in relation
La Relación Tutora & CONAFE
This project is in partnership with the Consejo Nacional de Fomento Educativo (CONAFE), México’s only federal educational institution, created in 1971 supporting 32,000 rural, isolated, and indigenous schools. Tutoría, their current model of teach and learning, centers communities of practice across students, teachers, and administrators with a focus on community self-determination and community-driven learning.
Since February 2021, CONAFE has implemented an “Escuelas Autogestivas” or self-determination schools model of teaching and learning based in a practice called Tutoría in Mexico’s small, rural, and Indigenous schools. Tutoría intentionally creates communities of practice across students, teachers, and administrators that are focused on education for self-determination; where community leaders manage the financial resources of the school, the selection of teachers, and the creation of school content alongside teachers and school leaders. Family and community are deeply involved in teaching and learning and are the center of leadership and decision-making. This project focuses on the last component of the Escuelas Autogestivas program - the design and implementation of local temas and making land-based curricular design a core pillar of their teacher training programs.
This past year in the state of Chiapas alone, state educators are training 10,000 community educators in the design of local temas to center, uplift, and reclaim land-based Indigenous educational content and pedagogical practices. Chiapas currently oversees 4800 rural and Indigenous communities in the state, which constitutes about a third of all CONAFE communities in Mexico. In the summer of 2022, 3 graduate students and 2 faculty members from University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development joined CONAFE to assist in documenting this work in the state of Chiapas.
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These efforts will center 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.
Supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals
Quality
Education
(SDg4)
By 2030, SDG4 seeks to ensure inclusive access to free, equitable and quality pre-primary, primary and secondary education, to promote lifelong learning opportunities and to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to promote sustainable development. Indicators of success for this goal can be measured by school participation and completion rates (4.1; 4.2) and the extent to which education for citizenship and sustainable development are mainstreamed in education policies, curricula, teacher education and student assessment (4.7)[1]. Global education efforts however, have often failed to understand the colonial entanglement with education nor have they explicated relevant and effective practices and outcomes inclusive of tribal knowledges, beliefs and values. Indigenous students fare better when teaching and learning upholds relationality, intellectual and cultural sovereignty, and strengthens their participations and commitments to the living world (Brayboy &Castagno; Fryberg &Leavitt; Goodyear-Ka’opua; Meixi et al). To ensure quality, communities need relevant tools that can measure complication constructs such as “life-giving”, decolonial and Indigenous-centered content, pedagogies and methods of evaluation and assessment. A co-designed evaluation will allow our partner communities to assess the quality of the land education and its relationship to SDGs in powerful, culturally-specific ways.
Life on land
(SDg15)
Life on land is becoming increasingly volatile. We must act urgently to counter the dangers associated with unsustainable ways of living, global inequalities and the “widespread, pervasive impacts to ecosystems, people, settlements, and infrastructure” resulting from climate change (IPCC, 2022). Indigenous communities are disproportionately vulnerable to these hazards and simultaneously offer needed models of sustainable living which can protect, restore and promote sustainable use of ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification and halt and reduce land degradation and halt biodiversity loss. Indigenous land education offers an opportunity not only to ensure high quality education to reconnect with traditional knowledge systems but also, to achieve SDG goals through Indigenous-led conservation/restoration and community-generated data on indicators such as proportions of protected/degraded land or inventories of sites and species (flora/fauna) and maintenance of biodiversity. This data can be used for community-based analysis and action and contribute to global measurement indices such as the Red List or Mountain Green Cover index (15.1-5).
good health & well-being
(SDg 3)
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Our project efforts align with SDG3 to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all, at all ages. Current indicators are largely measured by rates of mortality and disease but health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity (WHO). Through the creation of community-defined constructs of good health and well-being and the documentation of culturally-sustaining and life-giving educational outcomes, we will expand upon these indicators. This expansion will contribute to a more nuanced understanding and measurement of good health and wellness and likewise has implications for policy and practice worldwide.