Remembering Wartime Violence Experiences Of Teachers And Students From Secondary Schools In Bogota

This study is about the experiences of teachers and students in the production of memory about past violence, and how they struggle to articulate these memories with present concerns and their expectations about the future. In doing this, they rely on some social discourses such as learning lessons from the past which has the potential to offer a better future free from violence and other social problems, an idea commonly attributed to the philosopher George Santayana (1095). To find information about this I conducted research where the voices of the participants are highlighted, and their ‘framings’ of the past related to dominant ideas and a range of literature about collective remembering. The goal is both to explore experiences, and to reflect on theorising about the role of the past and of memory construction in the lives of educative actors. One of the key findings is that when they refer to aspects of the past, these actors do so to relate this to their present politics of everyday life. In consequence, it is shown that memory interrelates with the past, the present and the future and can be described as walking a thin line between these three temporal dimensions. Those interviewed also considered that their work could contribute to sustainable peace, but also insisted that structural violence required reforms beyond a peace agreement, to tackle root causes of social injustice, by reducing poverty and exclusion. The contribution of this research brings the voices of these relevant social actors to the forefront with the understanding of the contradictions, which impose an unusual context where the production of memory has to coexist with different forms of mutually reinforced violence.