study, alongside other K-12 teachers! Adding Ecuador to my list of countries and cultural explorations is just the cherry on top.