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

Introduction

On September 1, 2015, the paramilitary group Magahat-Bagani rounded up the villagers of a Manobo community in Lianga, Surigao del Sur, Northern Mindanao, Philippines. They became witnesses to the public execution of community leaders Dionel Campos and Jovillo Sinzo, and Emerito Samarca, the director of Alternative Learning Center for Agricultural and Livelihood Development (ALCADEV). These murders sparked the mass exodus to the provincial capital of Tandag of about 3,000 Lumad peoples. The Lumad is a collective Indigenous identity encompassing 18 ethnolinguistic groups in Mindanao including the Manobo. The evacuees assert that the Magahat-Bagani’s threats aimed to forcibly evacuate them from the site and make way for mining ventures over the Andap Valley Complex (Go, 2018). ALCADEV, which catered to students from Manobo, Banwaon, Higaonon, Talaandig, and Mamanwa tribes, was also forcibly closed (Alamon, 2017). State-sanctioned intimidation in the area has continued over the years with the 75th Infantry Battalion of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) establishing patrol bases within the communities themselves (Moreno, 2018; Save Our Schools Network [SOS], 2021). In June 2021, yet another massacre was committed in Lianga by soldiers camping in the area. Elements of the 3rd Special Forces of AFP indiscriminately fired at a group of farmers in Panukmoan, Lianga, killing Willy Rodriguez, Lenie Rivas, and Angel Rivas, a sixth-grader of the Han-ayan Learning Center run by the Tribal Filipino Program of Surigao del Sur (TRIFPSS) (Umil, 2021).

Decades of struggle for land and life birthed ALCADEV. The name Lumad emerged from the struggle. While the exonym Lumad means native or born of the earth in Cebuano—the language spoken in many parts of Mindanao, the 18 tribes that constitute it adopted the name ascribed to them by outsiders as a political identity (Alamon, 2017; Paredes, 2013). On July 26, 1986, delegates to the First Congress of Inauguration of the alliance Lumad Mindanaw adopted the collective political identity to consolidate communities against the Marcos dictatorship (Rodil, 2017). The collective includes the groups Ata, Bagobo, Banuaon, Blaan, Bukidnon o Talaandig, Higaunon, Mamanwa, Mandaya, Manobo, Mangguangan, Mansaka, Subanën, Tagakaolo, Tïboli, Tëduray, and Ubo (Alamon, 2017; Rodil, 2017). Since then, the Lumad social movement continued to develop and gain currency as a political force against land dispossession (Gaspar, 1997).

As of the writing of this study, militarization in Surigao del Sur continues to hinder the education of students of ALCADEV—which offers a secondary education program for Indigenous students across the Caraga region of Mindanao—and TRIFPSS— offering elementary education as the former’s counterpart—in the same area. Lumad communities living in and near Lianga with the support of several religious and non-government organizations instituted ALCADEV in 2004 as an alternative to mainstream formal education. It is one of the 216 non-government learning institutions established in the Lumad ancestral land to combat illiteracy (Nolasco & La Viña, 2021; Rodil, 1993). The schools’ curriculum revolves around a “nationalist, pro-people, and scientific pedagogy supplemented by conscious social practice” (SOS, 2019, p. 5). To serve the needs and interests of the Lumad peoples, Indigenous knowledge systems and practices (IKSP) are also woven into the subject components of their curriculum (Cabanilla, 2013; Sy, 2021; Wright, 2020). Academic emphasis is given to the practice of agroecology, “a fledgling academic discipline” that has evolved into a citizen science where ecological principles are applied to the design and management of sustainable food systems (Wibbelmann et al., 2013, p. 4). With farming as the core of its curriculum, ALCADEV seeks to emphasize both its students’ political and environmental responsibility over their ancestral land or, as they call it, yutang kabilin in the Cebuano language.

That the school facilitates the Lumad youth’s learning, cultivating, and defending of the land makes it a target of violence. According to data collated by SOS (2021), an alliance of education and Indigenous peoples advocates, there have been 1,030 cases of military and paramilitary attacks against Lumad schools and communities as of July 2021, affecting 93,977 individuals. More than 5,000 Lumad youth are unable to continue their education due to militarization, displacement, and forcible closure of their schools (SOS, 2019, 2021). As Lumad advocate and sociologist Arnold Alamon (2017) sharply puts, in Wars of Extinction: Discrimination and the Lumad Struggle in Mindanao,

the attacks on schools, [I]ndigenous leaders, and communities are violent attempts to weaken the resolve of communities to resist the entry of these destructive extractive industries. Closing down the schools will result [in] the weakening of the [I]ndigenous community, many of whom come together or congregate on the basis of the shared desire to provide for the education of their children. (pp. 121–122)

ALCADEV also functions as a center for political activity for campaigns to protect their children, people, and land from extractive industries. Foreign agriplantations and mining corporations, with the help of local businesses and even government units acting as brokers, have dispossessed Lumad communities of their land (Alejo, 2018; Imbong, 2020).

