{"id":767,"date":"2012-11-05T14:58:35","date_gmt":"2012-11-05T19:58:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/library.brown.edu\/modernlatinamerica\/?page_id=767"},"modified":"2012-11-05T14:58:35","modified_gmt":"2012-11-05T19:58:35","slug":"educating-change-in-colombia","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/chapters\/chapter-7-colombia\/moments-in-colombian-history\/educating-change-in-colombia\/","title":{"rendered":"Educating Change in Colombia"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Katerina\u00a0Seligmann<\/p>\n

In December, 2006, a teacher from a town called Pitalito in the Huila municipality of Colombia, interrupted the first national conference of the Colombian Ministry of Education\u2019s pilot project in Education for the Practice of Human Rights and spoke words I will never forget. She informed the group that a fellow teacher who also participated in the pilot had just been found assassinated. It is because we were committed to educating towards a culture of practicing human rights in Colombia that nobody asked why our colleague had been killed. We responded instead with a long silence. That conference marked the end of the year I spent as a Third Millennium Human Rights Fellow, serving as the UNICEF liaison to the national coordinating team of the pilot project.<\/p>\n

The challenges that the prevalence of human rights violations pose to educating towards the practice of human rights in Colombia are unavoidable. The pilot project did not have the capacity to deal with the death of our colleague in a juridical sense. But this pilot is as much aimed to foment the practice of human rights in Colombia as to discover what the role of education is and can be in creating\u00a0cultural change towards that practice.<\/p>\n

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In an earlier workshop, a member of the pilot\u2019s national\u00a0coordinating team shared an insight about how we might pedagogically change the way Colombians collectively confront human rights violations suffered by individuals. He said something like, \u201cThe first question we want to ask when someone gets killed is \u2018why?\u2019 But as soon as we answer that question, as soon as we reason away the violation, we justify acts which are unjustifiable.\u201d The reasons we might give tend towards biographical information about the sufferer of the violation. For example, earlier that year I heard on the radio that a woman\u2019s rights activist from the department of Magdalena was found dead. Even as her death was told, the reason was given: She was a woman\u2019s rights activist. First conclusion: She was killed because of her activism. Second conclusion: Human Rights activism in Colombia endangers lives. It is of course true that Human Rights advocacy in Colombia continues to be a risky endeavor. But reasoning away human rights violations and giving way to the fear they instill shuts down the path towards human rights practice. Interrupting the reasons which justify human rights violations, giving voice to the pain inflicted by them, creating peaceful and creative spaces for living-and-learning together: these are things education can do towards the practice of human rights. What I learned that year was that even if education cannot, by itself, stop human rights violations, education can be, in itself, the practice of human rights.<\/p>\n

The pilot project aimed to investigate how to legislate a National Program in Education for the Practice of Human Rights, a school-focused program which would primarily impact school culture as well as fortify relationships with both governmental and non-governmental entities to better serve the needs of school communities affected by human rights violations. Together with representatives of international, national, regional and local governmental and non-governmental agencies, faculty from several universities, and teachers in a sample of schools from five very different departments around the country, the pilot primarily sought to answer the question: What does education as the practice of human rights mean, and how do we do it? The seedling of the answer served as the pilot project\u2019s motto which came from Human Rights Education pioneer, Nancy Flowers: \u201cHow you teach is what you teach.\u201d The point of the National Program would not be to teach the content of human rights documents, but to bring those documents to life by premising them in every educational interaction.<\/p>\n

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That year, the pilot brought human rights to life time and time again. All planning began with: How can we do this as a practice of human rights? The national coordinating team rarely agreed on the answer to this question, but even our countless planning meetings of collaboration, disagreement and negotiating our disagreements towards consensus strove towards human rights as the premise of practice. We rarely agreed, for example, about how our workshops would create welcoming and safe spaces where everyone participated in the construction of a shared knowledge. We did agree, however, that re-arranging how we were accustomed to sharing space was the first step. Even if we were not always sure how we would approach what came out of the circles we created with participants, we knew we had to create them in order to find out.<\/p>\n

And in those circles with school teachers, university professors, and representatives of governmental and non-governmental agencies, education as the practice of human rights came to life over and over again. In the coastal department of C\u00f3rdoba, towards the end of a workshop, teachers who were involved in the process of firing a colleague after finding out he was gay, voiced their realization that educating for the practice of human rights meant they could not fire a teacher on the basis of his or her sexual orientation. In our workshop in the southern department of Huila, a teacher told the story of how she defended her pregnant daughter\u2019s right to education when the school she worked in tried to kick her out. At another workshop in the department of Bol\u00edvar, teachers whose principal had been disappeared by paramilitaries acted out the scene of that event, voiced the constant fear they had lived with in the years their town was fraught with armed conflict between guerrillas and paramilitaries, and described the theater program they started for students to have a peaceful outlet for the fear that pervaded their lives. Before hearing of our colleague\u2019s assassination at the national conference which marked the end of the pilot\u2019s first year in operation, each regional team collectively constructed their own definitions for human rights principles like \u201cdemocracy,\u201d \u201cpeace\u201d and \u201csolidarity.” The spaces created by the pilot and the future national program (projected to go into effect in 2009) may not answer for death, but they can and do put a rights-based way of living to the test, every day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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***<\/strong><\/p>\n

[Note: Original Published in\u00a0Digalogos Magazine.\u00a0<\/em>Providence: CLACS, Brown University. Spring 2009.]<\/p>\n

Katerina Seligmann<\/strong> is a first-year graduate student in Comparative Literature. She received the Third Millennium Human Rights Fellowship for 2005-2006 to work in the field of Human Rights Education in the United States and Colombia. Her primary research interest is cultural decolonization, especially in the Caribbean.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Katerina\u00a0Seligmann In December, 2006, a teacher from a town called Pitalito in the Huila municipality of Colombia, interrupted the first national conference of the Colombian Ministry of Education\u2019s pilot project in Education for the Practice of Human Rights and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"parent":769,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"sidebar-page.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-767","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/767\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}