Learning from the Environment: Children’s Participation and LOPI in Amazonia

• In Event: Ways of organizing learning in everyday settings: LOPI in Indigenous practices, values, and community collaboration

Abstract

This paper examines how Amazonian children learn through practice, and how this learning is reshaped by economic transformations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Matses communities in Peru, I frame my analysis within Rogoff’s LOPI model, suggesting that Amazonian children learn about the world by participating in fishing, hunting and foraging from a young age – fostering human-nature entanglements that are central to Amazonian cosmologies. Recent impacts of neoliberal economies on local livelihoods are nonetheless reconfiguring subsistence practices and learning patterns. I thereby argue that children’s learning must be placed within broader political and economic processes, where children are not passive recipients of change but active participants who shape emerging trajectories of learning and social life.

Author

• Camilla Morelli, University of Bristol