The teacher who took her classroom into the forest

Rosa Elena Hernandez, 65, has taught for 37 years. On a humid morning at the Blasiaku Resguardo in Colombia's Putumayo, she led her pupils past the desks and out among the lemongrass, where an eight-year-old named Chely Pakari learned what the leaves are for.

The reserve is small: 67 hectares on the Amazon piedmont near Villagarzón, where the Andes fall away into the basin, home to 34 families. Its name means monkey river in Inga Kichwa. Ten years ago the community gave one hectare of that land to the school, and out of it grew Kindi Tarpuy, a student-run enterprise making soaps, shampoos, essential oils and crafts. Chely, along with Catalina Cordoba, 9, Dana Jacanamejoy, 10, five-year-old Lyvis and Tomas, 9, are its workforce and its apprentices at once.

The class belongs to Atun Ninambi — great path — a bilingual school network spread across ten locations, teaching 1,267 students in Inga Kichwa and Spanish. Its 30 facilitators are not only teachers. They carry spiritual and cultural roles as well, and the people who shape the curriculum are the same people who hold the community together: Vicente Jacanamejoy, a medicine practitioner; Juan Carlos Jacanamejoy, the taita who heads the indigenous education system; Yolanda Jacanamejoy, governor of the resguardo; Amanda Jacanamejoy, the community's mayor and a mother; Jesus Arbey Jojoja Quincho, a spiritual facilitator.

That sentence, from a community member, describes something Colombian law has permitted for a decade. A 2014 decree allows resguardos to administer their own education budgets directly rather than through the municipality — collective land that cannot be sold or seized, now paired with the right to decide what happens in its classrooms. The Inga are the northernmost Quechua speakers in South America; their language is one of 65 the Colombian state recognises.

Putumayo is better known for other numbers. Oil, cattle and coca have shaped its economy since the 1980s, and the department has repeatedly ranked first or second nationally in coca cultivation. Aerial glyphosate spraying passed over this landscape for years.

What Rosa Elena teaches is arithmetic and entrepreneurship alongside the properties of plants — a curriculum in which knowing how to distil lemongrass and knowing how to price the bottle are the same lesson. The children learn it in the language their grandparents speak, on ground their community owns outright and cannot lose.

The possibility of choosing how we want to teach.