Museum Casa Bella in Boyacá, Colombia: a tool for peacebuilding through cultural heritage education

• In Event: Educación cívica, democrática y para el desarrollo sostenible: libros escolares, patrimonio documental, herencia cultural e innovación pedagógica

Abstract

There is a worldwide recognition that education is the path to alleviating poverty and reducing the social exclusion, inequality, and injustice that are ingrained in our societies. In Latin American countries, we can testify to the precariousness of our educational systems. Based on the colonial standards of “civilize the natives”, our curricula were designed for assimilating the dominant cultural beliefs, values, practices, and languages of our colonizing nations. Nowadays, we must fight to guarantee our human rights and preserve our local culture in the face of a harsh sociopolitical and economic context.
As Colombia emerges from the violent world of its past, new approaches for education are in demand, aiming social inclusion, cultural access, and peace building. In this sense, we understand cultural heritage as a useful tool for building citizenship, respect, and peace in the minds of our youth. Through cultural sensitization and appropriation, we believe it is possible to understand our history and cultural values and thus increase our respect for the way others live, think and act. This understanding is fundamental to diminishing latent tensions, prejudices, and hostilities and mitigating conflicts and rivalries.
Encouraging peaceful cooperation and friendship is essential for our youth, who need to be prepared to help build a future free from their parents’ wars. This is the goal of the Museo de Arte y Cultura Casa Bella: apply a methodology of fostering participative processes in heritage preservation through cultural awareness.
This community museum aims to become a social and cultural awareness environment. Its top priority is the development of activities that can help local people understand, appropriate, and preserve their cultural heritage. The target is to achieve greater social and cultural inclusion. This inclusion will become tangible through the representation, participation, and access of people or communities that are usually excluded. This paper aims to present how this ethnographic museum acts as an agent of citizenship, capacity building, empowerment and cultural awareness, helping to improve the quality of life of Colombians through the valorization of their cultural heritage.

Author

• Jose Hernando Torres Flechas, STUDENT