in relation
Welcome to
Learning in relation
Supporting Self-Determination through Public Education
OUR
MISSION
We aim to strengthen and advance inclusive & equitable quality education to promote lifelong learning opportunities for all (e.g., The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) #4) in rural contexts and sovereign indigenous nations in México. These efforts will center around indigenous education by exploring schools designs with systems of relationally (Meixi et al., 2022), and evaluation in a dignified, decolonial approach that disrupts impositions of the pervasive power and hierarchies that marginalize K-12 learning settings.
Land Education & Self-Determination
Indigenous relationalities with land, water, and sky-scapes have always been central to ensuring thriving and just futures for all, human and more-than-human. The placelessness of public schooling on the other hand, has debilitated dynamic community and land-based knowledges, transmitted a settler-colonial land ethic (Calderon, 2014) and contributed to increasingly uninhabitable worlds. Our work here in Caminatas Educativas/ Aprender y Caminar (Stories) strengthens the ways land and water-based communities and Indigenous peoples shape, craft, and advance their own systems of education, human development, and evaluation in public schools. Land education is core to self-determination.
We use land education to refer to what Cajete called “education appropriate to place”, learning that engages the wisdom of places embedded and living in the lands, waters, and sky-scapes that sustain these communities. Regenerating a collectives’ ethical relationships and responsibilities to lands and each other are foundational to a communities’ ability to self-determine their futures and ensure the flourishing of their lifeways for future generations.
OUr initiatives
Land-Based Evaluation
We are co-designing a culturally-responsive evaluation tool of land-based education to understand the practices and impacts of an Indigenous land and family-based curricular design or commonly known as local temas program on the health and well-being of two communities in CONAFE. (More coming in 2024).