Teacher Education and Cultural Integration in University Students' Programs in Chile: A Case Study

This article studies the degree to which Nursery and Elementary Teacher Education programmes in Chile incorporate knowledge about indigenous cultures in their curricula. This is a case study contextualized on three universities located in the regions of Tarapaca in the north, Valparaiso in the center and Araucania in the south of the country. Curricula, course programmes and professional profiles are analyzed, together with the voices of the students that belong to these programmes. Findings show that the curricula do not incorporate ancestral knowledge of the indigenous groups (aymara, quechua, pascuense, mapuche) that inhabit the regions mentioned above. Besides, they do not prepare students to interact and act pedagogically in intercultural contexts, neither do they consider indigenous knowledge as an intercultural option to enrich teacher education and intercultural integration.