Fostering Indigenous young people’s socio-environmental consciousness through place-based learning in Ecuadorian Amazonia

ABSTRACT

Education has a fundamental role in preparing youth to address the socio-environmental challenges that threaten Indigenous territories in Ecuadorian Amazonia. In this study, we focus on place-based learning and analyse how diverse learning spaces in the everyday lives of the Indigenous youth allow them to engage with diverse knowledges on socio-environmental issues. We conducted participatory mapping, photo elicitation, and interviews in three upper secondary schools in Pastaza province of Ecuador to study young people’s perceptions and teachable moments about socio-environmental issues. The findings suggest that young people’s daily embodied experiences, family life, and community meetings offer rich grounds for learning about local socio-environmental issues, Indigenous knowledge, and cosmovision (worldview). However, in the intercultural bilingual upper secondary schooling, socio-environmental issues are discussed mostly as detached global phenomena, while more explicit connections to local issues and knowledge would contribute to pluriversalizing education and supporting students’ territorial ties and critical socio-environmental consciousness.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecuadorian Amazonia
• Indigenous young people
• intercultural bilingual education
• place-based learning
• pluriverse
• socio-environmental consciousness

Introduction

The territories of Indigenous people in Ecuadorian Amazonia are threatened by environmental devastation caused by oil drilling, mining, logging, and agribusiness (Koenig, 2020). Additionally, the combined impact of global climate change and deforestation is increasing extreme flooding, which destroys lives, livelihoods, and property (Marengo & Espinoza, 2016). These socio-environmental issues are linked to global and national oil dependency and the pursuit of economic growth through extractive activities (Davidov, 2013; Koenig, 2020). Resistance to extractivism and the defense of the rights of nature or Pachamama (Mother Earth) have become central in the agenda of the Ecuadorian Indigenous movement (Altmann, 2020a) alongside the fight for plurinationality and the right to territorial self-determination, societal participation, linguistic and cultural diversity, and intercultural bilingual education (IBE) (Jameson, 2011; Tello, 2012). The development of a critical socio-environmental consciousness that allows the recognition of interlinked social and environmental injustices and that inspires activism against neocolonialism and the extraction of natural resources (Misiaszek, 2020) is also important for the young generation, the future leaders and defenders of the Indigenous territories.

In this article, we argue that place-based learning is crucial for enhancing Indigenous young people’s understanding of environmental changes and for building and sustaining their territorial connections. By engaging in place-based and environmental education, schools and educational institutes may become ‘sites for gradual social transformation, where actors of the state and civil society can engage with the power struggles underlying the strategic process of counter-hegemonic moral and intellectual reform’ (Stahelin, 2017, p. 261). Schools and educational institutes that engage in place-based education and that aim to contribute to social transformation also need to engage in pluriversality, which means the recognition that multiple knowledges, ontologies, and epistemologies co-exist (Mignolo, 2018) and the aspiration to make a ‘world where many worlds fit’ (Escobar, 2017). Pluriversal education questions the universality of a Eurocentric understanding of knowledge and learning and acknowledges the diversity of knowledges and worldviews (Baker, 2012).

Eurocentric schooling is regarded as a threat to children’s and young people’s Indigenous knowledge acquisition (e.g. Demps et al., 2015; Reyes-García et al., 2010). In Ecuador, Eurocentric schooling has caused students to become alienated from their cultural background and lowered school performance among Indigenous and other minoritized students (Bastidas Redin, 2020; Granda Merchán, 2018). Initiatives to decentre Eurocentric approaches in education in different parts of the world typically recognize and respect the diversity of students’ cultural backgrounds and attempt to improve the study success of Indigenous students through culturally responsive learning spaces and Indigenous pedagogies (e.g. Fogarty & Schwab, 2012; Ragoonaden & Mueller, 2017). In Ecuador, there is tension between those who defend the IBE system and those who perceive school as a place for learning Spanish, mathematics, and other skills and knowledge needed in the dominant mestizo society and who consider Indigenous knowledge and language learning to belong merely to the realm of family and the Indigenous community (Martínez Novo, 2016). We consider the intersections of different realms for learning to be an important topic to study further in the context of Indigenous peoples’ education in Ecuador. Therefore, we are particularly interested in how schooling, students’ independent experiential learning, and learning with the family and community may form complementary and overlapping learning spaces in which the youth can engage with diverse environmental knowledges of the pluriverse.

This study focuses on Indigenous young people who study in IBE upper secondary schools in the Pastaza province of Ecuadorian Amazonia. We are interested in how these young people perceive socio-environmental issues that affect their living environments. In which ways do young people’s daily world of experience, interaction with family and Indigenous community, and schooling support their place-based learning, develop their critical socio-environmental consciousness, and strengthen their territorial ties? How could the place-based approach contribute to pluriversalizing the IBE? Our place-based qualitative inquiry also contributes to the discussion on Indigenous socio-environmental (in)justices in Amazonia caused by ongoing colonization in the form of resource extraction in Indigenous territories, which leads to environmental destruction and is likely to erode and transform the eco-cultural¹ relations of the young generation and to create new forms of agency (Rodriguez, 2020; Ulloa, 2017).

