Mexico: Innovative university project in Oaxaca expands range of courses

Oaxaca de Juárez. For almost a year there has been an Autonomous Municipal University in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca (Universidad Autónoma Comunal de Oaxaca, Uaco). On December 8th, she received accreditation for another from the renowned Autonomous University of Benito Juárez (UABJO) Masters course receive.

The “Educación comunal” course was developed over six years and, according to the director of UABJO, Eduardo Bautista Martínez, it is the result of work that “arises from the needs and interests of the communities in the state and the whole country”. The subject areas of the course “appreciate the common traditional knowledge that has been discriminated against over generations”. As an educational institution, one is now fulfilling the obligation to recognize the common knowledge of the communities and their ancestors as valuable.

Since January 2020, interested students have Locations The opportunity to study at a university spread across the entire state, which creates critical awareness through the recognition of different cultural forms and insights from everyday interaction. The focus is on learning for and from the collective. The teachers describe themselves as a “university community”. Everyone who takes part in a course can express their opinion freely and has the right to participate in order to enrich and shape the learning process.

The Uuaco Organization Act was passed by the State Congress in Oaxaca on January 15, 2020, and published in the Government Gazette on April 20 of this year.

The director is the social anthropologist Jaime Martínez Luna. He was a lecturer at the UABJO Institute for Education for several years and is now pleased about the support of the renowned university. The Uaco breaks with the classic academic forms of university education: “There will be no teachers and students, no classrooms, but activities, the exchange of experiences and the development of a sense of community […]. Here we want to connect people who think, believe and create in community and cooperation “, explained is.

The aim is to create a new form of learning that is shaped by new knowledge every day and that embraces being human and living in a community. “We have the great opportunity to strengthen our collective knowledge in order to save our culture and our language, so that the knowledge of our ancestors can return to the power it always had.” Each Uaco location acts independently and can determine when and how to start work. What all those involved have in common is the orientation towards the four basic pillars of common ground, territory, organization and work with the community.

Most recently, the Autonomous Center of the Community University of Ndaniguia opened on November 28 in the municipality of San Pedro Comitancillo on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The development process of the site began seven years ago when the community realized that there were serious problems that made life in the region difficult. At the time, through reflection rounds, those involved came to the realization that various political parties were ensuring that they lost their language, their traditions and also their food sovereignty.

Now, at the San Pedro Comitancillo site, you can choose between two courses of study, “Community Health Care” and “Sustainable Food Systems”. Mariana Alejandra Solórzano, academic at the Uaco headquarters in Comitancillo, emphasized that great progress has already been made at her location through a cooperation with UABJO.

The Uaco is the result of various processes that were initiated by social scientists in Oaxaca more than twenty years ago. Individual institutions that dealt with the collective ideas then later resulted in specific initiatives that were presented to the congress. There are more in the future Cooperations planned with UABJO, which will focus on humanistic topics as well as strengthening culture and indigenous languages.

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