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Session Submission Summary

Peace education efforts in Colombia: Teaching peace, living conflict?

Thu, April 21, 9:00 to 10:30pm CDT (9:00 to 10:30pm CDT), Pajamas Sessions, VR 109

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In 2016, after four years of negotiations, the Government of Colombia signed a peace agreement with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), ending more than fifty years of an armed conflict that caused more than 260,000 deaths and the displacement of over 8 million people (Observatorio de Memoria y Conflicto, 2021). The agreement involved a bilateral and definite ceasefire, representing the beginning of a transitional justice process with a significant role for Colombia’s public institutions and for civil society engagement. Negotiating an end to the conflict polarized Colombian society in formal political spaces as well as within communities. Five years into the peace process, Colombia has seen more than 2,300 FARC dissidents (HRW, 2020) that continue committing abuses, rising violence directed at indigenous populations and social leaders, student-led mobilizations drawing attention to educational inequity, and reports of brutal police repression. The crime and abuses are largely taking place in areas of the country that also experience pressing issues related to drug production and trafficking (HRW, 2020). Meanwhile, Colombia has become the biggest host country for Venezuelan migrants (1.7million), adding stress to particularly under-resourced schools (UNESCO, 2020).

Decades of armed conflict and forced displacement have impacted Colombia’s education system, resulting in school-based violence and political confrontations spilling into schools (Ardila-Rey, Killen, & Brenick, 2009; Chaux, 2009; Villar-Márquez, 2010). The prevalence and protracted nature of conflict has also led to a number of educational initiatives aimed at mitigating the harmful effects of violence on young people’s learning and socioemotional development. In fact, efforts to promote peace have been recognized as within the purview of the educational sector for some time. Colombia’s 1994 Ley General de Educación-- the primary legal mandate for the education sector-- mentions peace as one of the goals for education as related to respecting human rights, democratic principles, diversity, equity and personal freedom (Artículo 5). More recently, national level policy efforts were introduced, envisioning mandatory peace education for learners from early childhood through grade 11, spanning young people’s basic schooling.

Teaching young people about controversial topics, such as violent conflict and societal division violence and injustice has been analyzed in various national settings through the lens of policy, curriculum, and classroom-based interactions (Bar-Tal et al., 2010; Bellino, 2017; Bickmore et al., 2017; Lynn, 2005; Tibbitts, 2006; ). Even in stable settings, discussing such topics openly can be deemed too sensitive; these risks increase markedly when conflict is ongoing and proximal, influencing what can and cannot be said openly (Rubin, Abu El-Haj, & Bellino., 2020). Across educational settings, policymakers, teachers, and students cite shared and distinct challenges with a recurrent emphasis on navigating the “disjunctures” between hoped for ideals and everyday realities that fail to live up to promises for peaceful transitions, social cohesion, or democratic inclusion (Rubin, 2007; also see Rubin et al., 2020). This theme of disjuncture echoes CIES’s calls to explore educational “idea/lism,” accounting for areas of resistance, inspiration, hope, and fatalism.

Research set in Colombia has shown that existing curricula is not conducive to a critical historical understanding of the origins and long-term consequences of the armed conflict, further normalizing the presence of violence in young people’s lives (Padilla & Bermudez, 2016; Rodríguez, Foulds, & Sayed, 2016). Nonetheless, there are opportunities for facilitating “peacebuilding citizenship” in school spaces (Bickmore et al., 2017) that could lead to an effective promotion of democratic dialogue and mutual understanding among students that carry contrasting conflict experiences.

This panel will bring together research exploring various types of peace education interventions, set in schools as well as informal educational spaces, encompassing curricular innovations from contested spaces. Authors will draw attention to initiatives that have been imposed or authored from “above,” as well as those generated from “below,” in an effort to examine the dialectic between educational spaces and stakeholder perspectives.

Because the panel is focused on a single national context, we will leverage the opportunity to engage in comparative analysis, examining educational practices and discourses across contexts within Colombia. One goal is to consider the real and perceived opportunities and barriers to peace education as they vary across space and scale, during this significant moment of political transition. For example, teaching about conflict in settings where political actors have remobilized can be high-risk and thus may need to be avoided altogether, but perhaps there are more subtle expressions of resistance and solidarity circulating. When and how can proximity to national conflict allow for deeper conversations with or amongst young people about their role as civic actors? How do these practices contrast with those set in educational contexts perceived as more distant from the conflict? And how do the everyday lived experiences with various forms of structural, physical, and symbolic violence trouble these boundaries? Outside of schools, how do experiences of conflict, the peace process, and associated divisions live in physical spaces and material objects? What educative moments do young people recognize inside and outside of school, in order to bring their own language, theories, and frameworks for action to bear? And how do global crises such as large-scale migration and the pandemic intersect with these efforts?

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