The school’s political role in Lumad communities inspires questions about its pedagogy. This article illustrates how ALCADEV could help us understand how a critical place-based pedagogy could connect issues of human and environmental concerns. I primarily argue that the agricultural pedagogy practiced in ALCADEV is both critical, as it challenges hegemonic conventional education, and place-based, as it obliges hands-on praxis to help sustain both the school and nearby communities. The environmental knowledge construed by the school’s composite pedagogy instigates and fosters a radical stewardship over their yutang kabilin, a perception of land that necessitates not only a pro-environmental ethic but also an organized resistance against land-grabbing.

Learning from the learners

While ALCADEV is located in Surigao del Sur, Mindanao, barred by the lack of resources and issues of safety, this article learns from Lumad students and teachers from ALCADEV who set up a makeshift Bakwit School. Bakwit is a popular Filipino languaging for evacuate. Spearheaded by Save Our Schools (SOS), the Bakwit School was first established in 2017 during the Manilakbayan, an annual protest caravan in Metro Manila of Lumad and Moro communities who seek to bring the national government’s attention to their minoritized issues such as landlessness. The temporary mobile school practiced the same nationalist, pro-people, and scientific pedagogy and communal system as in any Lumad school. The only difference between them is that the Bakwit School moves from one refuge to another. Moreover, volunteers provide pedagogical and logistical support to help Lumad students and teachers survive their perpetual state of displacement (Empong et al., 2021).

Despite the distance between the Bakwit School and the students’ ancestral lands in Mindanao, they bring their yutang kabilin through their campaigns for government attention and policies that can protect their lands, communities, and schools (SOS, 2021). From 2017 to 2021, the Bakwit School also gave a platform for students and teachers to participate in protest actions and engage in public educational activities (SOS, 2019). It functioned as a sanctuary that embodies the dreams of Lumad youth to return to their yutang kabilin and continue their studies in peace (Sy, 2021). In her address to fellow Lumad students during the 2021 Moving Up Ceremony, Chricelyn, a Manobo student who finished her secondary education that year, reminded everyone that their fight was not over despite the temporary closure of Bakwit School operations in July 2021: “Let us rebuild our schools together, and let us promise that we will never ever cower in the defense of our ancestral lands” (Empong et al., 2021, p. 76).

Since 2018, in addition to teaching at University of the Philippines Diliman (UP Diliman), I also taught courses in Social Studies and Research Writing at the Senior High School level at the Bakwit School. While teaching at the University of the Philippines, I have taught Social Studies and Research Writing classes at the Senior High School level of the Bakwit School. As a member of SOS, I have also done research, paralegal, and campaign work in committees joined by other volunteers and some of our older students. I see this participation in their struggle for the right to education as an opportunity for praxical reasoning. Being there in the struggles of the Indigenous students and teachers involved in this research shape my own reflections. After all, the learners themselves understand their school experiences best (Tungpalan & Bawagan, 2015, p. 85). Associated with participatory action research, immersion with the community or organization can be “quite significant to the inclusion of [I]ndigenous epistemology in the discourse of research” (Minoi et al., 2019, p. 173). Guided by this involvement, I reflect on a focus group discussion conducted in the Bakwit School when it was at the UP Diliman in 2018. The two Lumad students are anonymized as Gina and Vic. Volunteer teachers Micah and Chad were also interviewed. These four participants were recommended by the ALCADEV administration due to their considerable length of stay in Mindanao. Even though these engagements were conducted outside the Lumad peoples’ domain, the students and teachers have sustained their relation to the yutang kabilin through their mobilizations against militarization and resource extraction in their lands and school. The state of displacement is a productive site for critiquing and resisting displacement itself. Dr. Janette M. Silva, a primary contributor to the curriculum developed for ALCADEV, was also interviewed in 2018 to give context about the school’s pedagogy. Consent was obtained from all participants.

