Educación Intercultural Bilingüe in the Galapagos Islands

media release: Please join UW Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program. The events are free and open to the public.

Room 206 Ingraham Hall - 1155 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706. Register for Zoom option.

About the presentation: This presentation discusses the efforts of a migrant Salasaka Indigenous community from the Ecuadorian Andes living in Galapagos in establishing a bilingual Kichwa-Spanish school. Galapagos, a province of Ecuador, is a region in which the majority of the population does not identify as Indigenous nor speak Kichwa. Yet, this migrant Indigenous community was able to create a school that adapted the Ecuadorian Educación Intercultural Bilingüe (EIB) model to the Galapagos context. The presentation will address the agency and creativity of migrant Indigenous groups as transformative agents in maintaining their languages, traditional ecological knowledge, cosmovision, and Indigeneity outside their ancestral lands.

About the presenter: Dr. Diego Román is an Assistant Professor in Bilingual/Bicultural Education at the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Fall 2019). Prior to this appointment, he was an Assistant Professor in Bilingual Education at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Dr. Román holds a B.S. degree in Agronomy from Zamorano University in Honduras and a M.S. degree in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He also earned a M.S. degree in Biology, a M.A. in Linguistics, and a Ph.D. degree in Educational Linguistics, all from Stanford University. At the K-12 level, Dr. Román taught middle school science to English Learners and newcomer students for seven years, first in rural Wisconsin and then in San Francisco, California.