Picture this: It’s the early 90s in Los Angeles, and a nun at a neighborhood Catholic school has her class reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. They reach the part where Edmund takes the Turkish delight from the White Witch, and she stops. She reaches into a bag and hands a Turkish delight treat to each child.
Lizette Valles never forgot that moment. Decades later, she can still feel it. “I remember savoring the story,” she told me. “It lived inside me.”
The experience of that story led to a love of literature that set Lizette on the path to become a librarian and English teacher. Then she became a school founder.
The day I visited Ellemercito Learning Community in Los Angeles, Ms. Betty was teaching culinary arts, not as a skill, but as nutritional anthropology. At Ellemercito, students press fresh corn, make horchata, and understand that food is civilization, memory, and body. Theater, cooking, and literature are woven into their trauma-informed model built on the foundational truth that children learn with their whole selves, or they don’t really learn at all.
Lizette built her microschool in a community much like the one where she grew up and still lives. The parents who choose Ellemercito aren’t choosing a school. They’re choosing a neighbor.
Across the country, Catayah Clark is building learning around the rich histories of South Carolina’s geographical regions. Palmetto Pathways Academy’s (PPA) network of learning hubs is being designed for and with the communities it will serve—born from a career educator and native South Carolinian who knows the wisdom held in the state’s unique regions.
Initially approved as a charter school, unforeseen changes with their authorizer resulted in a reapplication mandate. PPA’s board is making the difficult decision to reorganize and move forward with an independent school arm rather than remain subject to a system that had not-so-subtly shown them what it does with inconvenient innovations. But Catayah didn’t abandon the vision. She liberated it. PPA stands as an insistence, made visible and structural, that she will not be moved quietly. The communities PPA seeks to serve are still looking to them for solutions, and they remain ready with answers gained through generational wisdom and tenacity.
Children learn from people they trust, in places where they feel known. Identity isn’t a barrier to academic rigor; it is the doorway.
Coi Marie Morefield
You cannot teach a child who does not feel seen. Belonging is not soft work. It is the first work. Children learn from people they trust, in places where they feel known. Identity isn’t a barrier to academic rigor; it is the doorway. When a school reflects a child’s family, language, and history back to them, something unlocks that no curriculum alone can open. Lizette and Catayah are not just building schools. They are building based on the cultural conditions under which learning becomes possible.
And to be clear, they did not learn this from us.
The movement learned it from them.
The values that define the learner-centered movement—self-determination, collective responsibility, community as infrastructure—did not originate in research papers or innovation labs. They have been alive in Black and Brown communities for generations, passed down through matriarchs who organized their neighbors in salons, living rooms, and kitchens. Through grandmothers who ran thriving community businesses and knew every child on the block by name. Through women who understood, long before any framework said so, that you cannot separate a person’s learning from their identity.
When I asked learners at Ellemercito to describe how they feel there in one word, their comments included “confident,” “free,” “courageous,” and “safe.” This is what children say when someone who looks like them builds something around them, and when the school doesn’t just serve the community but is the community.
May is the month we set aside to honor mothers. I want to honor not only those who gave birth to children, but those who birthed possibilities for all children. Mothers of the movement who understood that transformation is not a single grand gesture but a journey of faithfulness. Mothers who carried forward what was instilled in them, built on city blocks and family farms. Mothers who knew, before we had language for it, that the village does not outsource the future of its children.
