"Construímos cada día una nación": Educating for citizenship in postconflict Guatemala

• In Event: Education and Citizen Formation in Central America

Abstract

In 1996 the extended armed conflict in Guatemala between army and guerilla forces, a conflict that had endured over three decades, ended with the signing of the Firm and Lasting Peace Accords. These UN-brokered accords included a promise by the government to “design and implement a national civic education programme for democracy and peace, promoting the protection of human rights, the renewal of political culture and the peaceful resolution of conflicts” (United Nations General Assembly, 1997, p. 11). Embedded in the Guatemalan Peace Accords and related documents were policy directives centering national civic reconstruction on the creation of a new Guatemalan citizen, one devoted to peace, human rights, multiculturalism, and democracy. As in many postconflict settings, both internal and external actors viewed the educational system as central to this effort.
Transforming civic identity through education, however, is no simple task. Grounded in a critical, sociocultural approach to civic identity and based on qualitative data collected from three distinct types of schools, this analysis indicates that young people from a variety of Guatemalan communities draw on a weave of family, school and community to create disparate connections to and interpretations of the country's turbulent past and complex present. The distinct civic understandings of students in indigenous, Ladino and integrated settings illustrate a critical dilemma in postconflict civic education: the difficulties of engaging directly with injustice while moving toward a shared national identity. Drawing from these portraits of civic belonging and historical memory across a divided country, I conclude that global models of democratic, multicultural and human rights education alone are inadequate for creating a new sense of citizenship in Guatemala, and suggest that an integrated schooling experience, curricula that attend to past and present injustice, and teaching practices for active civic engagement would greatly enhance these efforts.

Authors

• Beth C Rubin

• Deirdre M Dougherty, Rutgers University