What says your heart: community, learning, and education in a Nahua indigenous village

Graduation date: 2017The purpose of this thesis is to understand the experiences that Nahua children, in rural Mexico, have as they attend schools that are primarily influenced by formal Western education in relation to their own ways of learning and knowing. This research took place over the course of three months within a Nahua indigenous community. I completed fieldwork in both the local elementary school and within the community through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with children, parents, and teachers. What I found was that the ways in which the community constructed childhood, knowledge, and learning differed significantly in what they experienced within the classroom. This in turn effected the relationships that were built between the school and the community and the student’s ability to succeed and have meaningful and supportive educational experiences. The experiences that they have are in turn effected by global, national, and local political and economic trends such as the implementation of neoliberalism, and it subsequent effect on educational policies for rural communities in Mexico. This ultimately leads to an education that is colonial in nature, despite efforts of including bilingual intercultural education programs, as the system seeks to colonize the bodies and minds of these students. Thus, it is my conclusion that both community and school must work together in order to create education programs that decolonize this process through the inclusion of programs that re-center their local language, culture, and learning practices