At the end of my experience in Peru, and by that I mean on my 8 hour flight to Atlanta, I took inventory of all I saw and experienced and thought about my guiding question for this International Field Experience: In what ways do Peruvian students construct identity amid the competing pulls of Indigenous heritage, national culture, and global citizenship?
I deliberately crafted this question around identity for a few reasons. First, it’s work I’m fully engaged in within my own building and with my own students. Their work on those big questions inspired me to use my question as a way to bring with me something of my own classroom. Concurrently, as a social studies teacher (and someone whose daily news reading list includes multiple international sources), I was well aware of some of the very real, very challenging socioeconomic tensions within Peru - be they related to migration into the country from Venezuela, internal political/policy debates, or the history of Indigenous representation throughout the country. I wanted to dig into something important while being respectful of the surroundings I would be a part of as a visiting educator.
What I was left with isn’t necessarily a clean answer, at least not in any type of definitive sense. There is no one size fits all answer to the question, as the diversity of experience, history, and perspective in Peru is itself in a way the lens for identity. The students I met, they didn’t shy away from any of the complexities of their world. They spoke with pride about the long, indigenous histories in their communities. They stood up for and together with groups that might not trace their immediate roots within the country, and yet were an essential part of the fabric of their communities. They articulated what they saw as the key challenges facing education in Peru, not in an abstract sense, but in a way that clearly articulated how top-down decision making doesn’t reach all populations in all ways. To them, what it meant to be a student in Peru was recognizing the reality of the world around them and embracing it, challenges and all. It’s how you get a class having a frankly difficult discussion as to why some of the students in the room couldn’t drink the tap water in their own homes while others challenged themselves to learn not one, but multiple languages, reaching out to an Indigenous past and a global future.
In all, I leave this experience excited to bring these perspectives back to my classroom. The energy of Peru, of the students I met, and the educators I was fortunate to interact with is something you almost wish you could bottle up, just so that you know you’ve got it in one place to share. Instead, I’ll do my best to stay true to that energy as I embark upon more of this work at home. And if I bottle anything, it’s likely going to be some chicha morada. That stuff is magic.