Storytelling: Reframing Learning Through Relationships

Ymasumac Maranon-Davis (Quechua, Bolivia, and early New England pilgrims) is a writer, educational consultant, university lecturer, and keeper of intuitive healing spaces. She shares ancestry with the Quechua people of Bolivia and the early pilgrims of New England. As a child, she lived in a village in the Yucatan Peninsula among the Mayan people. Culture, language, and politics are threaded throughout her work as a writer with strong cords of spiritual energy coursing through the interlacing of her words.

Ymasumac is a doctoral candidate in Education for Social Justice at the University of San Diego. Her current areas of research are exploring how oral storytelling is used as a counternarrative that transcends oppressive narratives, highlighting voices and stories that stress and broaden the dominant culture, and how we create a mindset characterized by humility both as an individual and collectively with others. She has worked in public education using her passion for language, culture, and learning as a teacher and as an administrator at the county office of education coordinating the innovative world of educational technology. She has spoken at various conferences and written on topics ranging from shifting perceptions in education, equity in the twenty-first century classroom, and empowering voices often unheard in our communities.

She is married to a wonderful man who carves wood and builds and maintains sets for a living. Together, they have four children moving into early adulthood grounded in art, learning, and love. She is also excited to be a grandmother to two exceptional grandaughters.