We start with a review of place-based educational approaches and an overview of the IBE, which is the form of education that most Indigenous children and young people attend in Ecuador. After the description of the research methods and data, we analyse how teachable moments in diverse learning spaces may contribute to the development of critical socio-environmental consciousness and strengthen the territorial ties of Indigenous young people. We conclude by discussing how engagement with the place-based approach and pluriversality can be strengthened in IBE schooling.

Learning from/within the place, land, and forest

Place-based education counteracts universalizing approaches to knowledge and teaching and grounds pedagogy in the place (Gruenewald & Smith, 2014). We perceive place-based education as an umbrella term that brings together various pedagogical approaches that recognize ‘place’ as a primary component of the human eco-cultural experience and learning (Gruenewald, 2003; Schroder, 2006). Place-based education is ‘committed to attending to […] the land, natural environment, and non-human world’, which are typically overlooked by anthropocentric educational approaches, such as community-based education (Gruenewald, 2008; Tuck et al., 2014, p. 15).

Place-based education is sometimes conceptualized as place-conscious education or critical pedagogies of place to include a more radical approach in terms of criticizing and actively addressing the inequities and transmission of ‘mainstream capitalist, competitive and ecologically destructive values’ within the education system (Furman & Gruenewald, 2004; Schroder, 2006, p. 313). Therefore, place-conscious education has been perceived to resonate well with the visions of Indigenous peoples and IBE in Ecuador (Schroder, 2006). Place-conscious education is also close to ecopedagogy, which particularly opposes the neoliberal framework within education that carries the conception of environmental devastation as ‘an unfortunate outcome of “development” and “progress”’ (Misiaszek, 2014, p. 220). Ecopedagogy applies a social justice perspective to environmental education and follows the footsteps of Paulo Freire with its focus on ‘raising consciousness (conscientizacão) about societal oppression caused by environmental degradation’ (Misiaszek, 2012, p. 429). Ecopedagogy aims to teach students the critical ‘reading’ or deconstruction of socio-environmental issues in diverse learning spaces to understand the underlying politics and power dynamics (Misiaszek, 2020, p. 624).

In the North American settler-colonial context, Indigenous authors have proposed to renew place-based education through land education. This education engages the critical analysis of settler-colonial landscapes, which includes a history of land as Indigenous and demands the decolonization of the ‘local’, for example, by ‘assessing how different colonial processes impacted a place and subsequently shaped it, informing the notions of territoriality present in that space today’ (Calderon, 2014, p. 28; Tuck et al., 2014). The political dimension of land education resonates with the Indigenous Amazonian realities in which the colonizing processes of resource extraction have long caused environmental and cultural destruction and deteriorated the living conditions in ancestral territories (Speed, 2017). For the Indigenous people in Latin America, territorio is a lived space that guarantees their cultural survival and reproduction and is important for the political fight over land rights and autonomy (López Sandoval et al., 2017). Their territorialidad (territoriality) can be characterized as ‘pragmatic and constitutive environmental communication’ that is related to exerting symbolic and political control over Indigenous territories (Castro-Sotomayor, 2020, p. 55). Knowing the histories of a place and the territorial conflicts of the past and present is integral to critical territorial consciousness (Stahelin, 2017).

In Amazonia, knowing the histories of a place entails knowing sacred places: primary forest, waterfalls, and lagoons; places inhabited by living beings. The native Kichwa people live in close relation with the living forest, which is called Kawsak Sacha (Gualinga, 2019). Thus, the resource extraction, pollution, and climatic changes that threaten Kawsak Sacha also threaten the culture and lives of these people. Therefore, education in Amazonia should respect the living forest and the Indigenous people’s relations with the forest. Human-nature relationship has a central role in an Amazonian Indigenous cosmovision or ‘a worldview’ that ‘consists of the suppositions, premises, and ideologies of a socio-cultural group that determine how they perceive the world’ (Sánchez, 2010, p. 79). In relation to Amazonian Indigenous cosmovision, we refer to the concept of Sumak Kawsay (‘life in plenitude’) that resists the commodification of nature with an ideology of a harmonious human-nature relationship and a collective well-being for human communities in their ancestral territories and other living beings and spirits in the rainforest (Chuji, 2014; Viteri Gualinga, 2002). Multiple interpretations of Sumak Kawsay represent the diversity of Andean and Amazonian Indigenous communities and organizations (Inuca Lechón, 2017) and their political projects (Altmann, 2020b). Indigenous interpretations of Sumak Kawsay differ from the state appropriated version of the concept, which can be translated as Buen Vivir (‘good living’) and is associated with extractivist environmental and development policies (Cuestas-Caza, 2018).

