Education as Repair: Re-Igniting the Village
Land and Lineage Acknowledgment
This work is offered from the unceded, stolen lands of the Ojibwe and Anishinaabe peoples. I carry Rarámuri lineage and offer this framework as part of our journey of reconnection to ancestral ways of learning – ways that have been practiced by Indigenous peoples across generations, long before colonial education systems attempts to erase them.
The Lighthouse Learning Model™ is a contemporary application of educational wisdom that belongs to Indigenous communities worldwide: learning through relationship with land and kin, honoring the body as site of knowledge, practicing repair rather than punishment, and understanding that individual growth serves collective wellbeing.
Through 10 years of education & community experience this remembering has emerged.
This model tends to the fire of re-indigenized learning that lives at the core.
Guided by: Accountability, Compassion, Curiosity, Unity
🌿 Relational Ecology
We learn through relationship—with ourselves, each other, and the living world. Education as a living system of reciprocity.
🌿 Embodied Learning
The body is the classroom. Learning happens through sensation, movement, and direct experience.
🌿 Restorative Culture
Healing how we live and learn together. Moving from punishment to repair, from isolation to belonging.
🌿 Reciprocal Belonging
We learn in service to the collective. Our growth becomes nourishment for our communities.
What Is the Lighthouse Learning Model™?
The Lighthouse Learning Model™ is a meta-framework for intergenerational learning, healing, and communing. It’s a return to village-based education – where elders, families, facilitators, and learners move together through cycles of inquiry and belonging.
This model guides a remembering of how we’ve always learned – through relationship, our bodies, repair, and reciprocity with the land and each other.
Lighthouse Learning is deeply practical. The model gives educators, parents, and community builders a compass for making decisions—from how you design a lesson, to how you respond when harm happens, to how you structure your learning space.
It asks: Are we centering relationship? Is the body included? Are we practicing repair? Does this learning serve the collective?
These four pillars and the Lighthouse Learning Spiral™ become your guide for creating spaces where people heal, learn, and grow.
The Lighthouse Learning Spiral™
A living cycle that mirrors how humans and nature actually learn – not in straight lines, but in spirals of deepening understanding.
🌀 Inquire
Curiosity, wonder, asking “what’s interesting here?” Through questioning and sensory noticing.
🌀 Explore
Engage through experience, play, and research. Creative and embodied activity.
🌀 Practice
Try it out, make mistakes, integrate. Skill-building through repetition.
🌀 Reflect
Pause, observe, make meaning. Through journaling and circle sharing.
🌀 Share
Offer learning back to the community. Through projects, art, service, and storytelling.
This is how villages learn.
This is how we practice learning that inspires, that lights us up.
If you’re called to join the Lighthouse Learning Movement, explore ways to train, learn with, and collaborate here → https://liberatedlearning.org/join/