Critical and place-based pedagogy

I suggest that radical environmental subjectivities, or eco-subjects, whose consciousness and actions challenge dominant discourses of the environment, emerge from the confluence of critical and place-based educational models that can be observed in ALCADEV. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) observes how the marginalization of Indigenous knowledges parallels the denial of citizenship, human rights, and the right to self-determination. In the same way, the dominant frame of formal education lacks “any genuine acknowledgement of the colonial underpinnings of the state and society” and, instead, pushes Indigenous youth to corporate paths and away from asserting self-determination (Choudry, 2010, p. 57). Recent literature sought to pivot attention to “skills and knowledge nurtured in venues beyond the realm of formal education” to forge critiques against neoliberal education (Wotherspoon, 2015, p. 79). Across the Global South, documented cases include Indigenous schools in Malaysia (Minoi et al., 2019), Nepal (Gupta & Padel, 2019), Bangladesh and India (Singh & Espinosa-Herold, 2014), Aotearoa/New Zealand (Choudry, 2010), and the Philippines (Cabanilla, 2013; Wright, 2020). These schools promote multicultural and multilingual learning, use local languages, and cater especially to those with little access to social services (Gupta & Padel, 2019; Singh & Espinosa-Herold, 2014). Thus, they become a viable site to cultivate knowledges about social and environmental justice (Choudry, 2010).

Such potential to decolonize learning and conscript it as an instrument for people-led development resonates with critical pedagogy, a transformational educational framework that responds to institutional and ideological domination under capitalism (Freire, 2005; Gruenewald, 2003). Entangled with states’ neoliberal policies which facilitate the privatization of schooling, the youth are sequestered in walled communities to pacify their liberatory potential (Lanuza, 2015). An alternative and critique of this system, critical pedagogy is best understood as,

an effort to work within educational institutions and other media to raise questions about inequalities of power, about the false myths of opportunity and merit for many students, and about the false myths of opportunity and merit for many students, and about the way belief systems become internalized to the point where individuals and groups abandon the very aspiration to question or change their lot in life. (Burbles & Berk, 1999, p. 50)

This model of education promotes a consideration of one’s socio-economic position vis-à-vis the ideologies and institutions that gridlock social mobility, including the mainstream state-endorsed school setup itself.

Convinced by the necessity of critical pedagogy, Gruenewald (2003) proposes that place-based education needs to be synthesized with the critical so that “the education of citizens might have some direct bearing on the well-being of the social and ecological places people actually inhabit” (p. 3). A curriculum that adapts to the material socio-political and environmental conditions of the site of learning encourages empathy and outward learning. Hence, Gruenewald (2003) prefers the term “place” because it “is attuned to the particularities of where people actually live, and that is connected to global development trends that impact local places” (pp. 4–5). In this model of education, much attention is offered to the students’ and even teachers’ lifeworld, the realm of communicative life and action (Gaspar, 2011). One’s lifeworld—in this case, the ancestral land of Indigenous peoples—is always simultaneously achieved and ascribed; as any social construction, it is internalized as a viewpoint (Love, 1996).

As I argue in the case of ALCADEV, agricultural praxis in place—that is, the yutang kabilin itself—shapes subjects with both ecological and social consciousness. Knowledges, after all, are not passively transmitted. Robbins (2012) explains that “new environmental actions, behaviors, or rule systems lead to new kinds of people” (p. 216). Put differently, theory and practice within locational rubrics and spaces lead to subject formation.

The land and schools of the Lumad peoples

The Lumad peoples’ ancestral land is nestled in Mindanao, the Philippines’ second largest island, located in the southern region of the archipelago. Lumad lands straddle overlapping regions such as Agusan, Bukidnon, Cotabato, Davao, Lanao, Surigao, and Zamboanga. Big plantations and mining corporations still manage to grab parcels of their ancestral domain (Villareal, 2018). As of 2016, of the 23 priority mining projects under the government’s mining revitalization program in Mindanao, most lie within the ancestral lands of the Lumad peoples. Meanwhile, according to Imbong (2020), “corporate plantations are expanding at an alarming rate, with an estimated additional 600,000 hectares of arable land to be converted for plantations by 2023” (p. 1). The AFP and several paramilitary groups have intermittently militarized some of these areas, conducting food blockades and inflicting physical violence to displace tribespeople as in the case of Lianga to make way for the entry of agrocorporate and mining concessions (Alamon, 2017; Imbong, 2020; Sy, 2021).

