Living Heritage and Cultural Sustainability Through Intercultural Education: A Conceptual Framework Based on the Diablada Pillareña in Ecuador

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) contributes to cultural sustainability through situated practices, intergenerational relationships, and community-governed transmission. This conceptual study develops Living Heritage Intercultural Pedagogy (LHIP) using the Diablada Pillareña of Santiago de Píllaro, Ecuador, as a contextual case. An interpretive synthesis of festival scholarship, safeguarding frameworks, and educational research identifies six interdependent dimensions: relational memory, intergenerational participation, embodied apprenticeship, multimodal cultural literacy, critical intercultural reflection, and community centered safeguarding. The analysis integrates these dimensions into a recursive five-stage cycle—Listen, Participate, Interpret, Dialogue, and Return—and specifies four analytical operations linking source domains, heritage processes, educational affordances, and design propositions. A comparative matrix differentiates LHIP from adjacent pedagogical approaches, while a festival-specific illustrative scenario translates each stage into potential learning activities, ethical safeguards, and assessable indicators. The framework establishes a coherent conceptual basis for examining plural origin narratives, mask-making, collective processions, negotiated representation, and reciprocal community engagement within interdisciplinary education. Its contribution lies in operationalizing community authority, historical plurality, and ethical return as explicit conditions of heritage-based curriculum design. Future participatory research is needed to assess feasibility, learning outcomes, and community-defined cultural value.