The Third-Shift School and the Striving to Be: Systematization of an Educommunication Model in Contexts of Vulnerability

Abstract

This article systematizes the Phenomenological Humanizing Educommunication Model (PHEM), the result of an eighteen-year longitudinal research praxis in the Colombian Caribbean. The study is set at the Rancho Grande Educational Institution, located in Commune 1 of Montería, Córdoba, a territory marked by forced displacement, urban marginality, and recent migratory flows. Faced with “learned hopelessness” and symbolic violence that challenge the meaning of schooling, the research implemented a qualitative methodological bricolage that triangulates hermeneutic phenomenology, critical sociology, and Participatory Action Research (PAR). Based on a multimodal ethnographic archive (ESPCNEWS channel and the RECISO Project), it analyzes categories such as the “third-shift school” (digital educational interaction during nocturnal hours within the informal economy) and dialogic devices that challenge epistemic hierarchies. Results show that enabling students as EMIREC subjects capable of narrating their own reality produces an ontological restitution: the transition from deficit to the “Striving to Be” (afán de ser). The study concludes that educommunication operates as a synchronization technology that allows those excluded from institutional time to access the right to education and memory.