PeruMujer is an NGO which is dedicated to issues for the betterment of the lives of Peruvian women. They do not limit their activities just to Andean women, but in the case of this particular project, they are working with indigenous peasant women in Cajamarca. CADEP (Centro Andino de Educacion y Promocion, the Andean Center for Education and Promotion) is a non-governmental organization whose main focus is primary education and literacy of the Quechua populations in and around the departments of Cuzco and Apurimac, especially in the provinces of Anta, Chumbivilcas and Cotabambas. It conducts educational programs geared towards both elementary age children and female adults. The specific program discussed in this report is only for Quechua women, however. APED (Asociacion para la Ecologia y el Desarrollo, the Association for Ecology and Development) is an NGO whose primary function is to contribute to the development and betterment of the populations of the Andean region. They have implemented this literacy program in 42 communities in the provinces of Calca, Cuzco and Paruro, which are in the department of Cuzco.

All of these NGOs have as one of their philosophies that access to writing should not lead to a renunciation of either cultural values or mother tongue on the part of the learners, an issue that has historically been a serious problem with state-sponsored education (public schooling). In fact, in Cajamarca there has already been a significant shift away from Quechua, so that Spanish is the primary language even of the rural Quechua women. In this case, PeruMujer has started from a base of Spanish literacy rather than Quechua. Even so, they still emphasize the Quechua cultural values that a change of language cannot necessarily erase.

These organizations also believe that true community development is not possible if it is not based on the efforts of those intended to benefit from it. They have therefore developed the literacy programs by basing lessons on the Quechua cultural context, and creating programs that require the active involvement of the participants to keep the program running. In fact, the instructors in the programs are chosen from the communities themselves, and so are completely familiar with the environment in which they will be teaching. They undergo a special three-semester training program in how to teach literacy. In addition, communities and women's groups within those communities are strongly encouraged to participate in the election of literacy leaders and in the management of the literacy program overall in their communities. They also enter into agreements to financially support the programs to the degree possible in their respective communities.

The women's literacy programs are designed to be bilingual and intercultural. The program goals are to develop communicative competence through teaching reading and writing in the mother tongue, and to achieve high levels of competence, both oral and written, in both understanding and producing Spanish. In Cuzco and Apurimac, this is accomplished through second-language pedagogical techniques. Obviously, in Cajamarca Spanish is already the mother tongue of most of these women. In the ADEP and CADEP programs, the women are taught to read and write first in Quechua, and then Spanish is gradually introduced as a second language. In this way, a maintenance bilingual education program is effectively introduced, in which the use of one language does not eliminate the use of the other.

Implementation Process

The programs are implemented with the full acceptance and participation of the community, in the following process:

• First NGO representatives meet with community leaders to determine interest in offering a literacy program to the women of the community. If the leaders express interest, a community assembly is convened, where the pros and cons of the program are discussed, acceptance of the community as a whole is obtained, and an agreement is signed between the NGO and the community.
  
• The president of the appropriate community council decides which person(s) in the community would be the most appropriate to become the literacy trainer(s). It is absolutely essential, according to the philosophy of the program, that it be a community member who is the trainer.
  
• This person undergoes intensive training in how to teach literacy, for up to three semesters.
  
• S/he returns to the community and holds workshops in which s/he implements the training received.

By involving community members in this way, the program coordinators hope to create a sense of ownership of the program by community members and thus insure the continuation of the programs. Also, the hope is that these trainers will continue to teach for about two years, and then take on more responsibility and become coordinators, and then trainers of future trainers from within the community. In this way, the program can become a true community effort for which the members accept full responsibility for its continuation.

Scheduling of Class Time

One of the novelties of the program is the structuring of class time. As adults, they have heavy responsibilities at home and in the field, and are much less likely to be able to spend several hours a day away from these duties. For this reason, classes were originally scheduled in the evenings, or only during the agricultural "off-season" when their duties were somewhat lighter and they might reasonably be expected to be able to come to a class for a couple of hours a day every day or two to three times a week.

However, after some time, the CADEP program leaders decided that even this was not an ideal solution, so they tried a completely novel approach. They invited as many women as possible who could take the time away, to meet ("sequester" themselves) for a two-week intensive literacy training program. They took the women to a place on the coast (Canam) to completely remove the women from their daily responsibilities and also to offer them the chance to broaden their horizons and give them a new sense of freedom. Many of the women in this first pilot effort had never seen the ocean before, so as well as an opportunity to concentrate exclusively on learning without the worry of daily responsibilities, they also had an exciting vacation that they probably would never have been able to experience otherwise.

Class Themes

Themes of classes revolve around the daily life of a Quechua woman. In the beginning classes when women are being taught to read and write, they literally revolve around basic vocabulary such as the environment around them, working in the fields, housework, other everyday activities, and so forth. As their reading and writing skills advance, lesson themes may progress to more "theoretical" topics such as personal hygiene, health maintenance, even women's role in a changing society and more global topics such as ethnocentrism, cultural relativism, ethnocide, genocide, cultural values, world concept (cosmovisions), customs, cultural heroes, myths, acculturation and enculturation. The purpose of such discussions is twofold: it creates new uses of the language and stretches it to new domains, and it leads the speakers to discover new possibilities for "reading" reality and rediscover their own culture.

Overview of Classroom Activities

Classroom activities generally involve the reading-writing method, in which participants view a picture or code that portrays a familiar situation followed by presentation of the written word (the "cue" word) that represents the situation. The word is divided into syllabic families which make it easier for the women to break it down and recombine with other learned pieces to make their own words and express their own reality in written form.

Some activities other than discussion that take place at the introductory levels are choral repetition exercises, to help learners associate letter groups with their respective sounds; singing familiar songs while following along with the written words, which help to achieve the same purpose; practicing writing the sounds and words both in their notebooks and on the blackboard, to learn to produce what they are learning to recognize. They have lists of syllable groups (e.g., kay, kiy, kuy; tan, tin, tun; etc.) written on large wall-chart pages that they hang on the walls and blackboards. They practice spelling and recombination with these lists, to create words, and at more advanced levels, sentences. In the Cajamarca program, of course, these syllable groups were from Spanish rather than Quechua.

This project was chosen to be included in the International Literacy Explorer because of its primary emphasis on teaching literacy to women. The strategies that this program uses seem to be considerably more effective at initiating and maintaining literacy than state education has been. The format and methodologies used to teach the lessons can offer helpful ideas to other program developers in how to create lessons or develop programs based on a specific cultural context. While specific lessons might not be transferable to other settings, certainly the ideas used to construct them can.

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