The unsuccessful experience that two researchers, authors of this article, witnessed as they participated in the joint construction of a trilingual educational model for the island of San Andres, Colombian Caribbean, serves to illustrate the challenges that the passage from a monolingual and monocultural educational model to a plurilingual and intercultural one entail. Underlying this experience is the issue of how national policies of education, which intend to put the country on the path to a globalized world aligned with the neoliberal trends of education, clash with the multicultural and plurilingual characteristics of the country, acknowledged in its 1991 Political Constitution. As an alternative to the complex relations of power, we present a newly formed self-learning network of teachers from basic and secondary education, who seek to have an effect on the teacher training policies of the nation, through their own proposals of classroom action-research.