From Dialogue of Knowledges to Curricular Co-Creation: The Territorial Intercultural Learning Cycle for Community University Learning in Ecuador

Higher education initiatives engaging Indigenous and ancestral knowledge often document community knowledge without fully integrating it into curricula, assessment, or educational authority. This study systematizes implementation experiences from Connecting Ancestral Knowledge from Academia to Peoples and Nationalities, a multi territorial Ecuadorian initiative conducted in Saraguro (Loja), Azogues (Cañar), and Paltas (Loja), to develop the Territorial Intercultural Learning Cycle (TILC). Rather than testing causal effectiveness, the TILC organizes community university learning into six interconnected phases: relational entry and co-definition; mapping living knowledge; situated intergenerational learning; collaborative documentation and multimodal production; curricular translation and co-design; and reciprocal return, validation, and stewardship. These phases foster four cross-cutting capabilities: intercultural epistemic literacy, place-based inquiry, collaborative digital documentation, and ethical stewardship. Across the participating territories, implementation generated intercultural educational materials, collaborative digital resources, and processes for documenting and translating community-validated knowledge. Because no standardized pre–post assessment was applied across territories, these outcomes are interpreted as formative implementation evidence rather than causal learning gains. The study therefore proposes a community-governed assessment framework combining student portfolios, dialogic rubrics, community validation, multimodal artifacts, and curricular products. The principal contribution is a transferable but locally adaptable pedagogical process that positions communities as knowledge authorities and universities as learning partners.