The Amazon University Program (PUAM) is an initiative at the service of education that seeks to promote and have a greater scope in the access to a dignified and quality higher education, with a multidisciplinary approach of intercultural dialogue, valuing the cosmoexistences and territorial wisdoms, and with the desire to serve the particular reality of the peoples and communities belonging to the Pan-Amazonian region to be subjects of their history and to collaborate in the defense of life and towards and a social transformation from their own identities.
The Amazon region ought to be a place of social dialogue, especially between the various original peoples, for the sake of developing forms of fellowship and joint struggle. The rest of us are called to participate as “guests” and to seek out with great respect paths of encounter that can enrich the Amazon region.
Querida Amazonía, 26.
This integral Pan-Amazonian educational proposal is established as a mandate in the final document of the Synod for the Amazon and seeks to embrace the whole perspective of the being and work of the Church, in a territory in which its diverse and complex problems establish social, cultural, economic, environmental and -particularly- educational challenges.
To respond more effectively to the needs and urgencies pointed out by the territories after the broad listening process carried out in preparation for the Amazon Synod, and to elaborate contextualized and incarnated proposals that help collective and individual transformation with a vision that differs from the traditional university model.
PUAM assumes a liberating, territorialized, popular and dynamic pedagogy, with a multidisciplinary, inculturation and intercultural perspective, based on close, permanent and active listening to and with the indigenous, peasant, riverside and urban periphery peoples.
PUAM is organically linked to the Ecclesial Conference of the Amazon (CEAMA), with its own autonomy, profile and objectives, and functions legally within the structure of the Campus Foundation associated with the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador.