In this blog, the authors reflect on agroecology education by social movements, as called for by the Nyéleni process. Existing independent of (but in relation with) public schools and academic spaces, the autonomous agroecology schools of agrarian movements create complex dialogues among knowledge systems, by combining hands-on farming with technical training on ecology, the study of history and the commons, and organizing forms in the 21st century. The social movement agroecology school in Colombia, IALA María Cano, sets into motion the Freirian concept of praxis through an ongoing action research process that the authors are privileged to participate in as the VOCES Collective, where they accompany the research-teaching-organizing processes and pedagogy of alternation of IALA María Cano and its student participants. This transformational form of education, the authors argue, is acutely tuned in with the contexts and conditions of amplifying agroecology in Peasant, Afrodescendent and Indigenous territories.
Written by: Nils McCune, Olga Domené, David Meek and Rebecca Tarlau
This article is a part of an Agroecology Now series on Pedagogy and Learning
On Saturday, September 20th, 2025, a convergence of families, friends, and comrades of the students of the María Cano Latin American Institute of Agroecology (IALA) arrives to the bamboo, brick, and open air campus that sits abreast the mountain soils of Viotá, Colombia. The campus has an extraordinary perch, with a panoramic view to the sides and behind of the rising heights of the tropical peak under which it sits, a mountain that permanently changes color with the movement of the day, accentuating the shadows and shapes of its profile. The forward-facing side is an outward vision of great distance, over a vast valley of small-scale agriculture that climbs up faraway forested foothills until disappearing into dense clouds. High above the clouds, three white Nevados volcanoes of the Colombian Andes peak back like ancient gods. We have witnesses.
Curious about what this “peasant university” is all about, arriving family members and guests explore the student garden, the bio-input production station, hog and hen areas, eco-constructed cabins, a miniature jam and juice processing plant, a dining hall, and dormitories, before being shown to a long, narrow and flat field with a stage and a seating area. Showers of warm rain keep everything wet enough to shine. A live band belts out traditional Colombian country music as a technical crew works to keep cables and cords dry. The space is decorated with the yellow, brown and green flags of FENSUAGRO, Colombia’s Federation of Agricultural Unions, as well as freshly cut flowers, seeds, soil, and bowls of water spread out in four lines representing the cardinal directions. Accompanying FENSUAGRO’s flag is the red flag of the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC) and the green flag of La Vía Campesina (LVC). It is thus clear to those of us present that the graduation we are witnessing is simultaneously a local, national, Latin American and internationalist ceremony. This transcendence is also found in the pedagogical foundations, territorial methods and organicity of IALA María Cano, as this blog will explore. For as much as agroecological education is already an integrated, action-oriented, transdisciplinary process, it is much the more so when organically embedded in national, regional and global movements advocating for and constructing concrete alternatives to the neoliberal, extractive, and increasingly imperialist corporate food regime.
For as much as agroecological education is already an integrated, action-oriented, transdisciplinary process, it is much the more so when organically embedded in national, regional and global movements advocating for and constructing concrete alternatives to the neoliberal, extractive, and increasingly imperialist corporate food regime.
Our thoughts are suddenly interrupted by applause, as 35 graduates in cap and gown appear behind the crowd and walk the aisle between the two sets of seats. As they walk, they chant in unison about their role building their nation. Colombia. This megadiverse country– of such beauty that it hurts, as Gabriel García Márquez’s famous novels showcased– also bears the open wounds of decades of internal armed conflict, the heart of which has always been the grossly concentrated structure of land ownership and access.
The crowd gathered to witness the graduation ceremony of IALA María Cano takes turns applauding, weeping, and dancing. Amid the striking colors of the flags, flowers, stage and tents, the mística of the moment is palpable. For this is no ordinary high school or university graduation. Instead, it represents the culmination of a unique social movement strategy to territorialize agroecology through education.
In this blog, we describe the importance of agroecological education as a pedagogical, socioterritorial, world-historical process, and as an arm of a peasant organization committed to transforming Colombia from within. Denied peace for generations, Colombians increasingly see comprehensive agrarian reform with agroecological peasant economies as the way to permanently end war and create a historic project to celebrate, defend and sustain life on Earth. These movements will defend their ideas at the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20) in Cartagena, Colombia from February 19 to 28. The IALA peasant university’s students and educators will be highly present, in the international academic preconference on Land, Life and Society, as well as the social mobilizations by movement actors that week in Cartagena and the official FAO-sponsored conference, which expects to draw 5,000 attendees. But what kind of education does this peasant university represent? And how does it figure into different visions for agrarian reform and a mass movement for agroecology?
CLOC-LVC and the Latin American Institutes of Agroecology
In a recent article for the National Political Education Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America, Juan Reardon and Nils McCune described the educational programs of the La Via Campesina in Latin America and the Caribbean. In these regions of the globe, the umbrella organization for rural social movements is the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC-LVC), made up of 84 mass organizations of peasants, farm workers, fisherfolks, beekeepers, and other land- and territory-based peoples. These peoples and their movements are the carriers of over 500 years of memories of the struggle against colonialism. “Not one day without resistance” is a CLOC-LVC slogan meant to remind Latin Americans that the European invasion of the continent was met with continuous Indigenous, Black, peasant and popular resistance.
