Colombia stands at a particularly critical historical juncture and education plays a substantial role for the country’s future of democracy. The 2016 Havana Accords—signed between the Santos government and the country’s largest Guerilla faction, FARC—represented the most significant attempt to end an armed conflict that has lasted more than 50 years and cost more than 500,000 lives. However, shortly after, a small majority of the Colombian population voted against its ratification and Transitional Justice Interventions in a national referendum. But the presidential election in 2022, marked another turning point, when the government of Gustavo Petro declared that it seeks to reform the education system in order to promote and broaden the peace process and to deepen democratic participation. Implementing such policies in the field of education will have to deal with great challenges: One the one hand, Colombia is one of the most unequal countries in the world, and the access to and quality of education is largely dependent on income and on the other hand, schools and teachers became systematic targets of violence and the political strategies of paramilitary and guerilla faction. Therefore, plans to incorporate the results of the Truth Commission into the national curriculum will have to develop strategies to engage with teachers, creating an atmosphere of safety and assisting them in developing memory-political agency.
Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s concept of social justice this research project analyzes how Colombia’s educational policies and didactic discourses relate to notions of peace, social justice, democracy, and dealing with the past in one of the world’s oldest and most complex armed conflicts. On the one hand, we argue that positive peace and a meaningful democracy depend on a degree of redistribution, recognition of collective identities and inequalities, and the equality of representation or participatory justice. On the other, these categories are not just a normative reference but serve as a heuristic tool to study how educational discourses and policies relate to social inequality and conflicts as well as whose interests and demands become marginalized.
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Aims
Based on these premises, we investigate how education reforms and curricula are negotiated and study their implementation through a comparison of pedagogic practices in various schools and social contexts. Doing so, this project’s research agenda considers four major questions:
- How is the contribution of education to democracy and the peace process framed in public policy debates, and which notions of citizenship, peacebuilding, and social justice are explicitly or implicitly inscribed into the policy discourse?
- How does the pedagogic discourse represented in curricula and educational media respond to the framings and connect them to narratives on conflict and democracy?
- Who is involved in designing and negotiating educational policies and didactic discourses on different scales of the educational ensemble? How do structural and institutional aspects of the education sector, as well as its political and economic context, privilege or marginalize different actors and their discourses and demands in regard to participation, recognition, and redistribution?
- How do teachers implement, resist, or negotiate educational policies and didactic discourses in their pedagogic practice? To what extent do the regional and social situatedness of schools and the agency of local (conflict) actors, influence the possibilities of classroom discourse?
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Methodology
To this end, the project collects in a first step, different curricula and policy documents for a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Further, expert interviews will be conducted with scholars and with actors involved in the production and negotiation of educational policies and didactic discourses, including state functionaries, as well as representatives of political parties, civil society organizations, and textbook publishers.
The second axis of the project consists of a review of the most common social science textbooks for secondary education. The corpus will show how educational policies are translated into a regulated didactic discourse and narrative templates (Wertsch, 2013) on conflict and democratization. In addition to the previously mentioned critical discourse analysis, computer assisted qualitative content analytical procedures will provide a more comprehensive overview of the main discursive trends.
As the third axis of research the project will therefore contain a comparative investigation of pedagogic practices and political agency of teachers in different social and regional scenarios. This means conducting an exploratory series of interviews and an ethnological field research with teachers working in three different types of schools: private urban schools catering to wealthy families; public urban schools, which charge only minimal school fees; and rural schools in selected regions affected by armed violence and the presence of (former) conflict actors in the community.