Collaborating with foreign capitalists, neoliberal governments facilitate what Harvey (2003) calls an accumulation by dispossession where imperialist countries sway national policies in neocolonized states to expedite the entry of transnational and multinational corporations into Indigenous lands (p. 142). Through public–private development projects, corporations and their local brokers convert collective property rights to legitimize the appropriation of raw materials and commodification of labor power (Harvey, 2003; Ortega, 2017). This phenomenon aptly called development aggression displaces Indigenous communities from their ancestral lands, thus depriving them of livelihood, resources, and the means to protect their cultures (Alamon, 2017; Gaspar, 1997; Imbong, 2020; Paluga & Ragragio, 2016).

That they are denied access to basic social services has made the Lumad peoples more vulnerable to the extractive and extortive neoliberal projects of the state (Alamon, 2017; Imbong, 2020). Many students are forced to drop out of school due to the burden of the high costs of transportation, food, lodging, the discriminatory treatment against Indigenous peoples as second-class citizens, and military surveillance and harassment (Belisario, 2019). These challenges prompted several Lumad communities to work with outside institutions to cultivate educational services. Starting as outreach missions, literacy and numeracy programs were conducted by religious organizations in Surigao and North Cotabato in the 1980s. By 2019, a total of 216 alternative tribal school campuses, including ALCADEV, had been established all over Mindanao with the efforts of the Lumad peoples, religious institutions, and civil society groups, serving up to 9,000 students from both Indigenous and peasant communities (Belisario, 2019; SOS, 2019; Wright, 2020).

While these schools are a success for the Lumad movement, they are not safe from state-sanctioned violence. Lumad schools have been attacked by armed state, private, and local agents in the form of harassment, militarization, forced evacuation, and the denial of humanitarian access, among many others. These have been conducted on the baseless accusation that these schools teach rebellion against the government (Belisario, 2019; Lingao, 2017; SOS, 2019). Save Our Schools has collated these cases under the Duterte regime. By the end of 2020, around 93,977 Lumad peoples have already been victimized by over a thousand cases of attacks against schools and communities across Mindanao (SOS, 2021).

ALCADEV as told by teachers and supporters

The establishment of the ALCADEV in 2004 demonstrates both the independent agentive practice of the Lumad peoples and their strategic alliance-building with organizations of shared interests across the country. As a Lumad school, ALCADEV (2021) specifically aims to “develop the [I]ndigenous people into effective leaders and productive members of their community and country who are able to improve their socio-economic status and enhance their culture to competently deal with complex situations in the future” (“About” section, para. 2). The school anchors such development to the self-determination of the Lumad peoples. According to Silva, ALCADEV provides “a system of relevant, higher order knowledge, skills, and values to develop the Indigenous peoples to be self-reliant, self-sufficient, analytical, and creative in serving the Indigenous communities and the country through sustainable agriculture” (personal communication, November 7, 2018). Chad (personal communication, August 12, 2018) and Micah (personal communication, October 14, 2018) concur in saying that ALCADEV is a testament to the agency of Indigenous communities in paving their own way to self-sufficiency and self-determination. Silva also mentioned how the Indigenous school was recognized, by the Philippine Department of Education (DepEd), as the 5th Most Outstanding Literacy Program in the country in 2014 (personal communication, November 7, 2018).

In explaining the pedagogy of the school, the learners and teachers give emphasis on the practice of agroecology or sustainable agriculture, the lynchpin of life and livelihood in their ancestral lands. The curriculum used in the school since 2004 puts agriculture at its core to respond to the basic nutritional needs of the community and acknowledge the political situation of the Philippines as an agricultural country. DepEd (2020) does not require agriculture as part of the standard curriculum of elementary and secondary schools. As Gina explained, unlike in DepEd schools, they generally underwent eight subject components in ALCADEV: “Values Education, History, Science, English, Math, Home Economics, Agriculture, and Filipino” (personal communication, August 12, 2018). These are all taught in connection with their Agriculture classes. For example, core concepts taught in Mathematics include measurements used in farming. Values Education classes invite elders to discuss community leadership and collective labor. Vic added that History classes highlight Lumad history in relation to land (dis)possession (personal communication, September 14, 2018). These schools’ Health component involves training at various levels of first aid and the use of Indigenous natural resources for medical purposes. Agricultural practice in schools also sustains the health of the community as it becomes the source of food for teachers, students, and staff. ALCADEV also mounts self-learning and out-of-school learning programs to help the rest of the community support their livelihoods by improving literacy and numeracy (Educators’ Development Institute, 2018).

