Walking-Learning with Communal Knowledge Logics; New Paths and Horizons for the Scientific-Academic Discussion.

The reflections we wish to contribute with this paper arise from a research project that aims to strengthen the knowledge and communal life of a community in southern Oaxaca, Mexico. In this paper we wish to contribute some of the initial ideas and concerns that the implementation of this project in its first stage has generated. In the project we recognize that communal life is both a path and a horizon for doing-being-existing in the construction of knowledge different from that which generally takes place in the scientific-academic space in universities. We recognize that in order to be able to do what we have just pointed out in a broad dimension (not only conceptual-theoretical-abstract), we have to free ourselves from positivist-developmentalist-"modern" assumptions that prevent us from understanding the value of these philosophies, worldviews, or simply ways of life. Contrary to this, we have to find the way for the knowledge and action contributed in the project to be in favor of these same worldviews and experiences. In this sense, we observe a paradigmatic shift in the production of knowledge, which is useful for the life of communities, but not excluding or denying their forms of knowledge, but on the contrary, starting from them.

Why do we think it is good to free ourselves from these positivist assumptions (or even beyond positivism in the social sciences, also hermeneutic and interpretive-qualitative) so common in scientific-academic knowledge?

We think that the knowledge-science that we want to promote (and also progressively understand in this project) should not strengthen the fact that the young people of the communities participating in this project were disconnected from their own communal philosophy or from communal organizational forms. On the contrary, we want to walk together, to expand the possibilities of this walk.