Indigenous Education Commons^™

Nourishing Roots: Supporting Indigenous Food Education In School Gardens, Tatiana Marina Patino Madriaga

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project asked: How can a school garden at Hoopa Valley Elementary support Indigenous food education, student well-being, and relational learning? To explore this question, I designed and implemented a garden classroom and facilitated hands-on garden and culinary workshops with students.

The garden was planned in September, built in October, and had plants in the ground by November. Over the course of the project, I facilitated four workshops, one Earth Day community event, and weekly garden classes. Approximately 350 students participated in the garden in some capacity, reflecting broad, school-wide engagement.

Methods included participant observation, documentation of student engagement, and …

Amplifying Counterstories And Testimonios About Latine Rural Youth: A Case Study Of The Educational Experience Of Oaxacan-American Youth In Rural Humboldt County, Lorena Cortez

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

As the Latine community has increased in rural Humboldt County and in rural regions across the country, educators and researchers have struggled to address the needs of this student population. These challenges are reinforced by deficit perspectives that frame multicultural and multilingual student populations as “culturally lacking” or as “English learners”. Such narratives continue to drive policy in the K-12 education system and contribute to persistent inequities; Latine students represent the lowest educational attainment across other rural student populations (Sansone, 2023, p.60). To challenge these deficit narratives, this research applies a LatCrit methodological framework to create testimonios, a form of …

Campesino World-Building: Stories Of Migration, Memory, And Care In The Tension Of The Colonial Frame, Chelsea Ríos Gómez

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Campesinos, often reduced to the label of “farmworkers”, are too often seen only through the lens of their labor within profit-driven systems. This thesis disrupts that limited narrative by illuminating the rich, expansive nature of vivencias campesinas, ways of being that transcend capitalist measures of value. These vivencias are lived, embodied experiences rooted in campesino lifeways, encompassing cultural, spiritual, and relational practices that nurture and sustain life.

My research is guided by four central questions: (1) In what ways have campesinos in pixley resisted exploitative labor systems, and how can this resistance be understood as a form of care labor? …

Place-Based Learning Practices: A Diptych Case Study Of Human And More-Than-Human Relationality At The Tribal And Western Academic Institutional Interface, Karley M. Rojas-Vienneau

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The ‘Place-Based Learning Practices Project’ is a graduate project under the Native American Studies Department Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab and Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute (FSL). Making contributions at the intersection of Western academia and Indigenous science, it imagines and realizes content, policies, and protocols surrounding two case studies and the larger cal poly humboldt (cph) institution which respect, honor, and uplift Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence in partnership with the Blue Lake Rancheria Tribe and the greater regional tribal community. Encompassing two projects internal and external to the institution, I aim to address the construction of controlled and protective environments …

Place-Based Education: A Pedagogy Of Community

The International Journal of Ecopsychology (IJE)

Every place, no matter how seemingly mundane or described as ‘exotic,’ has a story—a human story involving culture (history, language, migration, etc.); a natural story involving land and water, plants and animals, and other natural phenomena; and a story that combines the two—humans in the natural space and their impact on that space. The degree to which we know the story of a place informs our connection to that place, be it positive, negative, or neutral. The incorporation of these stories—the cultural, historical, and ecological stories of a place—into school curricula is known as place-based education (PBE) and is the …

Holistic Student Development In Higher Education: Perspectives And Practices Of Holistic Student Development At A Public California University, Francisca Ann Crutchfield

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Within traditional American public colleges and universities, there is an emphasis on academic student success within the structures and values of educational programs, and the lack of a holistic approach to higher education may be negatively impacting college student development and well-being. By balancing academic knowledge with other areas of knowledge, including a heightened sense of community and mental and emotional well-being, higher education can cultivate students who apply their skills with reduced stress, a sense of belonging, and freedom of expression. This qualitative phenomenological study seeks to identify characteristics, educational priorities, and programming approaches of university student service programs …