CIESAS, Mexico
Poster
The present poster reports on what in my experience at least potentially conforms to successfully reversing language shift. For this aim, I will present illustrations of materials utilized in pilot interventions with Mexican indigenous groups, especially with children. Based on the idea of intercultural co-authorships and interactive workshops to empower the use of endangered languages, our from-the-bottom-up approach develops a co-participatory, empowering methodology. Interventions at the community level are sustained recovering culturally-sensitive pedagogies, recasting vivid indigenous oral genres (such as legends and riddles) supported by their own visual means (such as the amate, “painted bark wood paper”), recreating them in attractive high tech media such as DVD animation and three dimensional videos. Such high quality formats provide status to the indigenous language and culture, triggering interest and opposing well-entrenched stigmas, practices and ideologies.
Session: POSTERS: Focus on variation, migration, minority languages
Thursday, April 3, 2008, 12:45-15:45
room: foyer