Bilingual Education in the Light of Interculturality

Interculturality is considered by Ecuadorian professor and activist researcher Catherine Walsh to be a concept formulated and loaded with meaning, mainly by the Ecuadorian indigenous movement from the 1980s onwards. The educational policies promoted by indigenous peoples, NGOs and the state from this period onwards aimed to establish national policies of plurilingualism and multiethnicity. The change from the term "bicultural bilingual education", used at the time, to "Intercultural Bilingual Education - IBE", was proposed with the aim of recognizing the integrative, global, historical and dynamic nature of culture, which results in the condition that a human collectivity never becomes bicultural, but rather is capable of including new forms and contents as new living conditions and needs require. Thus, this work seeks to make a contribution to the area of language acquisition, in the sense of understanding and proposing alternatives for implementing intercultural competence in the process of teaching and learning English in Brazilian early childhood education, by proposing to observe the social and cultural contrasts implicit in the curricula of this area.