Place-basedness in the IBE

The upper secondary study programmes within the IBE system in Ecuador are expected to modify the national curriculum in accordance with the IBE model, Modelo del Sistema de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe (MOSEIB), which advocates for the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge into the curriculum and educational materials, the use of Indigenous language and instruction methods that comply with the respective Indigenous cosmovision, and the involvement of parents, grandparents, and other community members in the educational processes (MinEduc, 2013). The MOSEIB and the pedagogical guidelines provided by the IBE Secretary instruct the IBE schools to support the connection between academic activities and local nature, the seasonal cycle, community livelihood, and socio-cultural and spiritual activities (MinEduc, 2013, 2017; Veintie & Sirén, submitted). Moreover, the IBE pedagogical guidelines recommend that teachers apply approaches that resort to students’ previous knowledge and that involve learning through on-site observation, hands-on activities, experiencing, or sharing their knowledge in events organized by the school or the Indigenous community, using various spaces for the instruction (MinEduc, 2017). Thus, the IBE model resonates with the central tenets of place-based education in terms of supporting the use of teaching methods for experiential learning and diverse learning spaces as well as fostering students’ relationship with the local socio-cultural and natural environment. Therefore, we found it important to study the teachable moments in diverse learning spaces that have the potential to enhance Indigenous young people’s understanding of environmental changes and build their territorial connections as part of the IBE in Ecuadorian Amazonia.

Methods

This study is based on data produced in three IBE upper secondary schools in the Pastaza province in Ecuadorian Amazonia. We chose schools in which the majority of students belong to the two largest Amazonian nationalities, the Kichwa and the Shuar, and which are located in areas that are in different stages of urbanization and road connections (Figure 1). The ‘Camilo Huatatoca’² school is located in the village of Santa Clara, and its students live in the centre of Santa Clara and in the surrounding rural Kichwa communities from where they commute to school mainly by using public buses. The ‘Kumay’ school is in the Shuar community of Kumay, which was connected to the Puyo-Macas highway by a narrow gravel road only a few years ago. The students arrive at the school by public bus, foot, or bicycle. Some students, who come from afar, stay in a student dormitory near the school for the week and return to their communities only for the weekends or holidays. The ‘Sarayaku’ school, in the Kichwa community of Sarayaku, is the remotest school included in this study as there is no road connection to the community, and it can only be reached by canoe or small aircraft. In Sarayaku, most students walk through the forest to go to school. Motorized transportation is limited to motor canoes that travel on the Bobonaza River that transects the area.

Figure 1. Locations of the upper secondary schools included in this study in Pastaza province.

The authors and a field research team visited the schools twice in 2019: in March-April and September-October. The different sociocultural and academic disciplinary backgrounds as well as the diverse research experiences of the research team members complemented each other and made the study a pluriversal exercise. The first author (Hohenthal) is a geographer who contributed to this study with her understanding of socio-environmental issues and participatory mapping. The second author (Veintie) has a background in anthropology and education, and a long experience in qualitative research on epistemic diversity and IBE in Ecuadorian Amazonia. The two authors are university based white women researchers from Northern Europe. The field research team consisted of four women and three men who represent Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, activists, and university students in environmental sciences, Latin American studies, and tourism. The team communicated with students and teachers in the three schools mainly in Spanish, but in Sarayaku, where people are not as used to communicating in Spanish as in Santa Clara or Kumay, a kichwa-speaking woman research assistant, originally from Sarayaku, and a North European white man researcher living in Sarayaku facilitated more nuanced discussions with the students in their own language. These team members were more familiar with the eco-cultural context compared to the rest of the team, and functioned also as linguistic and cultural interpreters.

We employed participatory mapping, photo elicitation, observation, and interviews for the data production with students. Participatory mapping and photo elicitation are widely used tools for qualitative spatial knowledge production, and they have also been used to study school journeys (Morojele & Muthukrishna, 2013; Wilson et al., 2019). The school directors signed an informed consent to participate in the study on behalf of their schools, and students were orally informed about the purpose of the study and had the possibility to refuse to participate.³ Typically, the mapping groups had 4–10 students who lived in the same or nearby communities. Each group was first instructed to draw routes from each student’s home to their school and then to mark the locations that they like, consider intimidating or that need improvement, and places that they find culturally important. They were also asked to locate environmental problems they had observed in the area and mark place names on the maps. School journeys were used as a starting point for mapping, but students also marked places that are important for their after-school activities. After the drawing, we conducted group interviews about the maps with students and asked students to volunteer to take photographs of the significant places. On the following day, we interviewed the volunteers about the photos.

Altogether, 156 students (74 female and 82 male) between 15 and 21 years of age participated in the mapping. They produced 23 maps in total. In addition, 16 of them took altogether 549 photos (Table 1). The data were complemented with 28 student interviews that contained a broader set of questions related to studying in an IBE upper secondary school.

Table 1. Data produced in the upper secondary schools, Pastaza province, Ecuadorian Amazonia.

