Social appropriation of knowledge, participatory research and construction

Abstract

This article discusses the capacity of the Social Appropriation of Knowledge (ASC) to contribute from the school to the construction of a sustainable peace in Colombia. Based on the experience of working with a group of teachers from the south of Tolima in Colombia, it is proposed how the development of participatory research projects on armed conflict and peace, from an approach aimed at achieving processes of social appropriation of knowledge, has the possibility of contributing to building individual and collective knowledge and understandings about the way the armed conflict was lived in the territory and how it transformed teachers and communities. It is argued that these understandings are necessary as a starting point to generate social transformations aimed at building sustainable peace. The development of projects of this type constitutes, in itself, an intervention and peace-building process. I argue that the ASC can become a fundamental tool in the process of contributing to the construction of a sustainable peace, especially in contexts that, such as Colombia, have experienced the armed conflict. ASC can contribute to the necessary academic reflection on conflict and peace in different ways. On the one hand, it adds new looks, built from the same local actors. On the other hand, it promotes the generation of strategies, aimed at the construction of a sustainable peace that responds to the dynamics and contexts in which the processes of social intervention are developed.