Over the last 40 years, these movements have gradually integrated agroecology into their political theory, organizing strategies, legal processes, and praxis of defending, recovering, and healing land and territory. In doing so, they also provide some of the most updated and complete social theory available, built through innumerable encounters with diverse realities across the continent. The early theorist of action research, Kurt Levins, wrote that “the best way to understand something is to try to change it.” As peasant and indigenous movements resist extractivist agriculture, they have come to put forward agroecology as a political tool for recovering the fertility, diversity, and stability of the lands and territories that these movements are able to remove from the project of transnational capital.
One of the powerful ways that CLOC-LVC is transforming territories with agroecology is through creating an alternative educational model in the Latin American Institutes of Agroecology (IALAs). CLOC-LVC has created over 10 IALAs throughout Latin America and the Caribbean to offer formation in agroecology to rural people of all ages. These autonomous social movement universities provide advanced training in agroecological production methods, as well as organizing skills, dialogue, and reflection to learn from concrete struggles and improve the practice of social movements in territories.
The first IALA was built in Barinas, Venezuela, and named for renowned Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. There, agroecological engineering students from Black, Indigenous, and peasant backgrounds were formed in social movement methods and agroecological production, with advanced training in everything from community-organized irrigation to bioconstruction to soil ecology and peasant food systems. Popular peasant feminism is an ongoing construction of CLOC-LVC, as a response to machismo and patriarchy’s impact in the countryside, and also as a response to more urban, white, Global North and bourgeois forms of feminism. This peasant feminism develops campaigns to stop violence against women, promote women’s land access and tenure security, and celebrate the sisterhood and knowledge that have emerged from centuries of women’s contributions to food, seed, water and communal systems. Deep engagement with their CLOC-LVC’s original and emerging form of feminism helps learners to challenge patriarchal traditions within themselves, their families, their communities and their organizations.
Popular peasant feminism is an ongoing construction of CLOC-LVC, as a response to machismo and patriarchy’s impact in the countryside, and also as a response to more urban, white, Global North and bourgeois forms of feminism.
After IALA Paulo Freire came into being, CLOC-LVC member organizations began creating IALAs in several countries, including Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Nicaragua, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic. In the United States, the People’s Agroecology School of the organization Rural Vermont is in the process of setting itself up to offer a similar agroecological popular education linked to grassroots organizations that work together as La Vía Campesina. In the second and third waves of IALA construction by CLOC/LVC member organizations, the original pedagogy of Venezuela’s IALA has continued to evolve, meeting emerging needs of the movements over the last 15 years of changing Latin American and Caribbean political, social, and ecological contexts.
IALA schools have several novel pedagogical tools and approaches, providing a comprehensive training for participating students. They practice a pedagogy of alternance, meaning that students spend extended periods of time in rural territories as part of the learning, organizing agroecological processes among grassroots organizations and communities, while learning deep local knowledge from these communities. This learning comes back to the school process during the reflection portion of school time, filtering its way through individual, small group, and large group written and oral discussion. Students are expected not only to become proficient at agroecological production methods, but also to become capable of assuming leadership responsibilities at one or multiple scales of their movement.
IALAs promote values such as solidarity, communication, internationalism, and organized struggle through action-reflection cycles known as praxis. They promote the dialogue among ways of knowing between different historical memories of distinct collective actors, representing the diverse peoples of the land of “Abya Yala,” the Kuna indigenous name for Latin America and the Caribbean.
IALA María Cano director Fabian Pachon explained to us that the Colombian social movement has its own understanding of agroecology, as a basis for the construction of a new social life founded upon fundamentally changed relationships with land and territory. “We approach the agrarian question from a technological matrix that has been co-constructed by peasant women and men, to build life through agroecology.” This vision is in fundamental contradiction with the predatory extractive industries that have profited from violence, displacement and power imbalance in Colombia.
VOCES: a different way of doing research
Learning about the IALA schools has shown us the importance of transformation. As researchers in agroecology, geography and education, we have had the joy and honor of participating in a research collective with three IALAs, through what has come as the VOCES Collective. Founded in 2024, VOCES is a colorful acronym for Vermont, Oregon, Colegio de la Frontera Sur (Ecosur), Stanford. It also means “voices” in Spanish. The director of the Maria Cano Latin American Institute of Agroecology (and IALA Paulo Freire graduate), Fabian Pachón, created this name for our team. We consist of four researchers: Nils McCune (Institute for Agroecology at the University of Vermont), David Meek (University of Oregon), Olga Domené (Ecosur) and Rebecca Tarlau (Stanford University). Together, we are carrying out a collaborative action research process with three Latin American Institutes of Agroecology: IALA Maria Cano in Colombia, IALA Ixim Ulew in Nicaragua, and IALA Sembradoras de Esperanza in Chile. As part of an ongoing collaboration that has taken shape over the last decade, the educators, facilitators, and students of these institutes are carrying out what they call “organizational action research” on community engagement with agroecological transformation through this collective of internationalist agroecological learning. We have also been able to meet the formation team from IALAs in Argentina, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic, and hear about their pathways since their founding. Taken together, the 10 IALAs in Latin America and the Caribbean have formed a contingent of several hundred agroecological social movement leaders, whose work only begins with their time as learners in IALA.