School	Mappings	Students taking photos	Photos	Student interviews
Camilo Huatatoca	6	6	296	9
Kumay	8	6	108	8
Sarayaku	9	4	145	11
TOTAL	23	16	549	28

The data were first arranged by using topical, descriptive, and analytical codes (Bazeley, 2013) in Atlas.ti software. Later, the codes and associated quotations were exported to Excel sheets for more in-depth analysis. In analysing the maps and photos, we paid particular attention to socio-environmental issues. The mapping and photo elicitation interviews provided information that was necessary for understanding the meanings attached to the places and issues portrayed. When analysing the data, we focused on identifying the potential ‘teachable moments’ in students’ lives. We adopt this concept from Corntassel and Hardbarger (2019, p. 89) who used teachable moments to define the ‘often unseen or unacknowledged everyday actions, such as regenerating Indigenous plants and food systems, that represent important sites for renewing relationships with community, family and homelands’, which are typically unrecognized in schooling. In addition to such actions, we also considered embodied experiences, ‘observational inquiry’, ‘intergenerational and familial interactions’, and the sharing of stories as potential teachable moments that are essential for ‘learning about and making relationships with the natural world’ (Marin & Bang, 2018, p. 111). In the analysis, we asked from the data: what kind of teachable moments do the encounters with socio-environmental issues potentially provide for young people? What kind of teachable moments are there within family and the Indigenous community? How are local socio-environmental issues and knowledge discussed at school? We also reflected on how teachable moments possibly cultivate the critical socio-environmental consciousness of students and/or strengthen their territorial ties. What potential do the Indigenous knowledge, cosmovision, and traditions hold for elaborating pedagogical approaches for pluriversal education?

Diverse spaces for learning about socio-environmental issues, Indigenous knowledge, and cosmovision

In this section, we first analyse students’ perceptions of socio-environmental issues portrayed in their maps and photos, and identify teachable moments related to experiences with these issues. Thereafter, we focus on teachable moments within family and the Indigenous community. Finally, we observe how students and teachers discuss local environmental issues, Indigenous knowledge, and cosmovision at school.

Young people’s observations of socio-environmental issues

The students’ maps portray some differences between the three schools regarding the students’ perceptions of socio-environmental issues. In Sarayaku, students indicated points of flooding near Bobonaza River and its tributaries on almost all maps. In addition, students considered littering to be a major issue in Sarayaku along with fuel leakages from motor canoes, which contaminate water and fish in the river. In Santa Clara, the students of Camilo Huatatoca particularly marked points of flooding, logging, and water contamination on the maps. According to the students, logging is done for clearing land for cattle, crops, a water park for tourists, or for timber or charcoal production. Students relate water contamination to extractive activities, such as gold mining, oil production, waste dumping, and sewage spills in the rivers. In Kumay, students most often marked littering as an environmental issue on the maps, but also points of flooding and logging on some of them.

Encounters with the abovementioned socio-environmental issues offer teachable moments for young people. For example, flooding teaches by occasionally disrupting students’ school journeys (Figure 2):

Interviewer:

Explain to me a bit about this [Titinkiem river], is there a bridge here?

Student 1:

No.

Interviewer:

How do you cross the river if there is no bridge?

Student 1:

When water is low large stones appear, and you can pass through here. When the river grows, further below there is a fallen pole (Figure 3). We walk that way and pass through there.

Student 2:

When the river is very grown, transportation [by bus] is not easy.

Interviewer:

Is this red sticker because of that?

Student 1:

Yes. The green sticker was about improvement by building a bridge. It is dangerous to pass through here when the river grows, because of the water, that's why we put the black [sticker].

(Group interview, Kumay)

When students encounter floods, they can observe how rivers change and learn how to find new routes in varying circumstances. Besides this kind of experiential inquiry, it would be important for students to discuss with their teachers at school how the floods and heavy rains affect Indigenous communities and how they are linked to climatic patterns, global climate change, and land cover changes upstream. Such wider-scale socio-environmental issues are typically presented through western scientific conceptualisations (Castro-Sotomayor, 2019), and teaching them with reference to local phenomena, like flooding, could help ground them in place.

Figure 2. A map drawn by the students in Kumay. In the middle on the map is the Titinkiem River that crosses the road to the communities of Kawa, Panki and San Jose. When it rains heavily, the river floods and it is difficult for the students to cross the river to go to school.

Figure 3. ‘This is the way [a pole] to cross the [Titinkiem] river when it grows.’ (Photo taken by a student in Kumay).

In Kumay, students discussed logging and said that it had increased since the provincial government of Pastaza constructed the road connection to the highway five years ago. One student expressed understanding towards community members who sell trees in order to make a living (Figure 4). At school, it would be possible to discuss how logging is driven by national and international economic and political factors and how it may contribute to Amazonian deforestation and the global climate change. It would be of equal importance to reflect on how logging relates to Indigenous cultures and contradicts the principles of Sumak Kawsay and Kawsak Sacha and what consequences it thus may have for the Indigenous community. Such critical deconstruction of local socio-environmental issues as part of a pluriversal education would support the development of students’ critical consciousness (Misiaszek, 2020).

Figure 4. ‘Those who harvest wood, they have their needs, they have their children, they educate their children, they don't have enough to support themselves, that little piece of wood, by selling that they can support themselves.’ (Photo taken by a student in Kumay).

Observations of, for example, gold mining and the construction of a hydropower plant in Santa Clara also offer possibilities to reflect on power relations between the Indigenous community and other actors in relation to extractive activities.

