Indigenous Knowledge and Education in Chiapas, Mexico: An Intercultural Method

We review two related intercultural education projects designed from the bottom-up, Laboratories Socionaturales Vivos y Milpas Educativas (Living Socio-Natural Laboratories and Educational Milpas) and Laboratorios para la Vida (Laboratories for Life, a school garden project). Both projects involve activities outside the classroom, using the Intercultural Inductive Method, discussed here, and a syntactic concept of culture; a method and a concept that make it possible to formalize indigenous or community pedagogies implicit in the savoir faire of local community culture.