Augmenting Belize’s school curricula to increase indigenous students’ engagement in learning

Abstract

Due to high drop-out rates for Indigenous students in Belize, there is an urgent need to explore ways to increase student engagement. The purpose of this research is to gather the voices of the local educational community, including Indigenous stakeholders, about their experiences with the current secondary school curricula and how it may be made more engaging to Indigenous students. This research is important because it not only expands upon on limited theoretical and quantitative data presented by prior studies, but also attempts to harness the qualitative lived experiences, stories, and narratives of the local community who seek to improve education through ensuring its cultural relevance. To gather the voices, I conducted focus group interviews with students, teachers and Elders, and I distributed surveys to administrators. The sample of 30 participants was purposively selected and inclusive of residents of Toledo, Belize. Interviews were video and audio recorded and transcribed. The data, which consisted of student attendance records, responses from the surveys, and transcripts from the interviews were reviewed, coded and then thematically sorted and analyzed. My analysis of the data revealed six themes among participant responses with the most prevalent being the recommendation to integrate Maya language and culture into the curriculum.