Abstract

This paper accounts for three-year research involving Mapuche and Aymara families in their own territories, aimed to describe and analyze their concepts of learning and education. Epistemologically this study is framed in radical constructivism, focused in social and educational justice. The methodology is qualitative, participatory, and ethnographic, and is developed through a process of co-construction. The results show that concepts, logics and methods on learning and family and community education are mostly shared by Mapuche and Aymara families, and that understanding and valuing their ways of doing things, especially in formal education, would be an essential condition for indigenous people to exercise their legitimate right to participate in society on equal terms. A conclusion is drawn that it is possible to co-construct knowledge between people from different cultures if there is a common goal and a shared understanding that the meanings of words and actions may be different depending on people´s own history of coexisting. From this understanding arises the need for reformulating experiences and reaching consensus on the ways of describing things, even in the context of epistemic injustice that characterizes the relationships between cultures in our country.