School and children as victims of the armed conflict in Tumaco, Colombia

Abstract

: This article aims to make visible the voices of some actors in the educational community of two public institutions in Tumaco, General Santander and Roberto Mario Bischoff, to show how the school deals with the challenge of adding to its task of educating, that of resolving the impacts of violence. It reflects in particular on the boy and girl victims whose origin in time reveals the construction of the Colombian nation as an unfinished project of modernity. At the origin of the armed conflict, to resist modernization has been to become the different, the 'other', the enemy. It is illustrated with some fragments collected from open and semi-structured interviews as part of a process of Participatory Action Research, the experiences of the educational community in the middle of the conflict and the proposal through which the mentioned schools have faced a new role, based on the critical theory of hope. The schools have assumed the reconstruction of knowledge, pedagogies, and institutional guidelines, to win the pulse of violence, which comes from the hand of armed actors who create the victim boy and girl, push them away from the educational system, and include them in a conflict that it is alien. This is the story of the effort of two educational institutions to assume with better elements the task of reducing the effects of violence as a task that is beyond the competence of the school, but that cannot be ignored by it