Student:

They damage [the river] with the engine; they pour oil into the river, diesel, gasoline; they leave it very ugly. This is a very beautiful white river, but they damage it. It was not dirty (Figure 5).

Interviewer:

Who does the damage?

Student:

The miners come from other places, wash gold and leave.

Interviewer:

Aren’t they the people of the community themselves?

Interviewee:

No, the people of the community do wash, but with a pan, not with a dredge.

Interviewer:

Why can't people in the community forbid them to do that?

Student:

Yes, they tell them, but sometimes people do not pass by the community. They go to work and cannot be seen.

(Male student, Camilo Huatatoca)

Above, the student argues that the contaminating form of gold washing is done by people who come from outside the community. The large-scale extractive activities in the Amazonia are mainly run by national and international investments and companies (Koenig, 2020) that use more effective tools than local gold washers and are thus likely to benefit more economically.

Figure 5. ‘Here they are damaging the river, they are mining, and all along here they wash gold.’ (Photo taken of a river near Ishkay Yaku community by a student of Camilo Huatatoca).

The Piatúa River near Santa Clara has long been threatened by plans to build a hydropower plant. For the local Kichwa people, the river is sacred and has a high cultural value. Piatúa River is also important for biodiversity conservation, leisure activities, and tourism (Paz Cardona, 2019). Local people have organized several demonstrations to defend the river, including one in September 2019. However, the big corporation that aims to construct the plant, Generación Eléctrica San Francisco (GENEFRAN S.A) based in the capital Quito, is a powerful opponent:

Piatúa River is sacred because of its crystalline waters, because it’s the purest. That's why they [local Indigenous people] protect it. There is a phrase: “Piatúa libre” [eng. “Liberate Piatúa”], to defend the river from the hydropower plant, but they [local Indigenous people] will not be able to. As we are Indigenous, they [the corporation owners and regional authorities] do not value us.

(Female student, Camilo Huatatoca)

The student argues that local people, because they are Indigenous, do not have the possibility to oppose the plans of the company run by non-Indigenous people who are in a more powerful position. This statement reflects the persistent inequality and discrimination against Indigenous people in Ecuadorian society (Ávalos, 2012; Martínez Novo, 2014). The socio-environmental issues are embedded within these power struggles. Therefore, one task of pluriversal education that applies the critical ecopedagogical approach (Misiaszek, 2012) is not to reinforce the dualism and opposition between the powerful and the powerless (Ávalos, 2012; Bernal, 2011) – the non-Indigenous and the Indigenous – but to encourage the Indigenous young people to fight for Indigenous socio-environmental justice (Ulloa, 2017). Teachers could, for instance, discuss inspirational examples of similar cases in which Indigenous people (in collaboration with their allies) in Ecuador and around the globe have won fights against large corporations. For example, the victory of the Sarayaku community in a lawsuit against an Argentinian oil company, Compañia General de Combustibles SA (CGC), in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2012 (Hennida, 2015), shows that transnational alliances are possible and that strategies fostered and created by Indigenous people are effective.

Teachable moments in family life and Indigenous community

In each studied school, students explained that they learn about trees, medicinal plants, and animals from their families, as well as traditional skills related to hunting, fishing, making and driving canoes, farming, and making handicrafts and chicha (traditional fermented beverage). Students also discussed these knowledge and skills during mappings and marked important places on maps, e.g. where to find medicinal plants and good points for fishing (Figure 6). Learning in the family is often place-based and experiential, as the young people learn from family members when they fish, hunt, or cultivate crops together. Students highly value learning ancestral knowledge from their parents:

It is important to value ancestral knowledge so that we do not forget ourselves. Almost everything we do here, we do with the knowledge from the ancestors. Our parents teach us to do these things; fishing or hunting. The ancestors left us this ancestral knowledge and until now we are practicing it; with that we live.

(Male student, Sarayaku)

Teachable moments that are related to Indigenous ancestral knowledge, values, and relationality can foster young people’s ties with the Indigenous culture and territory. Some students indicated that family members have an important role in teaching values, such as how to live well, be helpful, and study in order ‘to become someone in life’ (male student, Sarayaku). They also encourage young people not to be ashamed of being Indigenous:

Interviewer:

Do you think that speaking your mother tongue [Kichwa] is important?

Student:

Yes

Interviewer:

Why?

Student:

For not to lose the custom, for not to be ashamed of our nationality.

Interviewer:

Very good. Who taught you that?

Student:

My parents.

(Female student, Camilo Huatatoca)

For some students, guayusa upina, the drinking hot infusion made of guayusa tree leaves, in the early morning hours forms an important time–space for learning. On these occasions, young people discuss community issues with adults, and sometimes they hear about local history and cosmovision. Thus, guayusa upina is an important part of the pluriversal education in the Amazonian context. In Kumay, one student explains how cherishing the guayusa tradition is a means for her and her brother to sustain ties to the Indigenous way of life in their home territory now when they live far from their family because of their studies:

Interviewer:

Do you still drink guayusa?

Student:

I must always drink guayusa because my father said I must maintain my culture, I must never forget my culture, I must value my culture, how my grandparents were.

Interviewer:

And what is the guayusa culture like?

