"Centering Indigenous Culture in K-12 Education" (Trisha Moquino)

In this episode, I'm honored to welcome Trisha Moquino to the podcast to talk about her personal journey in education, the inspiration behind the founding of the Keres Children's Learning Center and the Indigenous Montessori Institute, and what actionable steps that educators, school districts, and teacher education programs need to take to center the cultural, historical, and lived experiences of Indigenous People with fidelity.  To learn more about Trisha's work, you can visit her personal website at indigenouscheerleader.com or the Keres Children's Learning Center website at kclcmontessori.org.  You can also follow Trisha on Instagram with the handles @indigenouseducators and @indigenouscheerleader.  

BIO: Trisha Moquino (Cochiti, Ohkay Owhingeh, Kewa) is the co-founder of Keres Children's Learning Center (KCLC), a Keres-immersion early childhood classroom using Montessori pedagogy that includes a Montessori dual-language Elementary classroom. The vision for a school supporting Keres language and cultural learning and academic development came largely from Moquino’s master’s thesis in Bilingual Education at the University of New Mexico.   

For the last 3 years, Moquino has been working with her KCLC colleagues and Montessori Partners to build the Indigenous Montessori Institute (IMI), a teacher training program that uses indigenous knowledge systems and Montessori philosophy to approach education reform.   Before KCLC and IMI, Moquino taught in public, private, and BIE schools, but realized she was perpetuating an educational system that didn’t work for many Indigenous children, propelling her to develop a different approach to education for her own and other Pueblo children.   

Moquino is a founding board member of Montessori for Social Justice and is a Luce Indigenous Knowledge Fellow with the First Nations Development Institute. She has a Montessori Elementary I certification from the Montessori Education Center of the Rockies and completed her Primary training with United Montessori Association.

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