Fostering Ecofeminist Co-Learnings Across Cultures

Dr. Gertrude Cotter

A PRAXIS Ireland–Peru Partnership

Fostering Ecofeminist Co-Learnings Across Cultures

An Ireland–Peru partnership exploring land, ancestral and Indigenous knowledges, experiential learning, and Global Citizenship and Global Justice Education.

This public resource shares the partnership story, five interconnected pillars for teaching and collaboration, and practical questions for educators who want to connect critical reflection with experience and action.

About the partnership

What does Global Justice Education mean here?

Global Justice Education helps learners connect everyday experience with wider histories, structures and relationships of power.

It asks how inequality, colonial legacies, environmental change, culture, institutions and public decisions shape lives across borders. It also asks what people can do—collectively as well as individually—to build fairer and more sustainable relationships.

For this partnership, those questions were approached through land, language, ancestral and Indigenous knowledges, ecofeminist thinking, and learning through practice. The work challenged the assumption that valuable knowledge is produced only in universities or expressed only through academic language.

The aim is not to suggest that different traditions are the same. It is to ask how learners can encounter distinct, place-based knowledges with humility, context and responsibility—and how higher education might change as a result.

The collaboration in brief

The bilingual toolkit grew from a transnational collaboration involving University College Cork (UCC), the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM) in Lima, and the Federación Regional de Mujeres Indígenas de Ayacucho (FEREMIA). It formed part of the wider PRAXIS partnership research coordinated at UCC by Dr Gertrude Cotter and supported by Irish Aid.

The partnership asked how knowledge rooted in land, community, language, culture and lived practice might enter higher education without being treated as decorative, romantic or secondary. It also examined what reciprocal knowledge exchange requires when participants work across different languages, institutions, disciplines and relationships to power.

Learning through place and practice

Two distinct experiences, one shared inquiry

Ayacucho, Peru

Law students from UNMSM travelled from Lima to Ayacucho for a three-day learning experience with FEREMIA and young Indigenous participants. They encountered ways of living with and from the land, discussed collective and environmental rights, and reflected on the responsibilities they might carry into their professional and personal lives. The students created short videos to communicate and reflect on their learning.

Cork, Ireland

At UCC, postgraduate researchers and students from several disciplines took part in a practical workshop on ancestral and precolonial relationships with land and the more-than-human world. Through the traditional practice of eel-skin tanning, facilitated by Lucy O’Hagan, participants explored natural materials, ecological change, cultural memory, and the politics of land and ownership.

The activities were deliberately different: one should not be treated as an equivalent or substitute for the other. Their connection lay in a shared inquiry into land, knowledge, responsibility, professional formation, and the hierarchies that decide what counts as knowledge.

A framework for practice

Five interconnected pillars

The team organised its learning around five theoretical and practice-related pillars for teaching, curriculum development and future partnerships.

1. Critical reflexivity and positionality

Ask who is speaking, who is heard, which forms of knowledge carry authority, and how geopolitical, institutional and cultural positions shape the encounter.

2. Dialogue, intercultural communication and co-learning

Reciprocal dialogue needs time, translation, trust, curiosity and the possibility of disagreement or repair.

3. Indigenous and plural knowledge systems in dialogue with ecofeminisms

Recognise knowledge held in land, language, collective memory, spirituality and practice without idealising or extracting it.

4. Experiential pedagogies and methodologies

Use stories, objects, craft, place, video, sensory work and embodied practice, with accessibility, consent, care, context and reflection designed in.

5. Reflection, action and social transformation

Ask what changes in professional practice, relationships, curricula, institutions or public action—and who will take responsibility for carrying that change forward.

What the partnership learned

Co-learning has ethical and material conditions

  • Knowledge is plural and place-based. Academic knowledge is one form among many. Language, land, community memory, craft, spirituality and lived experience also shape understanding.
  • Professional education can be unsettled productively. Encountering unfamiliar knowledge practices can expose the limits of disciplinary training and open questions about professional responsibility.
  • Translation is pedagogical and political. Working across English and Spanish—and in a context in which Quechua and other Indigenous languages matter—affects pace, participation, meaning and whose concepts set the terms.
  • Experience does not interpret itself. A visit, workshop or creative activity becomes educational through preparation, ethical facilitation, reflection, and attention to power and history.
  • Reciprocity has material conditions. Time, funding, technology, translation, access, authorship and editorial control shape whose contribution is possible.
  • Action must be specific. Transformative language matters when it produces a concrete change in teaching, professional practice, relationships, institutions or public engagement.
Meaningful co-learning is often slower than the timetables of funded projects and universities. Time is not an administrative detail; it is part of the pedagogy and the ethics of partnership.

Use in teaching

Try the framework in a 60–90 minute session

This adaptable sequence can be used in law, education, social sciences, humanities, environmental studies or interdisciplinary teaching.

  1. Introduce the context and ethical ground. Explain where the material comes from, who created it, and any limits on how stories, images or community knowledge may be used.
  2. Map positionality. Ask participants where they are speaking from and what shapes their access to knowledge, institutions and decision-making.
  3. Work with a prompt. Use a story, object, image, short video or place. Identify what knowledge it carries, what remains invisible, and what cannot be responsibly claimed without more context.
  4. Apply the five pillars. In small groups, examine a course, professional problem, research project or partnership case.
  5. Agree one practical change. Name the action, who will take responsibility, what support is needed, and how accountability will be maintained.
  6. Close with an open question. Do not force consensus. Record what remains difficult, absent or unresolved.