Student:

In the morning at four o'clock, you must get up and you must drink, you must vomit to have a good aspiration in your life.

Interviewer:

How often do you drink guayusa?

Student:

Once a week.

Interviewer:

And do you drink it together with your brother?

Student:

Yes.

(Female student, Kumay)

The same student from Kumay also told how her father took her to a waterfall to have malicahua and ayahuasca, hallucinogenic plants, as part of a ritual for connecting with the Arutam, a powerful spirit. The ritual exemplifies the co-existence and interaction of multiple spheres of reality in the Shuar cosmovision. The rituals practiced and the hallucinogenic plants taken by the waterfall in the physical sphere of reality create a door to the supernatural sphere of reality (Abad Espinoza, 2019). Thus, participation in the ritual provides a teachable moment that helps understand the Shuars’ immersed being in the diverse realities, which also underlies their respectful relation with nature. It contrasts with the western nature/culture dualism and conception of human superiority ‘that conceive the natural environment as a segregated commodity’ (p. 187) and that have led to the destructive extraction of natural resources. According to Abad Espinoza (2019), failure to understand the difference between this western ontological perception and Indigenous cosmovision may explain Indigenous people’s occasional non-critical participation in extractive and damaging activities. Therefore, for the development of young people’s critical socio-environmental consciousness, it is important that students in IBE schools could learn to critically reflect on different worldviews so that they would be able to deconstruct the socio-environmental issues that are created by western rationalities in their territories and to defend the respectful relationality with nature based on the Indigenous cosmovision.

Figure 6. A fishing place (star) in Titinkiem River portrayed on a map drawn by the students in Kumay. The students also regard the river as culturally important (brown sticker). On the other side of the road, the students have marked a place where they regard logging as a problem (red stickers).

Another student in Sarayaku also reported about learning Indigenous cosmovision and relations with the living forest from his family members:

Student:

I took a photo of this bird. This bird is not edible.

Interviewer:

Why isn't it edible?

Student:

I don't know. It is a custom, we never eat it.

Interviewer:

What do the grandparents say?

Student:

In the past, this bird had a master. The masters [of the river] live in large ponds.

(Male student, Sarayaku)

In the account above, the student refers to a prohibition of hunting a particular bird species. The prohibition acts as a ‘protective taboo’ that regulates the relationship between Indigenous people and nature (Karikari et al., 2020, p. 255). However, the student does not seem to be very familiar with the story behind this prohibition, which may refer to a lack of intergenerational learning within his family. Therefore, reflection of these kinds of ‘customs’ and the associated Indigenous knowledge at school could strengthen students’ respectful ecocultural ties and relational understandings that challenge ‘a neoliberal, extractive ontology’ (Karikari ei al., 2020, p. 256) that prevails in the Ecuadorian society.

Even though a lot of eco-cultural knowledge is shared between family members, students rarely mention that they discuss the socio-environmental issues that threaten the Indigenous territories with their families. These issues are rather discussed in community meetings led by Indigenous community leaders and elders. Therefore, participation in community meetings provides potential teachable moments for young people to cultivate their critical territorial and environmental consciousness.

We also noticed that in some cases, young peoples’ connections and learning opportunities with the community and family are interrupted when they live outside of their community. In our study, this was the case with some students in Santa Clara and Kumay whose home communities were far from school. In such cases, IBE schools that have knowledgeable Indigenous teachers could have an important role in supplementing and broadening students’ knowledge of their own cultural background and strengthening their territorial ties.

Discussions about socio-environmental issues at school

Students’ accounts on the discussion of the local socio-environmental issues at school were variable. In Camilo Huatatoca, four students claimed that they had not learnt anything about local environmental issues at school. One of them told us that in biology class, they only discuss global issues and not local ones. He thinks this may be because some teachers do not want to get involved in local issues:

Interviewer:

At school, where or when do you talk about community problems and environmental problems like the [Piatúa] river?

Student:

No, teachers do not discuss environmental problems because there are different ideologies. The rector is in favour [of discussing them], but there are teachers who are not. Some people have decided not to discuss the problems of the community or the canton [at school]. They never touch on those issues.

(Male student, Camilo Huatatoca)

Teachers’ reluctance to discuss environmental problems can be interpreted as an aspiration toward political neutrality in education (Tuck et al., 2014). According to other students in Camilo Huatatoca as well as our observations in the school, some of the teachers take an interest in local environmental issues, particularly in the construction of the hydroelectric power plant on Piatúa River, and discuss the issue with the students. When we visited the school in September 2019, two Indigenous teachers took a group of upper secondary school students to a community meeting where the issue was discussed. In an interview after this occasion, one teacher explained that they rarely have opportunities for excursions, but this time they spontaneously decided to participate in the meeting with the students because it was a special event in which participants from various Indigenous organizations joined the protests. Moreover, he thought it was essential for the students to get to know these organizations. This represents a case in which upper secondary education connected with a timely local socio-environmental issue, which illustrates a contradiction between the national energy politics and Indigenous value of protecting the river as an eco-culturally important place. In a similar vein, we observed how, in Sarayaku, the school adjusted to community life by interrupting classes for one day to allow students and teachers to go fishing when conditions improved after a time of scarcity in catch (Veintie & Sirén, submitted). We argue that these occasions represent the kind of teachable moments that have the potential to foster students’ sense of Indigenous communality and cultivate their critical consciousness.

