Salir adelante: Collaboratively developing culturally grounded curriculum with marginalized communities

Abstract

In this article we discuss a collaborative research project meant to ground community members’ voices in curriculum design. We argue that performing collaborative research with students and parents can better inform curriculum design decisions, particularly for communities whose identities, knowledge(s), and ways of being have been historically marginalized. Building from the culturally responsive curriculum literature, we have developed a culturally grounded curriculum development approach. We illustrate the approach through discussing a case of its development and implementation with an educational nongovernmental organization (NGO) that provides access to secondary school for Quechua (Indigenous) young women in Peru. This article reflexively reports the process of the NGO’s collaborative inquiry project to cocreate meaningful educational opportunities with the students and parents. We then discuss dilemmas of interpretation that arose when incorporating community voices into curricular decisions, and how the collaborative curriculum approach can apply to formal and nonformal learning spaces in other contexts.