Till the land, defend the land: reflections on the critical place-based pedagogy of the Alternative Learning Center for Agricultural and Livelihood Development, Surigao del Sur

Abstract

This study delves into the critical dimensions of agrarian education and practices in the Alternative Learning Center for Agricultural and Livelihood Development in Surigao del Sur, Mindanao, Philippines. Alternative Learning Center for Agricultural and Livelihood Development is an alternative Indigenous school for the Lumad peoples, a collective identity encompassing 18 ethnolinguistic groups in Mindanao. The school’s curriculum, contrapuntal to mainstream education, emphasizes agricultural practice as a subject component. Informants of this study, which includes two students, two teachers, and a curriculum designer, suggest that organic farming sustains both the food security of the school and the students’ commitment to defending their ancestral land. Reflecting through the syncretized lens of pedagogy and ecology, the study describes how the environmental knowledge construed by the schools’ composite pedagogy fosters a radical stewardship over the Lumad ancestral domain. This perception of land necessitates not only a pro-environmental ethic but also the organized resistance against resource dispossession.