Local knowledge in the development of teaching educational practices

Abstract

Teacher performance has been one of the most questioned themes in approaches to the quality of teaching in different educational contexts. In some African countries, characterized by enormous cultural diversity and centrally defined curricula, contextualized knowledge, called local knowledge, is expected to be addressed in the classroom, a fact that creates new challenges for teachers’ educational practices. Therefore, it is important for teachers to know the educational contexts in which they work, to value cultural diversity and local knowledge and to develop teaching activities based on these same knowledge, within the framework of an intercultural education. Along these lines, this study presents the results of a systematic review of the literature on local knowledge and its presence in the field of education in the Mozambican context. The aim is to understand the contribution of this knowledge in the development of the teacher’s educational practices, based on the theoretical and practical assumptions of researchers in this area of knowledge. The corpus of analysis consists of seventeen articles, through research in the SCIELO database and in the aggregators RCAAP and Google Scholar, by applying inclusion and exclusion criteria. The results of the analysis show that local knowledge is experiences and social practices of communities that are relevant to their formal approach at school and potentially promote the professional development of teachers.