User:Kaamrami/sandbox

Escuela Unitaria (One-room one-teacher)
Escuela Unitaria is a one-room one-teacher style of Schooling focused on serving rural indigenous communities. The school serves up to six grades in a single classroom setting with smaller groups (divided by grade level) in the classroom and is used in rural communities in Mexico. Community involvement is a strongly implemented in the management of the school. Learning activities are based on not just inside the classroom but also outside in the agricultural environment. Children are self-instructed and the content involves the students’ rural community and family participation. The school is structured to meet cultural needs and match available resources. Indigenous ways of learning within a classroom setting includes collaboration between; the teacher and student, student teamwork, and students partnership with the community. Integration of cultural knowledge within the curriculum allows indigenous students to participate actively and to have a say in the responsibilities for classroom activities.

Educational Gap
Indigenous people view education as important to improve their situation by pursuing economic, social and cultural development; it provides them with individual empowerment and self-determination. Education is also a means for employment; it’s a way for socially marginalized people to raise themselves out of poverty. However some education systems and curriculums lack respect for indigenous peoples ways of learning, causing an Educational Gap for indigenous people. Factors for the Education Gap include lower school enrollments, poor school performance, low literacy rates, and higher dropout rates. Formal schools teach indigenous children to be “socialized” and to be a national asset to society by assimilating, “Schooling has been explicitly and implicitly a site of rejection of indigenous knowledge and language, it has been used as a means of assimilating and integrating indigenous peoples into a ‘national’ society and identity at the cost of their indigenous identity and social practices”. Educational equality for indigenous students simply cannot be achieved through a one-size-fits-all approach to formal schooling; it needs to include indigenous way of learning. The education gap is increasing because indigenous cultural methods are not being integrated into classroom settings. Intercultural learning is an example of how to build a bridge for the educational gap.