Essay Call Special
Maya America invites submissions (in Spanish, English, or one of the Maya languages) for a thematic issue relating to the broad and far-reaching scope of education.
As broadly conceptualized, education encompasses a breadth of dimensions, including literacy, cooperative endeavors, health promotion, environmental stewardship, and language rights. Topics under consideration for this issue include but are not limited to intergenerational perspectives on learning and schooling, children’s roles in family functioning, transformative educational approaches, personal experiences, challenges to Maya language and identity, environmental stewardship, lessons for advancing justice, and literary and artistic endeavors.
Today’s global challenges present existential threats around the world, including for people in and from Mesoamerica. Fast changing realities and opportunities require individuals and communities to acquire new dimensions of knowledge, or to renew elements that have been beneficial over time. Central to developmental destinies, education – as word and concept – also brings controversy and potential conflict. Educational goals in school systems promote acquisition of skills, along with ideals and ethical standards that enlighten and permit capacity building. Yet education can also be narrowly focused, designed to distort and shape students into ways of thinking and acting that may conform to or benefit systems of dominance.
Intersecting concerns of the issue include: 1. Socialization: how cultures encourage children and youth to become integral to family and society. Explores cross-culturally principles and practices promoting inclusion of children and intergenerational continuity, prioritization, and commitment to cooperation shared understandings of place, home, and others.
2. Schooling: (dis)continuities between home, community, and school; challenges, values, models, and personal experiences of schooling domains that either promote or discourage wellbeing and equity; integrating parental and community teachers and teachings.
3. Earth Wellbeing: diverse ways cultures and countries promote ecocultural understandings and extensions of social and environmental justice; activism and partnerships for a living planet, humanitarian ethics, and climatic resilience.
Send a topic proposal of 100 to 200 words to the journal by or before April 1, 2024. Use the journal “submission” link or send an email to: jamesloucky@gmail.com or David Barillas-Chón dwbari@gmail.com or managing editor Alan LeBaron alebaron@kennesaw.edu
Complete essay drafts received by August 1, 2024, will move through a double-blind peer review, with publication as Issue 6(2) Winter 2024.
