School, territory and post-conflict: grounding a local peace culture in Tolima, Colombia

This project seeks to contribute to peacebuilding in South Tolima, by working with school, teachers and community leaders from four municipalities (Ataco, Chaparral, Planadas and Rioblanco) in the design and development of a pedagogical strategy for the construction of a local culture of peace that can be developed through schools. Using action-research, the project seeks to make visible the experiences that children, teenagers, teachers, parents and community leaders have had with the armed conflict and, from there, to generate with them proposals for peacebuilding in schools.
This pedagogical strategy will be designed and developed jointly with the local actor University of Ibague through the Peace and Region Programme and Eureka Educativa, working with teachers and leaders in two central themes: a) school life and armed conflict and, b) territory, natural resources and post-conflict.
The project makes two innovative contributions. First, it uses a collaborative research approach between scholars and community members, developed by the actors themselves (children, teenagers, teachers, parents and leaders) as a fundamental element to bottom-up peacebuilding efforts. This perspective implies a change in the traditional way in which research projects are structured, by transforming the role of both professional researchers and local participants in the research process. The coordinating team will have, fundamentally, a role in training, mediating and accompanying teachers, students and leaders, while the latter will actively participate in research and develop proposals that are rooted in a local perspective of conflict transformation. Second, the research will use media, arts and literature as a way of eliciting dialogue among collaborators and local actors during and after the research process. This way of carrying out research and applying the results to the interests of the education sector and the community ultimately seeks to achieve a social appropriation of the knowledge produced in the project so that it can have a long-lasting effect on the construction of a local peace culture in Tolima.
The project is organized into four components: a) research, b) capacity-building for teachers, students and community leaders, c) appropriation and dialogue of knowledge between the educational community, community organizations and regional institutions, and d) the production of physical and virtual outputs.

The direct beneficiaries of this project are school members (teachers and students) and community organizations from the four project site municipalities. One key feature of this project is the methodology that will be developed for the definition of a local, bottom-up peacebuilding strategy (as opposed to externally imposed, top-down peacebuilding approaches) in conjunction with school and community members. This way of carrying out research and applying the results to the interests of the education sector and the community, is aimed at achieving a social appropriation of the knowledge produced in the project so that it can have a long-lasting effect on the construction of a local peace culture in Tolima. Thus, the school teachers, community leaders and students will benefit in various ways: a) making their knowledge on the history of the conflict visible, b) receiving training on peacebuilding approaches and research, writing and video-making skills, c) being protagonists in the development of a pedagogical strategy for local peacebuilding, d) networking amongst themselves and with academic and public sector actors, e)participating as co-authors in most of the project outputs, and e) in the medium to long term, experiencing an improvement in their well-being as the effects of the educational strategy start to have positive impacts in the reduction of conflicts in the area.

Regional universities (staff and students) and the public sector in Tolima will also benefit from the project. In particular we will be working with the local actor University of Ibague through the Peace and Region Programme. Research activities will help to strengthen the inter-institutional relations and networks that the university has with schools, local organizations and the public sector involved in local and territorial development. Students from the last year of their undergraduate and post-graduate studies at the University of Ibague also will develop new skills in peacebuilding by forming part of the project through internships.

In the medium to long term, we can expect that other municipalities of Colombia and the public sector at a national level, will also benefit from the project results by learning about the potentials of building a local peace culture through the schooling system, which they could adapt and develop in their own regions.