Through alliances and partnerships with organizations, ALCADEV garners funding enough to sustain their operations. Nonetheless, as told by Gina and Vic much of the effort to sustain the school comes from its communal system (personal communication, September 14, 2018). Students’ and teachers’ agricultural work puts enough food on the table, curbing the school’s expenses. According to them, overspills during harvest times are often sold for a cheap price and even for free during agricultural fairs for communities. Farming tools are outsourced from donations, while fertilizers and other inputs are made by students from endemic biomaterials. Expenses for utilities are also curbed by limiting electricity consumption in dormitories, where all students are expected to stay. Free housing directly responds to the overwhelming distance students travel when attending the few government schools in the region. ALCADEV students are also trained in first aid and basic public health to stand in for nurses as health services are a long way from their communities.

The school also provides a space free of discrimination from non-Lumad lowlander communities. To avoid bullying from classmates, Vic has decided to study in ALCADEV because “it was built by our parents, our community leaders, and it teaches us about our value being Lumad, our rights as Lumad” (personal communication, September 14, 2018). In the Philippines, discrimination persists as one of the traumatic experiences of Indigenous students (Episcopal Commission on Indigenous Peoples, 2008). A conventional pedagogical setup elides the cultural and historical contexts that shape Lumad youth (Nolasco & La Viña, 2021).

Despite its success in producing graduates since 2004, the Lumad school has faced attacks against students, teachers, and community members (Alamon, 2017; Belisario, 2019; Sy, 2021). Besides the massacres of 2015 and 2021, ALCADEV and TRIFPSS were raided in the middle of classes by elements of the 75th Infantry Battalion of AFP along with members of Magahat-Bagani on the grounds that students and teachers were part of an underground rebel group (Belisario, 2019). According to Gina, these attacks did not discourage her from continuing her studies in ALCADEV. She explained that the Lianga massacre only strengthened her resolve to finish her schooling to “save [their] schools” from military violence (personal communication, August 12, 2018).

The critical place-based pedagogy of ALCADEV

Reflecting on what the learners and teachers explained as regards ALCADEV’s pedagogy, this section discusses the environmental and social justice contours of Lumad education. Epistemologically denied by western colonial enterprises, Indigenous worldviews pose as counterexamples to the hyperseparation of human beings, other species thriving on the environment, and the environment itself (Grim, 2001; Hall, 2011). Living Indigenous traditions across the world demonstrate stewardship over the intact ecologies of their ancestral domains, exhibiting obligations of care toward all kinds of life living in the same land (Choudry, 2010; Detwiler, 1992; Hall, 2011; Rose, 1996).

In the realm of education, articulating a critical pedagogy of place counterposes “educational reform policies and practices that disregard places and that leave assumptions about the relationship between education and the politics of economic development unexamined” (Gruenewald, 2003, p. 3). ALCADEV’s focus on defending the Indigenous community and the land instills in its students what Krzesni (2015) considers as the objective of critical place-based education: “justice for the natural environment and for people [as a] primary concern in all public and private life” (p. 2). I expound this through three points: (a) the coupling of organic farming science and a critical institutional critique as pedagogical foundations; (b) the emergence of an eco-knowledge that destabilizes the bourgeois dualism between humans and nature; and (c) the emergence of eco-subjects who cast the ancestral land as a site for organized resistance.

Coupling environmental and social justice

To better articulate the assumptions and consequences of the pedagogical core of ALCADEV’s curriculum, I forward that it could be understood as a coupling of two alternatives to mainstream education. First, it adopts organic farming science as an alternative to conventional agricultural methods. Second, the critique of socio-economic forces that threaten Lumad lands is embedded in their study of agriculture.