Questions to keep visible

  • Whose knowledge is represented, and who decided how it would be framed?
  • Who benefits from the activity, publication or partnership—and who carries the work or risk?
  • What histories and power relations are needed to interpret this material responsibly?
  • Are participants able to refuse, question, reposition themselves or challenge the frame?
  • What will change after the learning, and how will that change be sustained?

Partnership lessons

Conditions for more reciprocal collaboration

What created possibility

  • A multidisciplinary team grounded in different institutional and community settings.
  • Experiential activities linked to land, culture, professional learning and environmental justice.
  • Repeated discussion rather than a single exchange event.
  • Creative and audiovisual forms that allowed learning to be revisited and shared.
  • A willingness to acknowledge uncertainty, discomfort and different understandings.

What required continuing attention

  • Translation and the wider significance of Indigenous languages.
  • Different academic calendars, assessment pressures and availability.
  • Limited opportunities for direct interaction between student groups.
  • Unequal access to time, funding, technology and stable connectivity.
  • Different expectations about outputs, authorship and pace.
  • How responsibilities continue after the funded period.

Resumen en español

Fomentando el aprendizaje conjunto ecofeminista entre culturas

Una colaboración entre Irlanda y Perú sobre la tierra, los saberes ancestrales e indígenas, el aprendizaje experiencial y la Educación para la Ciudadanía Global y la Justicia Global.

¿En qué consistió la colaboración?

Este recurso surgió de una colaboración transnacional entre University College Cork, la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Lima y la Federación Regional de Mujeres Indígenas de Ayacucho (FEREMIA). Formó parte de la investigación sobre alianzas del Proyecto PRAXIS, coordinada en la UCC por la Dra. Gertrude Cotter y financiada por Irish Aid.

El proyecto exploró cómo los saberes vinculados a la tierra, la comunidad, la lengua, la cultura y la experiencia pueden formar parte de la educación superior sin ser tratados como algo decorativo, romántico o secundario. También examinó qué exige un intercambio recíproco cuando las personas colaboran desde lenguas, instituciones, disciplinas y posiciones de poder diferentes.

Cinco pilares

  • Reflexividad crítica y posicionalidad. Preguntar quién habla, a quién se escucha y qué saberes tienen autoridad.
  • Diálogo, comunicación intercultural y aprendizaje conjunto. Crear tiempo para la traducción, la confianza, la discrepancia, la curiosidad y la reparación.
  • Saberes indígenas y plurales en diálogo con los ecofeminismos. Reconocer saberes presentes en la tierra, la lengua, la memoria colectiva, la espiritualidad y la práctica, sin extraerlos ni idealizarlos.
  • Pedagogías y metodologías experienciales. Incorporar accesibilidad, consentimiento, cuidado y reflexión crítica.
  • Reflexión, acción y transformación social. Concretar qué debe cambiar en las prácticas, los currículos, las instituciones, las relaciones o la acción pública.
Los saberes indígenas peruanos y las prácticas ancestrales irlandesas surgen de historias, posiciones políticas y relaciones vivas distintas. La comparación debe mantener esas diferencias.

Download the complete resource

Fostering Ecofeminist Co-Learnings Across Cultures

The full bilingual toolkit includes extended analysis, the five-pillar framework, classroom prompts, a workshop sequence, partnership learning and references.

Download the full bilingual toolkit (PDF)

Authorship, credits and acknowledgement

Authors: PRAXIS Ireland–Peru Partnership Team.

Partnership co-leads: Dr Jenny Butler and Dr Céire Broderick.

Partnership team: Melania Canales Poma; Dr Zulma Villa Vílchez; María D’jalma Torres; Dr Evelien Geerts; Dr Amin Sharifi Isaloo; Dr Marina Bell; and Elizabeth Rosales Martínez.

Principle Investigator, Partnership Research Project: Dr Gertrude Cotter, School of Education, University College Cork.

Partner institutions: University College Cork; Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima; and the Federación Regional de Mujeres Indígenas de Ayacucho.

PRAXIS project academic coordinator: Dr Gertrude Cotter, University College Cork.

Five-pillar framework and diagrams: Evelien Geerts and Elizabeth Rosales Martínez (2026).

Additional credits: Cork experiential workshop facilitated by Lucy O’Hagan; Cork video reflection produced by Elizabeth RoMa; interior photographs, video stills and learning materials supplied by the partnership team.

Website version: Prepared by Dr Gertrude Cotter from the research and bilingual toolkit developed by the PRAXIS Ireland–Peru Partnership Team.

Funding acknowledgement: This work was supported by Irish Aid through the PRAXIS Project. Responsibility for the content rests with the authors and contributors.

Suggested citation

PRAXIS Ireland–Peru Partnership (2026) Fostering Ecofeminist Co-Learnings Across Cultures: A Critical Pedagogical Toolkit for Global Citizenship Education. Cork: PRAXIS Project, University College Cork.

PRAXIS Project, University College Cork | Ireland–Peru Partnership | September 2026 | Supported by Irish Aid