<b>WHOSE MAPS? WHICH BOUNDARIES? STORIES OF LOCAL KNOWLEDGE, COLLABORATION, AND CONNECTION IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION</b>

Knowledge and its production are the central concerns of education and research. However, all knowledges do not hold the same recognition and influence. The boundaries to determine whose knowledge and which knowledge is recognized as valuable are drawn through power. This practice-led study examines how teachers recognize, create, and value local knowledge for teaching engineering concepts in a vocational school in Eldoret, Kenya. Understanding how knowledge is created and valued in this context will provide valuable insights for education and research by challenging dominant ideas of who gets to create knowledge and say their knowledge is valuable.

I explore how mapping multi-centric local knowledge with the teachers creates space for diverse ways of knowing in engineering. Using community mapping, the teachers and I create artifacts that can be used as learning materials as well as data for this study. I analyze the data from the co-creation using गाठोडी (gathodi), an approach of bundling data. The bundles of findings and discussions illustrate lessons learnt: 1) when we laugh; 2) when we negotiate; 3) when we collaborate; and 4) when we remember local, ancestral knowledge to teach engineering. This study contributes to scholarship of knowledge production where power asymmetries exist and illustrates the role of collective agency and distributive design in our processes of knowledge production. In addition, this work adds to practical strategies in research and implementation to enact the values and aims of learning, social justice, and service espoused by education, research, and engineering.