Environmental justice is woven into ALCADEV’s curriculum through the practice of organic polycultural farming. Monocultural agriculture, which is practiced worldwide under the logic of capitalist mass production, necessitates the repeated cultivation of the same crop in an area. This robs the soil of certain kinds of nutrients, like nitrogen, which then results in decline in crop yields. Organic farming responds to this profit-driven method by viewing food production as “a holistic enterprise where sustainability and health, each important as the other, are interlinked” (Myers, 2005, p. 14). Silva expounded that, in ALCADEV, sustainability is a core concept being promoted as an identified need by and of the community: “In terms of the procedures and activities, we are in the process of consulting agriculturists and farmers for the pedagogical component of the curriculum” (personal communication, November 7, 2018). Traditional agricultural practices that may be harmful to the environment are also improved by the curriculum. According to Chad, one of the methods corrected was the unnecessary burning of cut grass and weeds (personal communication, August 12, 2018). Organic farming science has transformed what would be seen as waste such as weeds into useful fertilizer. Vic boasted about his knowledge of kakawate (Madre de Cacao plant; Gliricidia sepium) juice, Madre de Cacao Liquid (MDCL), churned from the leaves, which he uses to keep out parasites (personal communication, September 14, 2018). Besides being a pro-environmental behavior, innovating technologies such as MDCL is also a way to eschew the exorbitant pesticides and inputs manufactured by transnational and multinational corporations. Given that local agricultural practice is already small-scale and shifting, “as proposed by the community, the curriculum remains faithful to Indigenous peoples’ beliefs and practices that value the role of Agriculture in sustaining communities,” explained Silva (personal communication, November 7, 2018). In this way, Indigenous knowledges about ecological stewardship are not denied or, to use Theriault’s (2017) term, “banishment” (p. 4), from the students’ organic, small-scale cultivation, which is already observed by many Lumad communities. Instead, it is the school itself which learns from Lumad agricultural praxis and introduces it to the academic curriculum required by the Philippine government in diploma-granting schools.

In ALCADEV, agricultural practice is coupled with the critique of socio-economic forces that hamper community development. Pedagogists have criticized how civil obedience and individualism are part of the hidden curriculum of neoliberal education (Lanuza, 2015). Mainstream education surveilled by national governments also “filtered to fit hegemonic positions” Indigenous knowledges that critique neoliberal capitalism (Choudry, 2010, p. 59). For Freire (2005), critical pedagogy, however, promotes collective action and structural imagination, which are also embedded in environmental justice education. According to Silva, community development itself is the intended outcome of education in ALCADEV, which “perfectly deviates from the values inculcated in the mainstream education setup where community development remains to be in the periphery (if not excluded) in its outcomes” (personal communication, November 7, 2018). She also points out that discussing development entails a questioning of structural inequalities that students can realize by reflecting on the lack of government support for their education. Gina explained how this framework configures their agricultural education:

Our major subject is agriculture because we are in our ancestral land, that’s where we’re based. So we need to live in dormitories, we need to farm. ALCADEV is not only for students but also for the whole community, so it teaches how to advance methods in farming. This is because ALCADEV itself is based in the community . . . . Then, agriculture is not only the cultivation of land, but is also a way for people to feed, and to protect the land. It is as if they are related. (personal communication, August 12, 2018)

Practicing and thereby improving their agroecological practices directly contribute to communities’ food security and the protection of the yutang kabilin. Such a connection surfaces their people’s perception of land and life as inseparable. However, education in the school setup is only one of the channels where such perception arises. As Gina and Vic insinuate, ALCADEV students view their education as part of a grander scheme of community mobilization and protest action (personal communication, September 14, 2018). Chad also mentions that teachers encourage their students to assert their rights to education and land with the aim to help them “stand up on their own feet” against threats and attacks by military elements (personal communication, August 12, 2018).

The students also share about learning from other sectors of society through what they call basic masses integrations (BMIs). BMIs are conducted before the end of each academic year. Here, students and teachers temporarily live with nearby non-Lumad communities to learn the respective sector’s lifeways and facilitate an exchange of knowledge. Gina notes that through their BMIs in poor peasant communities, they felt that they were not alone in asserting land rights (personal communication, August 12, 2018). It could be said that the analysis of their own situation is cultivated by a critical pedagogical praxis of “paying close attention to the social context of the teaching and learning situation” (Rappaport, 1974, pp. 76–77).

A sense of place

ALCADEV’s critical place-based pedagogy constructs an alternative environmental knowledge that shores up the Lumad students’ relation to the land beyond ancestral connections. For the Lumad, land is life as it is a source of food, construction materials, and other survival essentials, which are the material means of preserving cultures and traditions (Alamon, 2017; Gaspar, 2000). The attachment to land is fostered by the establishment of the school in the ancestral domain, a space where children can gather and, in interaction with the elders, learn about community dynamics and practices (Fiag-oy, 2005).

In explaining the importance of their school and land to their lives, Vic explained that ALCADEV functions as a wet market and health clinic for the Lumad peoples (personal communication, September 14, 2018). Ingredients for simple herbal medicines are species growing endemically. “It’s easy to get roots for medicine, like the root of balete, for wounds. This is why our land is so important.” Relearning in the classroom the herbal medicine practiced by their elders helps them connect their Indigenous science to a critique of the lack of public health services in or near their communities. Gina and Vic also mention that along with Indigenous medicine, they also learn about first aid and acupuncture (personal communication, September 14, 2018). That different “schools” of medicine are studied in ALCADEV add to what pedagogists call a socio-cultural diversity in educational practices (Singh, Espinosa-Herold, 2014, p. 6; Minoi et al., 2019, p. 176).