The pedagogical guidelines for IBE also encourage the involvement of knowledgeable members of the community in school instruction. In Sarayaku, some students reported that community leaders and knowledgeable members of the community have sometimes been invited to school to talk about community issues. Otherwise, our data do not show much evidence of community members sharing Indigenous and environmental knowledge at school.

Floods were mentioned as major environmental issues on many maps, but the interview data do not indicate whether they had been discussed in class. Teachers do not necessarily seize opportunities to elaborate further on all environmental topics or attempt to connect them to wider-scale socio-environmental issues, such as climate or land cover change, which may hinder the development of students’ critical socio-environmental consciousness. However, in each school, there were at least some individual teachers who are engaged in local environmental issues and discuss them with students:

We had one teacher who talked about [logging] a lot because his community is a tourist site, and they do not cut down trees.

(Male student, Kumay)

Environmental issues may also be discussed in school projects, campos de acción, in which students must elaborate on them in groups to complete their upper secondary education (MinEduc, 2020). In Kumay, for example, the students had done their project on planting, weeding, and picking up litter.

In each school, students affirmed that topics related to Indigenous knowledge, cosmovision, and local histories are discussed with teachers in some classes. However, differences between the schools are notable as in Camilo Huatatoca, as many as six students argued that these topics are not discussed in any way, while in Sarayaku, none of the students made this claim. According to students, there are only a few Indigenous or knowledgeable non-Indigenous teachers who are interested in and able to teach about these issues. In the students’ accounts, most teachers do not acknowledge multiple co-existing knowledges, nor do they embrace the ontological and epistemological differences. For example, two students in Camilo Huatatoca recognized connections between ancestral knowledge and topics in chemistry that concern soil, chemicals, and elements, but according to the students, these kinds of connections or differences between ancestral knowledge and science textbooks are not discussed in class.

Additionally, some students in Camilo Huatatoca claimed that some of the Indigenous students do not want to discuss Indigenous knowledge and culture at school:

Interviewer:

Why do you think that the knowledge and wisdom of the Kichwas is not respected and valued here at the school?

Student:

Because some students believe that they are not Indigenous, that they are mestizos, that's why. […] The students are ashamed that they are Indigenous.

Interviewer:

Why do you think this happens?

Student:

Because the students’ relatives don't speak the Indigenous language to them, they don't care, that's why.

Interviewer:

What do you think could be done, what would you suggest to improve this situation?

Student:

That parents and elders speak about the languages, about their culture.

(Female student, Camilo Huatatoca)

The student above refers to language loss in the Indigenous communities, which is a common phenomenon not only in the Amazonia but in Indigenous communities globally and relates to colonial power relations between speakers of Indigenous and colonial languages (Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 2008). Urbanization also plays a role in Indigenous students’ cultural and linguistic identifications. Some Indigenous students have moved into town to be able to attend upper secondary education, and therefore they do not have everyday contact with their communities. This leads them to renegotiate their identities, which may affect their relationship with the Indigenous language (Shulist, 2018), and in some cases, erode their territorial ties (McSweeney & Jokisch, 2007). Town life may expose Indigenous young people to discrimination, which may increase their feelings of shame (Martínez Novo, 2014). Pluriversal education could help in dismantling such thoughts and enhance students’ pride in their indigeneity by fostering Indigenous knowledges and cosmovision and by incorporating Indigenous methods of working and learning into instructional practices.

In Sarayaku, we observed the bearing of Indigenous methods in instructional practices as one of the teachers used minga, a collaborative and reciprocal form or work (Altamirano Enciso & Bueno Mendoza, 2011), as a learning and teaching method. In these classes, students worked together to clear spaces for fish ponds and to build a henhouse. As part of their work in these classes, they prepared a meal to enjoy together at the end of the day. Mingas are organized to take care of the school premises in the other two upper secondary schools as well. In these cases, the minga is not as clearly connected to educational instruction and Indigenous reciprocal community relations as in the abovementioned example from Sarayaku. However, in Indigenous communities in general, the minga represents an important space for sharing knowledge, wisdom, and intergenerational learning through shared experiences and guidance (Pomaina Pilamunga & Lema Paltan, 2017). Thus, applying minga as a method of instruction may foster a connection between schooling and community (Veintie, 2018) and open opportunities to engage with multiple knowledges. It is also important that students participate in the minga organized by the Indigenous community. Participation in the community minga as a way to connect with the community is mentioned also in the pedagogical guidelines for the implementation of the IBE model (MinEduc, 2017).

