In the Fall of 2019, I co-facilitated the Land Pedagogy Learning Community. My fellow Jessica Sánchez and I applied for a Learning Community Grant of the Faculty Innovation Center (FIC) at the University of Texas at Austin. The FIC was looking to build instructor capacity for supporting an inclusive classroom climate.

 

Inspired by Leanne B. Simpson, we imagined learning inclusivity from the land. This meant acknowledging that settler colonialism and its racial, gender, class and other divides are present in educational spaces. It also meant that it was urgent to start working to change this as instructors and learners. 

 

We created a multidisciplinary and non-hierarchical community of faculty, grad-students, and staff from UT libraries. We gathered throughout the semester, each time for a different activity. We were honored to learn from the Indigenous elders Marika Alvarado (Lipan Mescalero Apache), who is a plant medicine healer, and Dr. Mario Garza and Maria Rocha (Coahuiltecan Miakan-Garza Band) from the Indigenous Cultures Institute of San Marcos, TX.

 

As a final activity, we collectively created a zine you can read here!