Since ALCADEV is an alternative learning provider, “it must maximize the ideals and principles of nonformal education,” explains Silva (personal communication, November 7, 2018). This includes addressing the perennial problem of militarization. ALCADEV students who have been displaced from their lands and continued their studies through the Bakwit School found it difficult to continue exercising the similar agroecological praxis on their yutang kabilin. To address this concern, small learning farms were established in places where the Bakwit School made sanctuary. This attempt to replicate their pedagogical setup in their yutang kabilin indicates a strong sense of responsibility and care for the land they left. If the Indigenous peoples are to evacuate, the curriculum can allow for the continuity of their education through the application of place-based principles, which, according to Silva (personal communication, November 7, 2018), situates their agricultural knowledge not only in different spaces but also in the socio-economic struggles of the country.

Land is also constructed as a site of collective action through co-education as both faculty and students participate in farming. Members of nearby Indigenous communities can also volunteer in the schools’ learning farms. The land is learned as a station of cultivational activity that welcomes contributions from other stakeholders. Chad related: “Of course, the land is life. We do not see it from the bourgeois perspective where land is property” (personal communication, August 12, 2018). Relearned through the instigation of a sense of place, land is construed as an avenue to unite actors who, in a conventional educational setting, belong to unequal strata of power. From these ways of constructing the land in the classroom emerge eco-subjects who view their role as stewards of the land. Place-based educational institutions bolster students’ sense of place, “as a composition of our attachment to place and the meaning we associate with place” (Krzesni, 2015, p. 189). Collective labor, an activity fostered by co-education, paves the way for a consciousness that destabilizes an exploitative tendency toward the environment. This challenges “the socialized competitiveness of our students and the traditional inequality of classrooms” (Olea, 2011), usually between students and teachers (Freire, 2005). To echo Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), such practices “imagine” what “self-determination” would look like: a world where Indigenous peoples are active participants in responding to “challenges that lie ahead” (p. 124).

Radical stewardship of land

As demonstrated by its endeavor to elide hierarchies, ALCADEV’s pedagogy seems to deny “that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people” (Freire, 2005, p. 81). Moreover, a sense of place espoused by the Lumad’s education also fosters a strengthened attachment to their yutang kabilin. Given the political tensions surrounding the issue of authority over the Lumad’s yutang kabilin, “it is impossible not to discuss activism and militancy especially when threats linger,” acknowledged Silva (personal communication, November 7, 2018).

For decades, various Indigenous groups have stood against the government’s aggressive land development projects, leading to deaths including those of Samarca, Campos, and Sinzo. As Vic defended, “three aspects depend on our land: economy, politics, and culture. How can we live without land? How can we farm without land? All three aspects are connected to our ancestors” (personal communication, September 14, 2018). Chad even explained that the “the protection of the environment dovetails with the protection of land, not only for [the Lumad] but for everyone,” including other actors outside the school community such as volunteers and companion species (personal communication, August 12, 2018). The utilization of their yutang kabilin, thus, is a political stance against development aggression. According to Chad,

those who wish to leave the community out of fear of militarization are encouraged to commit to agriculture, because if a Lumad plants crops in their land, they will have an interest and will be more angered when that land is taken away from them . . . . If the land has regained value because of the fruits, vegetables, and crops planted in it, they are put into waste because of militarization. (personal communication, August 12, 2018)

Stewardship over the land responds to violent development aggression that harms both the environment and the Lumad lifeworld. “Land becomes more valuable, so there’s a stronger reason to reclaim and fight for their ancestral land,” Chad adds (personal communication, August 12, 2018). In ALCADEV’s pedagogy, the cultivation of land is the protection and survival of the Lumad peoples.

When the structure of this lifeworld is challenged by fundamental changes in the distribution or remuneration of labor, social mobilization becomes necessary (Canuday, 2009; Scott, 1976). Vic explains that the construction of mining operations in the Andap Valley Complex, facilitated by a written contract with the local government, threatens the communities and schools thriving in the Complex (personal communication, August 12, 2018). He says that this is the reason why they must always bakwit. Communities demonstrate consolidated resistance against this mineral regime through protests and coordination with non-state formations. By doing so, they do not only protect their lifeways but also the material environment. Chad also mentions that large-scale mining operations give headway to deforestation and soil erosion, which then lead to landslides, floods, and other disasters (personal communication, August 12, 2018). This, according to him, was the experience of Indigenous communities in Surigao del Norte, which were forced to evacuate not only because of militarization, but also due to environmental hazards caused by the same actors who burden the lives of Indigenous peoples. Organized resistance against capitalist ventures, whose impact damages both human and non-human subjects, stands for both the Lumad peoples and the ecological stability of their yutang kabilin, which they depend on for survival.

