The Making of Invisible Violence: Troubling Peacebuilding Curricula in Colombian urban schools

• 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

Since 2012, Colombia has entered into a complex process of transition from war to a ‘post’-conflict scenario. This process has led to the emergence of a wide range of peace pedagogies aimed at bringing different dimensions of peacebuilding education into schools (Acción CaPaz, 2017; Colombia. Ministerio de Educación Nacional, 2017). At the same time, challenges on the implementation of peace reforms due to the continuation of expressions of violence, as well as citizen polarization around many controversial issues of the peace agreements in Colombia (Fundación Paz & Reconciliación, 2017; Instituto Kroc de Estudios Internacional de Paz, 2017), add layers that further complicate the incorporation of peace education initiatives in school curricula.

In this paper, I explore how the implementation of curriculum state mandates on peace and citizenship education in schools interacts with youths’ political identities in two settings: a municipality in the south of Colombia’s Pacific coast that has been highly affected by the dynamics of the armed conflict; and a working-class neighborhood in a large city of Colombia in which violence rates, forced displacement, and presence of organized criminality has been historically high, but whose inhabitants have had a more distanced relationship to the armed conflict itself.

It is based on a multi-sited approach to case-study (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017), and involved three months of participant observation in two schools, interviews with teachers, 9 focus group with students from grades 8°-10°, and document analysis in each setting. In this presentation, I discuss focus groups designed to map out youth’s locally-experienced social conflicts and the expressions of violence they considered more salient in their communities. These included drug consumption, intolerance and interpersonal violence, pollution in their neighbourhoods, as well as domestic and gender violence. The way students make sense of these conflicts, and their own positions within them, are understood primarily in terms of interpersonal and de-politicized conceptions of violence and conflict. Although there was some divergence between the youth from the city and the Pacific coast in their understandings and concerns around these local conflicts, proximity to the armed conflict did not make as significant of a difference as was initially expected.

I argue, appealing to Bourgois’ (2009) conceptualization of invisible violence and Nixon’s (2011) notion of slow violence, that (global) citizenship education and convivencia [peaceful coexistence] educational imperatives and discourses present in school curricula (Nieto, 2018), instead of providing means for teachers and students to navigate these contradictions, effectively foster the disconnections between intimate, interpersonal and locally-experienced conflicts, and their structural, transnational, and historical overdetermination. They broaden what Rosanvallon (2008) calls the problem of the unpolitical: “a failure to develop a comprehensive understanding of problems associated with the organization of a shared world”, curtailing potential citizenship agency for the collective transformation of violence. Moreover, labels such as ‘education in emergencies’, ‘education in divided societies’, and ‘education for conflict zones’, further complicate the possibility to understand how the increase in intimate violence under the punitive version of globalized neoliberalism in many Latin-American countries, demands a curriculum of responsibility for peace according to positions in the transnational geographies of power in the world (Ahmed, 2000; Walsh, 2013; Young, 2011).

References

Acción CaPaz. (2017). ¿Qué es educar y formar para la paz y cómo hacerlo? Educación y pedagogía para la paz. Material para la práctica. Bogotá, Colombia: Oficina del Alto Comisionado para la Paz. Gobierno de Colombia.

Ahmed, S. (2000). Strange encounters : embodied others in post-coloniality. London: Routledge.
Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. (2017). Rethinking Case Study Research: A Comparative Approach. New York: Routledge.

Bourgois, P. (2009). Recognizing Invisible Violence. A Thirty-Year Ethnographic Retrospective. In B. Rylko-Bauer, L. M. Whiteford, & P. Farmer (Eds.), Global Health in Times of Violence (pp. 17–40). Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.

Colombia. Ministerio de Educación Nacional. (2017). Orientaciones generales para la implementación de la cátedra de paz en los establecimientos educativos de preescolar, básica y media de Colombia. (E. Chaux & A. Velásquez, Eds.). Colombia: Ministerio de Educación Nacional (Colombia).

Fundación Paz & Reconciliación. (2017). Terminó la guerra, el posconflicto está en riesgo: a un año del acuerdo de paz. (L. Valencia, Ed.) (Primera edición). Buenos Aires: CLACSO.

Instituto Kroc de Estudios Internacional de Paz. (2017, November). Informe sobre el estado efectivo de implementación del acuerdo de paz en Colombia. University of Notre Dame. Keough School of Global Affairs.

Nieto, D. (2018). Citizenship Education Discourses in Latin America: Multilateral Institutions and the Decolonial Challenge. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 48(3), 432–450.

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Rosanvallon, P. (2008). Counter-Democracy. Politics in an age of distrust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Walsh, C. (2013). Introducción. Lo pedagógico y lo decolonial. Entretejiendo caminos. In Pedagogías decoloniales: prácticas insurgentes de resistir, (re)existir y (re)vivir. Tomo I. Quito, Ecuador: Ediciones Abya-Yala.

Young, I. M. (2011). Responsibility for justice. New York: Oxford University Press.

Author

• Diego Nieto, OISE, University of Toronto