Navigating the risks of retraumatization: Addressing Colombia’s armed conflict, peace, and justice in Bogotá schools

• In Event: Navigating violence, trauma and safety

Proposal

Colombia’s armed conflict has lasted more than six decades, with devastating effects on young people’s development and educational opportunities. Over two million children and youth were directly impacted by displacement, confinement, sexual violence, and recruitment by various armed groups, spanning 1986-2017 (Comisión de la Verdad, 2022). The educational impact of conflict is widespread and multidimensional; for instance, armed groups have attacked schools; threatened teachers, students, and community leaders; and exploited schools as sites for recruitment and as barracks. Negotiating an end to the conflict significantly polarized society (Gomez-Suarez, 2017). Meanwhile, social movements around longstanding societal inequities (Fergusson et al., 2017) and corruption have risen in the post-peace accord years. Despite a national policy to implement peace education in all schools, polarization and protest have contributed to division and censorship in schools, challenging efforts to teach and learn about the armed conflict, peace, and justice (Bellino et al., 2022). This presentation examines the CIES theme of protest as a societal context for addressing violent pasts in educational spaces, while highlighting the voices of young people and their teachers and their relationships to power and marginality.

Drawing from survey, observational, and interview data across a diverse sample of 45 public schools in Bogotá, we explore the relationship between conflict experiences and opportunities to learn about conflict, peace, and justice in schools. The context of Bogotá presents a number of critical tensions for educators addressing the violent past, in that they both need to attend to the high proportion of victims in their classrooms—students who have been intimately impacted–and the overwhelming distancing experienced by students who see the armed conflict as temporally and spatially disconnected from their lives. On the one hand, there are concerns that historical coverage of violence risks retraumatizing students (Močnik, Duijzings, Meretoja, & Beti, 2021), negatively impacting their health and relationships to school; on the other hand, lack of knowledge about the armed conflict’s history, political dimensions, and widespread impact may amplify emotionally distancing, social divisions, and distorted understandings of individual and community experiences with violence.

Given that young people and their teachers experience different levels of proximity to violent pasts and legacies, and different types of risks in addressing them in the present, there are open empirical questions about whether those who have been directly affected by violent conflict desire opportunities to learn about the historical actors and dynamics that resulted in their and/or family members’ victimization. These tensions also raise questions about pedagogy and the classroom conditions that allow for engaging with violent conflict and related themes of peace and justice in ways that are sensitive to classroom dynamics and the social identities of students. This study explores the extent to which young people, including those who self-identify as victims, express an interest in addressing violent conflict, peace, and justice in formal curriculum, and the conditions they interpret as enabling meaningful engagement with such difficult topics. It also considers the perspectives of teachers, as they reflect on their pedagogical decisions.

Through hierarchical linear modeling, we examine the relationship between student demographics, including conflict exposure, and young people’s expressed interest in learning about the armed conflict and peace process through school curriculum. We find that students who self-identify as victims or relatives of victims of the conflict are more likely than their peers to desire coverage of these sensitive topics in schools. While students who do not identify as victims are more interested in these topics when they perceive more open, democratic classroom climates, students who identify as victims experience a negative relationship between open climate and interest. These interrelationships raise important questions with implications for comparative research on addressing violent histories in school spaces.

Authors

• Michelle Bellino, University of Michigan- School of Education

• Marcela Ortiz, University of Michigan Ann Arbor

• Julia Paulson, University of Bristol

• Carolyn Barber, University of Missouri - Kansas City

• Cristian Alejandro Cruz Moreno, University of Michigan Ann Arbor