As mentioned earlier, Lumad peoples resort to bakwit to address violent attacks. However, they deal with the precarious and perpetual state of displacement creatively. They march beyond their yutang kabilin to contest the state’s authority over what they have managed for centuries. They also initiate and participate in protest demonstrations in other parts of the country. In the last decade, Lumad and Moro communities launched the Lakbayan. The 2015 caravan was a success for ALCADEV as it pushed DepEd to develop a more culturally appropriate educational system for Indigenous peoples in an initial 300 priority sites in 2016 (de Santos, 2018). Mobilization for authority over their yutang kabilin began from the school farm and led to the streets.

As viewed by Lumad students and faculty, agriculture—the usage of their idle lands—is a sustainable way of advancing self-determination. The fraught reality of militarization and land-grabbing is part of the very place of ALCADEV. That the school’s curriculum both fosters the radical stewardship of their land and acknowledges the insecure setup of their classrooms demonstrate an awareness of the complex political situation of claiming the Lumad youth’s right to education. Their pedagogy centered on land and collective school setup, reflecting that of their communities respond to this reality. Gina and Vic mention how their participation in the struggle for land by participating in protests function like a “classroom” for them (personal communication, August 12, 2018). “We students learn that we are part of the struggle started by our elders,” Gina adds when she recounts attending the Bakwit School in Metro Manila.

Conclusion

Asking how an alternative Indigenous school such as ALCADEV conflates issues of land dispossession, environmental degradation, and Indigenous peoples’ marginalization, I argued that the agricultural pedagogy practiced in ALCADEV is both critical in that it challenges conventional education, and place-based as it obliges hands-on praxis toward community development. Forged with a place-based principle, critical pedagogy’s institutional critique is synthesized with the imperative to act on problems that trickle down from the national and global to the local.

Reflecting on what learners and teachers from ALCADEV shared with me, I offer three considerations regarding the pedagogy of ALCADEV. First, both social and environmental justice are learned in the school through agroecology, which fuses Indigenous and non-Indigenous organic farming practices. Second, attachment to the yutang kabilin as place is fostered by classroom learning, co-education with teachers, elders, and other sectors, and learning from the Lumad history of struggle. Third, through this critical place-based pedagogy, students and teachers see themselves as radical stewards of the yutang kabilin. This stewardship necessitates not only a pro-environmental ethic but also organized resistance against institutions that prey on the Lumad ancestral domain. It could be said that their struggle for education and self-determination also lays claim over the land sought after by mining, logging, and agro-industrial corporations. As new environmental regimes and conditions arise, such as the state-sanctioned mining operations in the Andap Valley, opportunities for local groups to secure and represent themselves politically emerge. Understanding these forms of Indigenous resistance is imperative in bolstering the case against neoliberalism and surfacing alternatives (Choudry, 2010).

Given the continued militarization of Lumad lands in Surigao del Sur, Gina and Vic along with their schoolmates, teachers, and parents resorted to bakwit to cities, which became a site not only of sanctuary but also of protest. As ALCADEV educators such as Silva, Chad, and Micah suggest, the school’s curriculum acknowledges the place of the Lumad youth, which is not only anchored on their yutang kabilin but also fraught with many challenges. Indeed, Gina and Vic mention limitations in transferring their agroecological study from their school in Mindanao to an urban landscape (personal communication, September 14, 2018). Nevertheless, that they use the space of bakwit for both learning and protest only demonstrates their resolve to reclaim their lands from landgrabbers and military elements.

The continuing narrative of dispossession lived by the Lumad peoples of Mindanao is fought with fraud, deceit, and manipulation dating back to more than four centuries ago (Gaspar, 2000). In fact, as of the writing of this study, military elements continue to camp in ALCADEV and TRIFPSS (Umil, 2021). Nevertheless, communities persist in paving their own way to self-determination through initiatives such as instituting their own school. As Gina (personal communication, September 14, 2018) recalls during our discussion, “even though our leaders were killed, I can’t think that they’re gone. A lot of us students hold the same principles like Ka Dionel to develop our communities and defend the land.”