(she/they/siya)

Visionary, Co-Builder, Oracle-In-Service

Maio Buenafe is the founder of the Unlearning Community School and is a bilingual immigrant, genderqueer, multi-ethnic Indigenous Filipino (Ifugao, Itneg, Ilokano, Tagalog and Fujian Chinese) who has lived most of her life between the ‘Philippines’ and ‘California’. As a Cultural Strategist, Maio has worked with grassroots community organizations, business owners, and non-profit organizations providing direct services to frontline communities impacted by systemic injustices.

They have a myriad of roles in their community work: administrative coordination, training/curriculum design and facilitation, conducting qualitative fieldwork research with Indigenous communities, reviewing grant applications or proposals, program design and development, and providing technical assistance through facilitating training or workshops within organizations and multi-site initiatives.

A former college professor for 10 years, they have taught Applied Cultural Anthropology, Social Sciences, Political Science, Critical Diversity Studies, and Ethnic Studies at various universities and colleges in the US and in the Philippines. As a qualitative researcher and scholar for over 15 years, Maio specializes in decolonial cultural and political education through Indigenous knowledge systems and practices, intergenerational knowledge transfer, & food and water sovereignty.

Maio combines her extensive experience as an educator-scholar-researcher with her work as a community organizer, facilitator, and mentor for transitional age youth and diverse community leaders. 

(any/she/siya)

Media Alchemist + Digital Specialist

bismillah!

o͡͡͡╮༼ ʘ̆ ۝ ʘ̆ ༽╭o͡͡͡

Originally born on the lands of the Ibaloi (oh 2 be back) from the colonized lands of the “Philippines,” Mar forcibly migrated to Occupied Turtle Island. Reckoning with her status as a settler colonizer on Turtle Island, Mar oscillates between the lands of the Yokuts, Ohlone, Huichin, Muwekma, Bay Miwok. Abolition at the forefront, Mar stays unwavered in her alignment with anti-colonial&decolonial resistance, indigenous communities & their(our) sovereignty, the third world + periphery (iykyk) + the filipino farmers back home<3. These values brought her to alignment (+finding home) in the Unlearning Community School. 

Aside from resisting the patriarchal hegemon we live in, Mar is also a student who hates wack-ahh pedagogies! The disdain is part of her fitnah with rote memorization. She hopes that everyone who takes part in the Unlearning Community School can find belonging in this unlearning process to learn how to dream of better futures— and how put it in praxis. 

Mar has dibble dabbled as an organizer and activist over the years. With workshops, being a keynote panelist, speaking engagements, and program directing, Mar understood how wack the nonprofit industrial complex is! That’s why the pivot of her offerings and services are reserved for her communities.

Seeing how the systems work, and failed (and failed some more) influenced the forming of her values within liberation + revolution.

♡Things I like/do/about: my cats, Tawakkul, collective liberation, learning the way I WANNA LEARN, nature + the natural, third world consciousness, hiking, chess, hating on law enforcment, love + work with land, exercise, great pedagogy (like superb), day dreaming, parallel theology, poetry, graphic design, creativity!, my communit(ies), eating, talking about ways to decolonize + unlearn white supremacist culture♡

*✧˚⁎⁺ ༚☆if u r tapped in, then we in alignment☆*.｡✿ ༚:*

(she/her)

Advisor & Co-Host of Ask an Auntie Oracle

Mary Roaf is a life-long educator and learner. She started teaching in K-12 with 7th graders in 1993. Since then, Mary has taught the entire span of K-12 and university from toddlers, elementary and high school, to her current position as a professor of Ethnic Studies and Black Studies at California State University-Stanislaus. Mary enjoys dancing, traveling, building community, and savoring the ebbs and flows of life’s journey. She has expanded her horizons through participating in the 2019 Black Decolonial Transnational Feminist summer program in Brazil, and her 2023 Fulbright to South Africa. Mary continues to cultivate her connection with Mayo from Stan State to the Unlearning Community School as a fellow Oracle in Service and transformative force within and outside of institutions.

(they/them)

Vision Collaborator (Ask An Auntie Oracle)

hii ⪩༏⪨⋆.ೃ࿔*:

I am a lover of cats, tattoos, trees of all kinds, kpop, sunsets, ramen, dragonflies, and the color blue 🌀

My name is Anika, close friends call me Ani, Mandarin speakers call me 美玲, and I am a queer nonbinary Chinese American adoptee. While I was raised in “Portland,” my ancestors remain in 邵阳,湖南 (Shaoyang, Hunan). It was through adoption that I was forcibly removed from my motherland and made a settler on Turtle Island.

I am on my own journey of (un)learning how to better be in community with those around me–animals and nature alike. It is through mentors and knowledge-holders, such as Maio, that I am a student of decolonial and abolitionist praxis. My praxis recognizes the absolute necessity to abolish carceral systems and logics of punishment if we are to be liberated. What we build in its place will be radical, regenerative, and abundant. Furthermore, we have entered a new cycle of the lunisolar calendar, welcoming the year of the Wood Snake. The Wood Snake invites us to engage in radical transformation by shedding old skin and releasing what no longer serves us.

My role as the video editor for the Ask An Auntie Oracle series has required that I step into my stretch zone as a creative and community organizer. However, I am guided by the teachings of the Wood Snake and recognize my role in the Unlearning Community School as one way to engage in radical transformative change. 

I hope you all will accept the invitation to transform from the Unlearning Community School and Wood Snake by joining us in this journey of meaning-making through art and sharing our collective knowledge.

蛇年快乐~

(she/her)

Research Collaborator

Aki brings a unique constellation of cultural knowledge and research experiences to the Unlearning Community School as the Director of Research. After growing up in Japan as a multi-heritage child, her adult life in the United States became an opportunity to make sense of her cultural identity and why and how people become who they are in certain cultural contexts. Raising her multicultural children led her to become a teacher in a US school that taught them different cultural values from what she had grown up with. She continuously wonders how education shapes people to fit in their own societal norms, bringing a cultural lens to analyses of learning that critically informs what is invisible with a mono-cultural view.

Aki is globally known as a lesson study and elementary mathematics education expert and has engaged in numerous research projects since 2001, examining how educators and learners learn and how their learning interacts with each other. Educational equity is always central to the work, informing educators how they can take advantage of learner diversity to create rigorous academic experiences.Previously, she held positions as assistant professor of elementary mathematics education at Stanford University and UC-Berkeley. Her work has been published in numerous journals and books, widely referenced by other researchers, and considered as seminal pieces in the field. Aki has led multiple cross-cultural research projects so far, facilitating communications among educators from different countries. She has worked with lesson study research project groups and teacher groups globally, provided guidance for their work, and helping them find their own cultural values and significances while implementing the innovation from another culture.