Conflict and cultural violence in Colombia. Transformation proposals from the school

Abstract

This article narrates a successful experience of transforming violence in a rural town in Colombia. It was made through the pedagogical intervention in conflicts’ resolution within educational communities affected by high rates of direct, structural, and cultural violence. Considering the conflict from a critical and positive perspective, the purpose is to overcome the violence culture through building, reeling off, and reassignment of meaning to the subjective dimensions of social actors, to their practices and discourses and, in this way, to the action values and patterns, which nourish the structural and direct violence in Colombia. And this is so because conflict is not only inherent to the human being and to social organizations, but also because, moreover, it is an element necessary to transform society.