From below, on the left & with the earth: Attuning to the relational in learners’ voices through a pedagogy of Buen Vivir

ABSTRACT

The epistemologies of the South (Santos, 2015) offer key conceptual tools for fostering ethical relations among human beings and the natural world. In our moment of socioecological crisis, they constitute a critical yet undertheorized dimension of learners’ voices and agency. This paper discusses a collaborative project in Maya-Achí territory in Guatemala aimed at designing and studying a learning environment organized around Buen Vivir, an Indigenous and collective conceptualization of wellbeing from Abya Yala (Latin America). Our analysis focuses on three interconnected levels at which we witnessed participants forming and deepening subject-subject relations: with the land, with other participants, and with the past and future. We discuss two design principles – conviviality and a shared axiological framework – which supported the development of subject-subject relations. We conclude with reflections on the importance of relationality as a core quality of learners’ voices for fostering more life-enhancing ways of living together on the earth.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Thomas Philip, Charles Underwood, Mara Mahmood, Kris Gutiérrez, Neil Gong, and Kimberly Vinall for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript. We greatly appreciate the thoughtful questions and recommendations from the anonymous reviewer and MCA editorial board. We also thank members of the Learners’ voices working group: Angela Booker, Sophina Choudry, Arturo Cortéz, Alfredo Jornet, José Lizárraga, Mara Mahmood, Kalonji Nzinga, Antti Rajala, Anna Stetsenko, and Charles Underwood for their thoughtful feedback and creating a space for the sustained engagement with ideas developed in this text. We give thanks and acknowledgment to our colleagues in Voces y Manos: Yenifer Valéy Gómez, Kimberly Vinall, and Armando Raxcacó, for their collaboration in the development of this curriculum. Finally, we thank the young people who have participated in the program from 2010-2022, who have taught us much and deeply informed the development of this program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics approval

The Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects at UC Berkeley provided IRB approval for this research.

Notes

1. Thanks to Carrie Chesnick for this important phrasing.

2. Similar to the way the term Turtle Island is used in North America, Abya Yala is widely used throughout Latin America in reference to the American continent. The term comes from the Kuna language (Panamá).

3. Citing Tutu (1999), Tavernaro-Haidarian (2019, p. 20) writes that, “Ubuntu can be thought of as the idea that a person is a person through their relationships with other people and expresses a way of life that exhibits other-regard (Tutu, 1999).”

4. The Metta Center for Nonviolence (2022) describes swadeshi as, “ … the discipline of restricting one’s purchases and possessions to those things which could be acquired principally locally. Its rough translation for contemporary struggles is simply localism. Home-spun cotton, or khadi (khaddar), was one of the main tools, and symbols, of the Indian Freedom Struggle because it represented a re-claiming of ownership of one’s home resources … [it enables us to] weaken corporate mass-production and dominance over our daily lives.”

5. e.g., the co-planting the “three sisters” of maize, beans, and squash, a Mesoamerican practice dating back millenia.

6. Throughout this paper, the parenthetical designation “we (design team)” is used to refer to the Voces y Manos design team as a whole. When not otherwise noted, “we” refers to the coauthors.

7. Pseudonyms.

8. We generally avoid italicizing words from Indigenous language, as a means of avoiding the tendency to exoticize non-English languages. However, when new key constructs or terms are introduced for the first time in the manuscript, regardless of language, we italicize these terms for emphasis.

9. We developed these vignettes based on our initial fieldnotes, supplemented by watching video clips to capture direct quotations.

10. Conviviality is a commonly used English translation of Convivencia. It is both one of the five values of the Voces y Manos program, and also a core design commitment which emerged through our analysis.

11. Pseudonyms are used for youth learners’ names; designers’ and educators’ real names are used.

12. Because this activity was not audio recorded, episode 2 is reconstructed from field notes and is not based on exact quotations.

13. Here, Clarisa combines the “tú” pronoun with the verb conjugation for the “vos” form, a pattern common in rural Guatemala.

14. Watts (2013, p. 23) powerfully elaborates the agency of place and more-than-human life in Indigenous cosmologies through the notion of Place-Thought, writing: “the agency that place possesses can be thought of in a similar way that Western thinkers locate agency in human beings. It follows that if, as Indigenous peoples, we are extensions of the very land we walk upon, then we have an obligation to maintain communication with it. A familiar warning is echoed through many communities, that if we do not care for the land we run the risk of losing who we are as Indigenous peoples. When this warning is examined in terms of original Place-Thought, it is not only the threat of a lost identity or physical displacement that is risked but our ability to think, act, and govern becomes compromised because this relationship is continuously corrupted with foreign impositions of how agency is organized.”