Our Story

What seeds grew the Liberated Learning Institute?

A love for learning and children.

I entered teaching because I loved learning and loved being a safe space for children.

I expected to stay in the classroom a long time. Experiences continued showing me a system that called harm support. Children asked to sit still in rooms that did not honor their bodies. Students who needed something other than the norm, treated as the problem. Parents, teachers, and leaders asked to carry impossible conditions, and then blamed for what those conditions produced. One question I kept returning to, “What if the design is the problem, not the people inside it?”

That question led me deep into curriculum and instruction, restorative practices, body-based work, and liberatory education.

It led me to Indigenous Knowledge Systems. The wide field of knowledge many nations carry, each their own. The question led me back to my Indigenous roots. From my mother's line I carry Rarámuri lineage. Our teachings confirm the knowing that all of life is a classroom and that the land, body, and relationships teach.

I practiced applying these teachings in elementary and middle school classrooms. Which then grew into application in professional development and adult learner spaces.

The same truths kept showing up through the healing circles, curriculum writing, and grassroots collaborations in Chicago, including Community as a Campus and the Puerto Rican Cultural Center - children and adults are not failing at education. Public education has been built in ways that fail children and adults.

Liberated Learning took form over these years of teaching, writing, facilitation, community work, and refusal. Refusal for punitive ways of being and refusal to accept structures that harm.

The Institute supports families, schools, microschools, organizations, and practitioners ready to humanize learning, relating, and being. We are liberating the conditions needed for evolutionary learning.

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