Education, Good Living, and Storytelling in Rural Ecuador

This book centers on the stories and histories of buen vivir (“good living”) in education in Ecuador, focusing on how Indigenous and Afrodiasporic Peoples have strategically engaged with state educational initiatives to advance their own epistemic and political projects. It examines the ideas of buen vivir in Fundamental Education programs destined to “better the lives” of the rural population in Ecuador in the 1960s and 1970s. After the bureaucratization of buen vivir in Ecuador and Bolivia, a regional wave of critique problematized the idea, yet the historical resonances of governmental uses of buen vivir with previous modernization projects have been understudied. Moving beyond a national framework, it offers a comparative and transnational perspective on how the notion of rural has been constructed through modernizing reason. The education experiences explored here are memory on strategies of resistance against dispossession and racism, as well as spaces of organization and affirmation of knowledge.