The Colectivo Voces has been accompanying a group of 17 IALA Maria Cano learners since their arrival at the school in September 2024. We’ve gotten to know them well, and met some of their parents by visiting their farms. Somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, these young people have sobering personal histories that in cases include forced displacement, poverty, landlessness, and violence. Their experience at IALA is often the farthest they’ve ever been from their families. They come from the grassroots peasant union locals and farm worker organizations that begin to represent Colombia’s megadiversity.
We have also gotten to know the unique pedagogy of IALA. At the school, these young people are not called “students”, the Latin root of which in Spanish (alumnos) means “without light.” Instead, they are called “subjects of education” or educandos, to denote that they educate themselves, one another, and their educators throughout the process (here we refer to them as learners). These learners are organized into “base groups” through which they share the school experience. These groups work in farm areas for weeks at a time, getting to know the rituals of bio-input manufacturing, hog raising, hen production, beekeeping, milk-and-calf operations, vegetable production and the agro-industry of traditional sugarcane processing into panela and fruits in jams. Learners also discuss Colombian history and the history of the agroecology movement, agroecosystem design and assessment, as well as the participatory action research tradition through the theories of one of its most well-known references, Orlando Fals Borda.
During their six-week-long “community time,” carried out three times over the course of the 12-month program at IALA, learners participate actively with the grassroots organizations that are at the frontlines of agrarian reform in Colombia. For example, ten months before their graduation, we visited a group of IALA educandos who were accompanying peasant farmers in a famous land reform process in Córdoba, the Caribbean North of Colombia. There, the Hacienda Támesis, once the center of operations of a drug mafia that colluded with wealthy landlords, had been confiscated by the government and was being redistributed to 100 families of people displaced by the war. Along with the IALA learners, we fished and cooked with a peasant family there, taking corn seed with us to plant the memory of that struggle for agroecology and dignified social life. We have also participated with IALA learners during their community time in Boyacá, Meta and Cesar departments.
Colombia’s current government has been the first in recent memory to move forward with land reform processes, by moving cases like Tamesis to the National Land Agency, where land titles may eventually be emitted. None of this accompaniment is simple; the country’s six-decade long civil war has created armed groups that defend landlord power, making it difficult and dangerous to be involved in land reform processes. Indeed, over its 50-year history, FENSUAGRO has lost over 2,000 members to armed violence by paramilitary groups, a staggering history of pain and resistance.
By spending time in rural territories far from their home, student base groups deepen their internal composure and their understanding of Colombia’s tragic recent history. They take on tasks such as farming, organizing and assessing the local places where they are sent, using a participatory action research framework. VOCES members were able to spend time with students during these formative experiences in the deep Colombian countryside, witnessing their transformative learning in conjunction with the learning of the community and territory where they spend this time. We accompany the IALA, as it accompanies its students who are accompanying communities in their process of problematizing the reality they encounter and developing collective responses. The agrochemical traps, the difficulties stemming from land speculation, the lack of women’s power over their own lives and their resource bases, the long legal processes involved in gaining access to land, are all factors of complexity as rural communities move toward accessing land in stable ways and implementing a model that works with nature, rather than responding to the demands of faraway markets.
Agroecology and hope
Agroecology is the seed that peasant movements are planting in society, and they see it as transversal in their vision of popular, comprehensive agrarian reform. In February 2026, Colombia will host the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20), exactly 20 years after the historic global meeting on agrarian reform that took place in Porto Alegre, Brazil. These two interceding decades have seen the acceleration of global environmental catastrophe and wealth inequality, the twin disasters of our times, both made possible by a militarized world where protest is increasingly difficult and dangerous.
In this context, the role of young people who are deeply skilled in agroecology is more important than ever. IALA’s graduates are agents of change who set in motion political, cultural, economic and spiritual processes of transformation. In his speech at the graduation ceremony, IALA graduate Dayron clearly stated the significance of the moment. “We call upon our peasant organizations to recognize us, the youth, as subjects of social change with technical, political and organizational tools. We want to be recognized as a living force that walks toward a peasant future with agroecological knowledge, community-based practices, and critical consciousness.”
IALA graduates are currently deployed across hundreds of communities and landscapes in Latin America and the Caribbean, carrying out the painstaking work of organizing, educating, experimenting, and documenting agroecological transformations, as they defend the rights of peasant women, men, youth, and elders. Their work restoring rivers and watersheds, implementing agroforestry systems, raising native bees, building seed libraries and local land reform processes, and creating more schools of agroecology, represents an international, revolutionary proposal known as food sovereignty. As social life becomes increasingly impacted by the power play of resurgent far-right forces, and across the world people are being led into war, examples such as IALA María Cano and its strategic bet on the peace process become international beacons of hope. We hope more people will have the chance to get to know this school, its process, its students and the daring hope it represents.