Working together, learning apart: a multicommunity study in rural Peru

ABSTRACT

This article is based on a team ethnographic study in the province of Yauyos in the Peruvian Andes. It focuses on rural education and the inequalities surrounding it. Teachers and parents exchange mutual recriminations as they seek to explain why some children have greater difficulties than others and why urban schools achieve superior results as shown in tests and verified in popular imaginaries. We examine two arenas where cultural misreadings, compensatory mechanisms and children’s agency come into play. One concerns verbal expression and classroom participation. The other concerns extracurricular mutual support networks and complements, from homework help to exposure to urban settings. Parents, teachers, and children all shared aspirations for children’s academic success. How that can be achieved, against high odds, is a source of tensions that the research documented and is the subject of ongoing debate in the Peruvian education sector.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural Andes
• children’s agency
• discourse styles
• support networks
• educational inequalities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Research participants’ names, and town names (except the provincial capital), are pseudonyms. Fieldworkers’ names are not pseudonyms.

2 While private schools absorb a major part of the demand in urban areas, practically all rural education is public.

3 We designed the research over the course of several months and two grant proposals, and it built on a previous project by one of the co-authors modeling a similar design. The fieldworkers were all anthropology students or in related social sciences, and underwent intensive training over two weeks in June 2008 offered by the co-authors, anthropologists from two other Latin American countries, and a Peruvian psychologist. The co-authors and other staff made periodic visits to the student fieldworkers as the research progressed, and worked closely with them on analysis.

4 The Catholic University in Lima (the sponsoring institution) had no ethics review process at the time of the research. We followed the ‘Smith rule’ (Smith 2006) in recognizing everyday expressions of engagement and tolerance as evidence for people’s willingness for their community to be involved in a study, and in deferring decisions about individual participation to the individual.

5 In our study, several of the teachers were working near where they had grown up and gone to school. Their understanding of local conditions and ability to model success could be an advantage for their students (compare Hornberger and Kvietok Dueñas 2019, 10; Sumida Huaman and Valdiviezo 2014, 72).

6 In the smallest town (population 500) six teachers taught grades 1–6 for the 46 primary students, and eight teachers in rotation taught the required specialties to the 31 secondary students. The secondary school in the largest town (population 1900) had 100 students; class sizes might surpass 20, still far from the 40 or more that might fill a classroom in many urban public schools.

7 Many parents treat school registration as the expression of an aspiration that may or may not be attainable. For example, in Pastizales, six out of ten registered first-graders, and three out of eleven registered third-graders, actually came to class regularly.

8 Compare Vigo Arrazola and Soriano Bozalongo (2015), 332 on teachers’ knowledge about their students and the families in a rural setting.

9 Many urban schools operate in three shifts without addressing student meals; in Yauyos, at the time of the study, the school day was organized into a morning and afternoon session separated by a lunch period.

10 Because all the fieldworkers were identified as college students, they were expected to share their knowledge and experience with community members on many different levels. Helping out with homework was an exercise in reciprocity towards children and families that were collaborators in the research.

11 Their efforts somewhat resemble the group assignments they were sometimes given, which were likely to be completed as a pastiche – rather than group work, each member of the group typically resolved their part and somebody pasted the parts together (see Oliart 2011). This technique also resembles copy-and-paste use of the internet, although computers and internet services were just arriving in Yauyos in 2008 and had minimal impact on schoolwork.

12 Decreto Supremo 013-2018-MINEDU/2018. In El Peruano, December 14, 2018, p. 20–70.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Consorcio de Investigación Económica y Social; Wenner-Gren Foundation.