Contribution short abstract

This presentation shares educational findings from our Partnership for Youth and Planetary Wellbeing project alongside indigenous Mapuche-Williche youth from Chiloé archipelago, southern Chile in a context marked by climate coloniality and environmental (in)justice

Contribution long abstract

This presentation offers contributions to the place of pedagogies in political ecology by sharing educational findings from our Partnership for Youth and Planetary Wellbeing project, which aimed to understand youth wellbeing in contexts marked by the slow violence of ecological crises in structural contexts of climate and intergenerational injustice (Tilleczek et al., forthcoming).

We draw on our work alongside indigenous Mapuche-Williche youth of Chiloé archipelago in southern Chile. These young people emerge as anti-colonial educational revolutionaries (Aránguiz et al., 2022a, 2022b; Tilleczek, 2022) in new spirits of critical pedagogies of hope aligning and transcending Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and the contributions of Gustavo Esteva to political ecology (Tornel, 2025).

Leaning on the Youth Advisory Committee's wisdom and through interviews, community conversations, and the co-design of pedagogical materials, our relational work illustrates how our research processes and the co-development of educational tools adhere to critical, youth-centered pedagogical methods that foster an understanding of how youth live well through reciprocal relationships with territory, land, forests, sea, creatures, and kinship. These young Mapuche-Williche educational revolutionaries breathe life and knowledge (old and new) into Freire's approach through Wekimun (new knowledge in the Mapuche language, Mapundungun) and Küme Mogen (living well in relation). They understand relationships with the territory, peoples, and the more-than-human world as the pathway for a pedagogy grounded on radical hope (Esteva, 2023). We speak to the ways in which this knowledge and practice serve as tools for repair and resistance to the structural forces that threaten individual, collective, and planetary wellbeing