Sharing and Building Knowledge with the Community to Overcome the Tensions between the Marginal Local and the Dominant Global

The presented project integrates the research processes and the collective reflection on current educational and social challenges as a tool to situate the local knowledge on the cause and result of the economic crisis in Europe, bringing questions like “How to integrate the needs of increasingly multicultural contexts with the positioning of globalization?” and challenges of interest to the Ethnomathematics Program – developed to rethink the role of education on the social violence.

One of the objectives is to investigate new methodologies, part of a participatory and critical approach, in which the members of the local communities on study can be actors of the processes of the ethnographic study, to deal with intra and inter-cultural/political/economic tensions.

The research on communitarian education is a concrete possibility in this regard – after all it already exists within the community as a process that allows the own community to establish common knowledge bases for their survival. Communitarian education is the praxis to live in the community, to be with and within the community, to know the environment from the perspective of the community – their own ecology; is the way of acting that the researcher assumes to observe and identify the local knowledge of the community.

Communitarian education as a research methodology – emphasizing the participation of the community in the processes of (1) identification of the problematic, (2) construction of the objectives, (3) data collection and analysis, with the Ethnomathematics posture allows interest in a transdisciplinary knowledge from an inter and transcultural approach.

The problematization of social challenges, thought educational ones, is set "with" the community, blurring the research-researched roles and allowing critically analyze also the approach of the academic community on education and its limitations to collaborate with the current problems of the dichotomy between local and global needs.