Which Kichwa? Teaching Indigenous languages and working with and against dominant language ideologies in a small-scale textbook in Ecuador

This chapter looks at an initiative to co-author a heritage language Kichwa textbook with educators and students. Taking into account findings about standardization and language shift from previous ethnographic research on making Kichwa a language of the state, including that many Kichwa speakers do not identify with, and may struggle to understand, standardized Kichwa, the production of the textbook aimed to teach and excite young people to become more proficient in Kichwa. A guiding goal was to value and model different ways of communicating in Kichwa, such as dialects, alphabets, and other differences from Spanish while also acknowledging drawing from the strength of students’ proficiency in Ecuadorian Spanish.