Concluding remarks: towards pluriversalizing the IBE in Ecuadorian Amazonia

In this study, we have analysed teachable moments in the everyday lives of Amazonian Indigenous young people and discussed how those moments afford opportunities to support the youth’s critical socio-environmental consciousness and territorial ties. We have recognized that at school there is a lot of potential to connect Western understandings of climatic and land cover changes and wider-scale economic and political power dynamics with young people’s own experiential and local Indigenous knowledges on socio-environmental issues and Indigenous struggles. Therefore, strengthening the place-based educational approach that makes use of the teachable moments in young people’s lives and discusses them in classrooms in a way that respects both Indigenous and Western knowledges and worldviews (Schroder, 2006) could contribute to pluriversalizing the IBE. Place-based approaches reject the conception that delimits schools as spaces to learn Eurocentric knowledge and Spanish language, detaches schooling from Indigenous communities, families, and places, and undermines their knowledges and cosmovision. Instead, the place-based approach would recognize the school, students’ own everyday experiences, and Indigenous family and community as important learning spaces of the pluriversal IBE, which has the potential to foster young people’s territorial connections.

The current IBE model incorporates the place-based approach, but our study shows that there is more room to connect academic activities with the knowledge that students acquire from their families, communities, and in interaction with local socio-environmental issues. Furthermore, we found very little evidence that students had reflected on deeper meanings or political aspects of the socio-environmental issues that they had observed. It is common for even place-based environmental education, let alone universalized education, to position itself as politically neutral and to refrain from addressing the aspects of power, culture, and economy that have shaped the socio-environmental realities of places (Tuck et al., 2014). This inhibits the holistic understanding and critical reflection of the relationship between humans and nature (Cole, 2007), which are crucial for the development of students’ critical socio-environmental consciousness. An IBE informed by a pluriversal place-based framework would guide students to deconstruct the connections that socio-environmental issues have to national and global social, political, and economic power relations as well as to climate change or other wider-scale socio-environmental changes. Also, for example, through the reflection of Indigenous rituals and customs, a pluriversal education could enhance students’ understanding of the Indigenous conceptions of human-nature relationality vis-à-vis Eurocentric conceptions. These amendments to IBE pedagogical goals would serve to the development of students’ critical socio-environmental consciousness as suggested by ecopedagogy (Misiaszek, 2014, 2020).

The incorporation of local and Indigenous knowledges into teaching may be challenging, particularly for teachers whose own background, education, and pedagogical training has been in the Eurocentric tradition (Breidlid, 2013). In Ecuador, a large number of teachers in IBE schools are mestizos, do not speak the Indigenous language, and have not received adequate training in intercultural education (Martínez Novo, 2016). In the schools we studied, a number of students stated that, in general, most non-Indigenous teachers do not integrate local issues and Indigenous knowledges into their teaching. Some of the teachers are not knowledgeable about or interested in the critical analysis of local histories and Indigenous relations to land or in exposing colonial structures as suggested by land education (Calderon, 2014; Tuck et al., 2014). Thus, we suggest initial or in-service teacher education for raising teachers’ awareness of environmental issues, colonial histories, Indigenous knowledge, and place-based approaches in education. This may help teachers reflect on their dispositions and question the Eurocentric thinking (McLeod et al., 2020), and it may help find ways to apply place-based and Indigenous pedagogical approaches and instruction methods. We encourage further research on the potential ways to develop instruction practices within IBE along these lines.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the students, teachers and directors of the Sarayaku, Kumay and Camilo Huatatoca schools who participated in this research and shared their knowledge and stories with us. We thank Katy Machoa, Tito Madrid, Anders Sirén and the students of Universidad Estatal Amazónica for their contributions to the fieldwork as well as Paola Minoia and Ruth Arias for their support during the research process. We also wish to express our gratitude to the editors of the special issue, José Castro-Sotomayor and Paola Minoia, and to the three anonymous reviewers whose insightful advice helped improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Develop Programme of Academy of Finland and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland under grant number 318665.

Notes on contributors

Johanna Hohenthal

Johanna Hohenthal, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher in Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her doctoral research in Geography focused on the governance of water resources and local ecological knowledge in the Taita Hills, Kenya. Currently, she works in the research project ‘Goal 4+: Including Eco-cultural Pluralism in Quality Education in Ecuadorian Amazonia’ that studies intercultural bilingual education and eco-cultural knowledges of Amazonian Indigenous groups. Her interests focus on the accessibility of intercultural bilingual education and its relation to Indigenous territoriality and place-based learning as well as on participatory research methods.

Tuija Veintie

Tuija Veintie, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher in Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki. She currently works in the ‘Goal 4+: Including Eco-cultural Pluralism in Quality Education in Ecuadorian Amazonia’ research project. Her current interest in participatory research on epistemological pluralism and Indigenous and intercultural education is related to her long-term commitment to educational justice and doctoral research that focused on Indigenous knowledge in intercultural bilingual teacher education in Ecuadorian Amazonia.

Notes

1 By ‘eco-cultural’, we refer to the combination of socio-cultural and ecological aspects.

2 We discussed the ethical research guidelines with the school directors and respect their wish to use the real names of the schools in the article.

3 This study complies with the guidelines of the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity. There was no need to ask the ethics committee for an approval for this study because it did not contain factors that would have caused a need for an ethical review (https://tenk.fi/en/ethical-review/ethical-review-human-sciences).