Jacaranda Education is a not-for-profit organization founded in 2005 by graduates of the International Education and Transcultural Studies Department at Teachers College, Columbia University. Its mission is to enhance education in Mexico`s public and private school sectors by providing a range of high-quality, cost-effective services focusing on teacher-training, curriculum design, teacher placement, and capacity building. In short, making new resoruces available to educators and students in Southern Mexico

Jacaranda Education supports a student-centered, constructivist, communicative language teaching approach which views local environment and socio-cultural context as an active and essential tool in the educational process and a necessary ingredient for active participation in today's globalized world. Jacaranda Education advocates that the best approach to preparing students for global change is through exposure to quality, passionate instruction and an educational approach which highlights the trans-configurative nature of culture and the relationship between the local and the global environment through a multi-disciplinary educational approach.

To these ends, Jacaranda Education is committed to supporting initiatives which offer sustainable, diversified training for teachers, and which encourage the production and implementation of a range of independent materials which expose one to a wider range of ideas, knowledge, and concepts.

Through these foundational approaches Jacaranda Education seeks to respond to trends which see a growing role in education for the private company branding expensive pre-packaged programming. With profit-making its primary incentive, the production of quality instruction and open sustainable teacher training is overlooked as it seeks to reproduce its brand or model in as many locations as possible at the lowest cost possible.

Jacaranda Education is concerned that such an economically driven standardized model excludes administrators, teachers, and students from participating in their own education as it fails to include socio-cultural context as a part of the educational process or environment. We seek to address this oversight by supporting teacher-training and curriculum development endeavors which start with an evaluation of the needs and interests of the student and teacher and which put quality before profit in forming sustainable solutions to current needs and problems.

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