Re-Thinking children's empowerment: An exploration of the Zapatista educational model to promote resilience and empowerment through design

Abstract

This thesis is motivated by the hope of creating a better future for the new generations. Therefore, it aims to understand the children's perspectives and encourage their empowerment. To accomplish this, it explores three approaches to understanding child development and a value case for providing a human perspective that could positively impact child development. The first step is to understand what characteristics are required to address children's development and provide mechanisms to bring their perspective into design propositions that meet their needs. Therefore, this project combines psychological (Cognitive development), spatial (Cognitive experience), and pedagogical (Popular education) approaches to create a framework that understands their age necessities. The second step is to incorporate a case study that has placed people and the environment at the center of its values. This move has the intention to discover concepts that could provide human values to design proposals. That is why this project has decided to implement the Zapatista edational model (from the southeast state of Chiapas, Mexico). It represents an essential component for understanding how community values can help to construct a caring, empowering, holistic, and sustainable environment where children can thrive and create stronger bonds within their communities. The result is a matrix that combines the Zapatistas values and the three approaches to create a methodology to bring children's perspective into the collaborative design process. The work aims to turn the designers' position around children and actively involve them in how we shape and transform our society.