Bringing peace pedagogies into school in the midst of post-conflict: Educational governance and peace curricula in Colombia’s Pacific South

• In Event: Round-Table Session 3
  In Round-table Session: Building Democratic Peace Through Handling Conflict in Schools? Evidence from México, Colombia, Bangladesh, and Canada

Proposal

Although conceived as crucial for peacebuilding, formal education reforms to make way to peace pedagogies within schools are not necessarily prioritized in post-armed-conflict settings (Lopes Cardozo et al., 2015). In addition, democratic and transformative peacebuilding pedagogies, often face many challenges to reach school curricula in a consistent and systematic way (Harber & Sakade, 2009).
This paper explores the challenges associated with bringing peace pedagogies into school settings during the transition from war to a ‘post-war’ scenario in Colombia. Since 2015, Colombian schools have been mandated to incorporate a Cátedra de la Paz [Peace Lecture] into their curricula. This mandate runs alongside the citizenship standard competences guidelines—incorporated as a requirement in school curricula since 2005—and alongside the promulgation in 2013 of a Convivencia Escolar law aimed at the promotion of peaceful co-existence in schools, training in the exercise of Human Rights, education about sexuality, and the prevention and mitigation of school violence. Together, these curricular developments speak of the significant role endowed to schools in the reduction of violence and their possible contribution to education for peace in Colombia. At the same time, they embody diverse purposes that may complement each other but also often collide to bring about unexpected outcomes.
Local and regional realities complicate the process whereby curricular mandates move downwards and are implemented in schools. Bartlett and Vavrus (2014) suggest tracing vertical relationships—the flows of people, ideas, discourses, texts, and actions of how policies unfold in distinct locations, travelling upwards and downwards through different educational local-global spaces.
This case study examines the processes associated with the incorporation of peace curricula into schools, as it develops in the challenging context of a municipality in Colombia’s Pacific South. In this region, which has been highly affected by the dynamics of Colombia’s armed conflict, post-agreement violence not only persists but has even escalated in some respects, making it a ‘laboratory’ of post-war peacebuilding efforts (Almario, 2017; Ávila, 2017; Flórez, 2016; Rocha, 2014; Verdad Abierta, 2017). The paper is based on 3 months of participant observations in two schools, participation in teacher development workshops for the implementation of peace pedagogies in school classrooms, and participation in the design of a toolkit for teaching peace at schools, all taking place during 2017.
As the municipality acquires the character of a ‘site of intervention’ within a highly decentralized and fragmented system of educational governance, I consider the crucial role that mediating institutions—such as international cooperation and NGOs, as well as civil society actors—play in the design and deployment of peace pedagogies for schools. In particular, I discuss instances in which implementation of peace programs for schools have to travel from non-formal educational settings to the formal-school domain. In the encounter between these actors’ pedagogical aims for peace education with teachers’ main concerns around violence, social conflicts and their own views of what they can do at schools, a crucial tension reveals: a dialectic of clash and accommodation is experienced between teachers, schools, and official guidelines’ emphasis on convivencia [peaceful co-existence] education—a form of peace pedagogies often concerned with values transmission, emotional management, and conflict resolution skills— (Bickmore, 2011; Carbajal Padilla, 2013; Nieto & Bickmore, 2016) and the peacebuilding orientation aimed at cultural and structural/societal-interest transformation (Galtung, 1990; Lederach, 2006; Ross, 2010) characteristic of NGOs and civil society interventions and peace programming. Similarly, some contradictions around scale, space, and time become evident in the differing aims, reach, and practices from ‘outside and inside’ the school. To conclude, I explore the existing opportunities to treat identity, territorial, and power conflicts that speak to teachers’ and young people concerns with violence, reconciliation, and peace as a form of transformative and more democratic horizon for peace education at schools in these contexts (Bajaj, 2015; Cann, 2012; Davies, 2014; Zembylas & Bekerman, 2016).

References

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Zembylas, M., & Bekerman, Z. (2016). Key Issues in Critical Peace Education Theory and Pedagogical Praxis: Implications for Social Justice and Citizenship Education. In A. Peterson (Ed.), The Palgrave international handbook of education for citizenship and social justice (pp. 265–284). [London, England]: Palgrave Macmillan.

Author

• Diego Nieto, OISE, University of Toronto