Unearthing Sacred Knowledge: Enlazándonos con la comunidad

• In Event: La Clase Mágica: Generating Transworld Pedagogy

Abstract

Objective: To provide an overview of establishing a reciprocal community, school, and university partnership that establishes a tekio-like collaborative that incorporates the sacred sciences and the knowledge of the community.
Theoretical Framework:
La Clase Mágica’s success has been attributed to the efforts of a school-community-university partnership focusing on developing an optimal learning environment to meet the diverse needs of a community through culturally relevant technology-based pedagogy. Fundamentally, LCM embraces the sacred sciences by promoting the potential of technology to engage young students in the learning and dialogic process, and fostering the magic of a community-oriented curriculum to connect children, parents, and educators outside the structured formal educational setting.
The LCM at UTSA initiative effectively links communication for collaboration to the cultural elements derived from the sacred sciences and tekio-cultural practices that have evolved overtime. We argue that responsibility for effective learning rests not only on the learners’ ability to control what and how to learn, but also on the support afforded by families and communities. Recognition, validation, integration of sacred sciences, funds of knowledge, and a trusting relationship among LCM stakeholders are the foundation and impetus for this critical collaborative work. Thus, members within the community have opportunities to engage in an effective problem solving process, much like the community gatherings of our antepasados.
Method:
We employed participatory action research (PAR), as an epistemological stance situated in Freirian principles, which calls for researchers and participants to engage in collaborative and self-reflective inquiry in forming partnership that leads to transformative change (Baum, MacDougal, & Smith, 2006; Chevalier, & Buckles, 2013; Torre & Ayala, 2009). The reflective process of PAR is “directly linked to action, influenced by understanding of history, culture, and local context and embedded in social relationships” (Baum et al., 2006, p. 854). Data sources included meeting notes, multiple iterations of reflecting, planning, acting, and observing; triangulation and member checking were used to develop a comprehensive summary of the development of a school-community-university partnership in the establishment of LCM as a tekio-like collaboration.
Results and Significance
LCM as an intergenerational approach has provided a truly working tekio-like collaboration that promises to address educational equity in the public school system and facilitate entrance to the digital world. In a tekio-like collaborative comprised of multiple stakeholders working together to create sustainable efforts all in the name of the common good, confianza and compadrazgo are the new conceptual understandings. The principle that worked for us included listening first to the needs and desires of the community; then leveraging the work of a long-term community organization and a committed local university to establish confianza in validating the notion of compadrazgo. These practices draw on the teachings and knowledge of our antepasados, which help us rediscover their richness and sacredness. Thus, by following these practices, we are providing a trajectory for children, parents, aspirantes, and all involved to become bicultural, bilingual, and technologically efficacious members of a community.

Author

• Lorena Claeys, The University of Texas - San Antonio