**4. How I Came to This Research**

Growing up on a homestead milking goats and pulling carrots, on Turtle Island (Canada), was formative in my understanding of sustainability. It cultivated an openness to the viability of livelihoods that many might consider alternative. I am also a white settler1, who has only recently learned the colonial history of our settler state and the harms done to people who are Indigenous to this area. As a white settler, I cannot help but be unsettled both by learning the historical and contemporary harms done to Indigenous people, as well as the prospect of decolonization. As Unangax scholar Tuck and collaborator Yang [ ˆ 31] write, settler academics must not forget that decolonization is not a metaphor. This work forced me to recognize my complicity in systems of injustice and challenged me to stay with that feeling, to not make moves toward innocence [31]. This is very humbling work that continues to expose the limits of my understanding and the extent of my privilege. I live in a time when many white settlers are learning about this history and beginning to understand and struggle, as I do, with how to act now that these harms cannot be ignored. This paper is about my mistakes, challenges, and learnings in my attempts to change my approach.

As a scholar of education, my focus is on peer-to-peer learning models as ways to promote sustainable livelihoods. Through my study of pedagogy in graduate school, I came to understand that the ways in which we learn affect what we learn as much as the content of what we are learning. The ways, the arrangements, and the pedagogies through which we learn and share knowledge are infused with both cultural understandings and power relations. Prompted by rereading Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed during my education doctorate, I began to search for contemporary examples of Freire's [32] conception of consciousness-raising education where educators are partners or allies in the struggle against structures of oppression. My search led me to several studies of CaC pedagogy in Latin America. CaC is said to be a Feirian popular pedagogy because of its horizontal and constructivist nature. For example, through organized groups, Campesinos/as show each other agroecology practices they have used on their own land and encourage others to try. They then meet to reflect on their experiences. My search for more about CaC led me to Eric Holt-Giménez's book, Campesino-a-Campesino, which chronicles how international peasant farmer exchanges spread sustainable agricultural practices from Guatemala to México, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Cuba during the 1980s and 90s [15]. More recent scholarship highlighted the importance of CaC as an educational methodology in the

growth of agroecology and food sovereignty movements [13,14,33]. La Via Campesina, for example, has taken up CaC as an important tool for teaching and learning agroecology practices among peasants and small-holder farmers [34].

CaC is often compared to agricultural extension, a model of agriculture education practiced in many parts of the world where agronomists or extension officers from universities or companies teach farmers techniques that have been developed to improve production. In his writing on extension, Freire critiqued traditional extension methodologies on epistemological grounds [35]. Extension, as he defined it, involved bringing an already elaborated concept to someone who presumably does not know it. The extension also has the effect of negating the knowledge already possessed by peasants themselves. The traditional extension then is seen as an act of replacing local knowledge with knowledge of so-called 'experts', which reinforces hierarchies of knowledge and expertise. Emphasizing the importance of participation in the construction of knowledge, Freire argued that extension erased the capacity of people to gain the intended knowledge because knowing requires a subject's action in transforming their own reality. In Freire's analysis, without participation in the construction of the elaborated concept, the target of extension becomes an object. As an object, the Campesino/a is expected to passively receive this information and put it into practice. However, as Freire argues, only a subject can act, and through this acting, know [35].

In contrast, CaC is described as a participatory tool that ensures Campesinos/as are included in agricultural development as the drivers of knowledge construction and sharing activities [36]. Those who are the leaders in CaC are called agroecology promoters, or in this case study, promoter guides. Their role is to share their knowledge of agroecology practices with interested neighbors and community members and help guide their implementation if needed. For ANAP (Cuba's small farmers' union) CaC is defined as:

a form of promotion and improvement of production systems, which places farmers in a position to achieve higher levels of sustainability, based on the principle that participation and empowerment of the actors themselves are intrinsic components of sustainable development, and therefore focuses on the initiatives and protagonism of peasants [13] (p. 73).

Although peasant protagonism has no direct translation from Spanish, I use it here to mean the collective power of peasants to create their own sustainable livelihoods. By centering knowledge, action, and collective power of peasants, CaC poses a challenge to the social conception of Campesino/a as "less than". This social conception of Campesinos/as as illiterate, poor, and incapable, has been both historically constructed and socially perpetuated to maintain economic, racial and social inequalities in México. My research was guided by the question: Could CaC be an anti-racist pedagogy that empowers peasants to self-determine their sustainability? Excited by this question, I searched for examples of this pedagogy in practice in the region where it originated, developed, and spread [15].
