Learning with immigrant indigenous parents in school and community

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article I introduce a framework that centers indigenous educational sovereignty in university-school partnerships. Developed from collaborative work with Indigenous Maya families who are migrants from Yucatan, Mexico, the framework operates from an understanding that Indigenous parents have knowledge that is important for their children to acquire and that schools are key sites to support this knowledge. I begin the article with a description of the framework that guides our participation in the partnership and which supports indigenous educational sovereignty. I then provide a brief overview of research addressing the growing population of Indigenous Latinx families in US schools. I discuss the partnership which developed from a qualitative study on academic literacies and expanded into a colaborativo (collaborative) that centers on the revalorization and maintenance of indigenous Maya culture and language at the school. I conclude with an example from an activity organized under this partnership that illustrates our consultative process in our family-school-university collaboration.