Treffer: The Herbarium of Coquí: A Platform for Knowledge Sharing, Cultural Documentation, and Community Education = El Herbario de Coquí: Una plataforma para el compartir de saberes, las documentación cultural y la educación comunitaria

The nonprofit organization Casa Múcura has been working with the community of the village of Coquí, Chocó, in Colombia's Pacific coast, for seven years in multiple participatory projects aimed at valorizing, promoting, and preserving traditional knowledge and ancestral ways of living in one of the world's most biodiverse regions. In Casa Múcura's School of Ancestral Knowledge, 35 elders (sabedores) and 15 children from Afro-Colombian and Indigenous Emberá backgrounds worked together with a team of four Casa Múcura members using Participatory Action Research methodology (PAR) to create what the community called the Herbarium of Coquí. The participatory project lasted one and a half years, during which organizers and community members used different tools to document their traditional plant knowledge as part of the educational program of the School: storytelling, focus groups, community dialogues, and intergenerational workshops for the creation of a cyanotype herbarium. This project could work as an example for communities to create participatory methodologies that allow children and elders to share their interests, communicate and experiment with different tools to co-create new ways of learning.

ERIC