Tejiendo Saberes: Indigenous Survivance Pedagogies as Digital World Practices

Emanuel Suarez Jimenez

Digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, personalized learning platforms, and surveillance software have become ubiquitous in classrooms worldwide. These technologies often embed technocentric ideologies that reinforce deficit-based and racialized assumptions about marginalized communities, advancing standardized, decontextualized approaches to teaching and learning. This research challenges these frameworks by exploring how educators in Oaxaca, Mexico, design and embody digital pedagogical frameworks that build on the cultural, linguistic, and epistemological practices of their communities. I approach digital pedagogies not as neutral tools or skills, but as socially organized practices embedded within broader sociotechnical systems. This study builds on sociocultural theories of learning as socially situated, symbol-based practices and on scholarship that frames digital pedagogies as ideological and epistemological meaning-making and decision-making practices. This lens allows me to understand how digital tools mediate the social, cultural, and material conditions in which teaching and learning occur. This one-year qualitative study explores how 11 teachers working in multilingual, culturally diverse communities design, learn, and make sense of digital pedagogies within local contexts. Specifically, it examines how educators: 1) design digital pedagogical frameworks that draw on saberes comunitarios and leverage the cultural and linguistic resources of their communities; 2) challenge or reinforce technocratic frameworks through everyday digital practices; and 3) offer alternative approaches to teaching and learning with digital technologies. The implications of this research can transform teacher education by moving away from decontextualized approaches to learning with digital technologies and toward more culturally just pedagogies that build on the knowledge and practices of marginalized communities.

About Emanuel Suarez Jimenez

Emanuel Suarez Jimenez is a PhD candidate in Education at UC Santa Cruz, where he also earned a Master of Arts in Education. Prior to graduate school, Emanuel worked as a K-12 substitute teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area, teaching in the same schools where he grew up. As a researcher with personal and professional connections to Mexico, Emanuel has built long-standing collaborations with educators, teacher educators, and communities across Mexico, particularly in Oaxaca. His scholarship examines the social, cultural, and political dimensions of digital technologies in everyday teaching and learning, particularly their implications for marginalized communities. Emanuel's research explores how teachers working in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts, in both Oaxaca and California, make pedagogical decisions within and against systems not designed for them. By leveraging community knowledge and cultural resources, these educators create meaningful learning experiences that challenge dominant narratives of technology in education, approaching digital pedagogies as everyday practices shaped by sociocultural contexts, community knowledge, and broader sociotechnical systems. Emanuel's cross-border work seeks to strengthen educational pathways between the U.S. and Mexico, where many classrooms are shaped by the histories, languages, and experiences of culturally and linguistically diverse students and families. His research has been supported by the UC Alianza MX initiative and the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. He is also a recipient of the Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship and has served as a Graduate Pedagogy and Professional Development Fellow at the Teaching and Learning Center at UC Santa Cruz.