Problematizando la comunidad: voces de estudiantes de secundaria

Abstract

This participatory action research study explores community literacies in a group of thirty students in a public school in Bogota, Colombia. Although the school is located in a low socioeconomic sector of the capital and students’ families have suffered forced displacement due to military conflict, this group of sensitive, committed young learners come from families that have constructed Los Alpes as a stable neighborhood. Unfortunately, the traditional curriculum of schools in Colombia does not connect the realities of students and their knowledge (Moll et al., 1992; Sharkey, 2012; Sharkey et al., 2016) to their learning experiences. Thus, this research study aims at determining how secondary school students, investigate community problems and express their voice through language. Through teaching that is context-embedded, this study promotes the development of students’ literacy competences in Spanish and English using a Freirean approach to local pedagogies (1970). Some of the pedagogical activities proposed include students exploring their community as real experience (Dewey, 1938), during which they learn through and interact with different sources like online news, surveys, and interviewing local government officials. Students wrote texts that reflected their positions and invited their community to act to solve a problem. Three cycles were developed in this participatory action research: exploratory, investigation and production stages. The data collection included videoclips and texts produced by students, field notes and a focus group interview. Through grounded theory data were analyzed and the category named "Media and writing literacy to announce our needs" responded the research question. The principal aspects found in the data were students’ production argumentative and narratives texts and media Literacy including awareness of their community issues and the importance of their experience in the learning process. Results show that students´ awareness about their community can begin through inquiry-based instruction to start identifying aspects that need to be transformed in their community.