Radio Sutatenza: Collective Memory as a Facilitator of a Popular Education Project

• In Event: Collective Memory: Conflict, New Media, and Community Agency

Abstract

The construction of institutional memory of the educational project of Radio Sutatenza in Colombia (1949-1994) also translated into a collective memory practice for employees, ex-employees and volunteers of the project. Practices of organizing, archiving and preserving that were also present in the basic educational notions of economics and planning of their popular educational approach. At the end of the project, many of the institutional memories that justified the use of resources and new funding sources became a testimony of a complex network of people, documents, and evidence of learning which is still alive. Proof of this is the efforts to generate networks of program participants who seek that this form of education continues to generate other educational projects and persist with significative affective bonds both with their peers and with the past products of their work in the institution. This paper presents how, nowadays, this collective memory continues to generate an agency to promote the creation of new projects for adult education and improvement of social conditions of groups at risk of exclusion. Besides, it is urgent to design strategies that encourage the educational approaches in the second generations of program participants.

Author

• Jorge Rojas-Alvarez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign