“Through the Active Participation of the Students, the Construction of the School Itself Is a Pedagogical Moment”
Since when have you worked with the community in Tepetzintan, Puebla?
In 2017, we initiated a collaborative process between students and our team to design and self-produce their school using local materials and organizational schemes of mutual aid. The “Productive Rural School” (Digital Rural Baccalaureate No.186) project emerged self-managed through participatory workshops, in which the students expressed their need for educational spaces appropriate to their community’s cultural and territorial context, in addition to an intercultural education in their own language, Nahuatl.
What motivated your initial contact with them to collaborate on the Digital Rural Baccalaureate No.186?
The vision that the student community and the teachers of the Digital Rural Baccalaureate No.186 have implemented is fundamental because beyond designing a culturally appropriate space for education, their objective is exemplary: to design teaching-learning processes in their own language that integrate the transmission of traditional knowledge and trades rooted in the territory, turning the project into an intercultural effort to strengthen their indigenous language and the vision of the world through it.
Can you tell us about the participatory process carried out for this project?
The project was conceived as a participatory process with different moments and workshops: diagnosis, design, planning, collective production, and maintenance of the space. The students incorporated the name “Productive Rural School,” proposing a program that promotes the recovery of traditional trades and production methods. The participatory process has also involved the creation of community structures (committees) that facilitate the exchange of knowledge and cooperation between generations.
What are the benefits you’ve seen from this participatory approach?
The project represents an intercultural alternative for educational processes in rural communities in our country. The completion of its first construction phase has allowed eight generations to experience an educational program that is culturally appropriate to their realities, needs, and desires. This collective dream has materialized in a pedagogical space whose impact is significant at the local and regional level, as it is currently attended by young people from twelve different communities.
Do you believe community engagement and the self-production strategy enhance the impact of school construction? If so, in what ways?
By actively participating in the social production of the school, construction is a pedagogical moment in itself that promotes the training of young people in various trades and the collective creation of artistic processes. Priority is given to community networks, action learning, the environment, the quality of the spaces, the rhythms of collective work, and the biocultural calendar of the community. It is not only important that the space is culturally appropriate, but the whole process and the social-ecological relationships it produces.
What is the anticipated impact of this project?
The expansion and improvement of the Digital Rural Baccalaureate No.186 will have a direct social impact in the short term, benefiting a total of 66 students enrolled. In the medium and long term, it will promote new productive, pedagogical, artistic and intercultural processes that will strengthen the knowledge and economy of the families of Tepetzintan, as well as twelve nearby towns that are now part of the educational community.
How do you envision the Digital Rural Baccalaureate No.186 three years after the completion of the project?
The school will also serve as a Community Training Center so that both the inhabitants of Tepetzintan and other nearby populations can access the spaces built and the pedagogical content generated in the school. The project has the potential to be an adaptive model to implement educational spaces in a self-managed and collaborative way based on community-popular learning processes that emerge from the territory.
Context:
The interview was held with the collaborative group of Comunal.
Comunal is a work group of five women who aim to collaborate in the social production of habitat processes using participation in an ethical-political position that recognizes inhabitants as subjects of action.
In Mexico, 27% of young people aged 15-17 don’t attend high school, and in the Northeastern Sierra of Puebla, where the project we are looking at today is located, it’s even 30%! Educational policies lack investment in suitable learning spaces, often resulting in architectural designs that don’t match the country’s diverse socio-cultural and environmental needs.
Before the start of the project in the indigenous Tepetzintan community, the Digital Rural Baccalaureate No.186 had a high dropout rate. Although there were already a couple of classrooms, they were not enough to meet the educational demands of the students or to prevent young people from dropping out.
