Tejiendo Saberes Digitales: Collaborative Inquiry as Teacher Learning Across Oaxacalifornia

Emanuel Suarez Jimenez

Digital technologies have become ubiquitous in classrooms worldwide, accompanied by global calls to prepare teachers to integrate them meaningfully into instruction. Dominant approaches continue to privilege access and implementation frameworks, leaving underexamined how educators understand, repurpose, and refuse digital tools in relation to their pedagogical commitments. Indigenous teachers working to maintain Indigenous languages, community knowledges, and cultural practices rarely have sustained opportunities to think collectively about digital pedagogy, especially across diasporic and technological contexts. Partnering with educators, community organizations, and researchers across California and Oaxaca engaged in Indigenous language education and teacher preparation, this study develops Tejiendo Saberes Digitales as an inquiry space organized around shared artifacts of practice (e.g., digital resources, classroom dilemmas, and emerging design ideas) to examine how teacher learning emerges through collective engagement with digital pedagogy. Virtual gatherings, interviews, and classroom observations in Oaxaca and California will trace what educators come to notice, how they contribute, and how they make pedagogical decisions with others over time. Drawing on Learning by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI), this project positions teachers as designers, co-theorizers, and producers of pedagogical knowledge who negotiate what it means to teach and learn with digital technologies. In turn, this study offers an account of digital pedagogy as collective, community-grounded work, expanding how the learning sciences, teacher education, and educational technology research understand teacher learning across contexts. Findings will inform a protocol for cross-context collaboration and community-facing resources co-designed with participating educators.

About Emanuel Suarez Jimenez

Emanuel Suarez Jimenez received his Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Santa Cruz. His experiences as the son of Mexican immigrants, a former K–12 substitute teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a learning scientist working across Mexico and the United States shape his commitments to understanding teaching and learning with digital technologies in culturally and linguistically diverse communities. Suarez Jimenez's scholarship approaches teachers' everyday work as a site for studying how educators learn, make pedagogical decisions, and design meaningful learning experiences with digital technologies. Through ethnographic and collaborative research with Indigenous teachers in Mexico and the United States, he studies how teachers make sense of digital technologies in relation to the social, cultural, and political contexts that shape their teaching. Suarez Jimenez centers the pedagogical knowledge educators develop through practice, showing how teachers take up, repurpose, and refuse digital technologies as they organize meaningful learning with and for their communities. Collaborating with educators and community partners, he also co-designs digital resources and interactive learning materials for sustaining Indigenous languages, knowledges, and practices. Suarez Jimenez's research has been supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship (2025), the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship (2024), UC Alianza MX (2024, 2025), and the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas at UC Santa Cruz. His current work focuses on teacher learning, digital pedagogy, and cross-border educational collaborations between communities in Mexico and the United States.