Keres Children’s Learning Center (KCLC) strives to reclaim our children’s education and honor our heritage by using a comprehensive cultural and academic curriculum to assist families in nurturing Keres-speaking, holistically healthy, community minded, and academically strong students.
Keres Children’s Learning Center’s (KCLC) innovative compared to the status quo in our community in that we are providing a Mobile Outdoor Immersion Classroom that focuses to help increase the Keres language use and fluency while enjoying the process of learning, growing, and harvesting fresh produce within our KCLC agricultural fields and raise beds. Currently KCLC serves at total of 30 children and their families. The idea for a Mobile Outdoor Immersion Classroom came from the nexus community members. Originally the idea for an “outdoor classroom” included some fixed structure that would start our agricultural setting with raised beds and eventually include livestock. One of the community members idea pointed out that, “whenever you go outside, you’re in your outdoor classroom.” It’s everything and everywhere. Indeed, we believe that the land was prepared for us by our Creator, so it is an organic and natural setting for learning, and our people have been learning this way since time immemorial. It can sometimes be the mountains, sometimes the river, sometimes the fields, the plaza, other times an historic or culturally-significant site. Therefore, the idea of a Mobile Outdoor Immersion Classroom is what we pursued because it can be more responsive to the needs of the curriculum that will have developed than any fixed site could be. Language, like people, are attached to the land; therefore, the classroom cannot just be in one place, cannot occupy a fixed space; it’s everything. Through this KCLC would has expanded its Mobile Outdoor Classroom to include an agricultural field which includes produce such as corn, Chile, beans, peas and melons, etc.