The Production and Appropriation of Educational Policy Oriented Towards Peacebuilding: An Extended Case Study in the Colombian-Venezuelan Border

• In Event: Highlighted session: Expanding educational frameworks for peacebuilding: evidence from Colombia 2016-2018
  In Highlighted Paper Session: Highlighted session - Expanding educational frameworks for peacebuilding: evidence from Colombia 2016-2018

Proposal

The signature of the Peace Accords between the Juan Manuel Santos’ government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in November 2016 opened new opportunities for peacebuilding in the country. The Rafael Baralt school located in Arauquita – a border region between Colombia and Venezuela – was no exception to the enthusiasm that the peace movement brought. One month after the official signature of Colombia’s sixteenth peace agreement, Emma, the school principal was nominated for a national peace award. In her application she described how under her leadership, parents, teachers and students worked together to protect the school from armed conflict and turned it into an epicenter for community development with support from regional, national and international organizations. Thanks to this collective effort, the Rafael Baralt school became a K-12 rural institution serving 250 students, that provided a year-long adult education programme and taught literacy to a cohort of FARC ex-combatants.
In this paper I explore how educational actors spread across distant locations appropriate educational policies related to peacebuilding in Arauquita. To make sense of the wide constellation of legal and illegal actors that compound the educational system in areas heavily affected by war, this extended case study drew from 98 semi-structured interviews that included policy makers, employees from governmental and non-governmental organizations, and the Rafael Baralt school’s administrators, teachers, parents and students. This paper explores the discursive and material relationships (Novelli, Lopes-Cardozo & Smith, 2017) these actors established between educational policy as practice (Levinson, Sutton & Winstead, 2009; Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017) and transformative measures to build peace. Findings suggest that policies that are flawed in their design retain the potential to be appropriated and enacted when they respond to local needs and interests. This indicates that leadership and management skills of educational actors are a determining aspect of policy implementation.

References

El Tiempo. (2018). El mapa de la vergüenza. Este año han sido asesinados más de 120 líderes sociales en Colombia. Available here.

Bartlett, L. & Vavrus, F. (2017). Rethinking Case Study Research: A Comparative Approach. New York: Routledge

Levinson, B.A.U., Sutton, M. & Winstead, T. (2009). Education policy as a practice of power: Theoretical tolos, ethnographic methods, democratic options. Educational Policy 23(6), 767-795

Novelli, M., Lopes-Cardozo, M. & Smith, A. (2017). The 4R’s Framework: Analyzing Education’s Contribution to Sustainable Peacebuilding with Social Justice in Conflict-Affected Contexts. In Journal of Education in Emergencies, 3(1), pp. 14-43

Author

• Diana Rodríguez, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia