Farmer-led education on the Colombian Andes: Escuelas Campesinas de Agroecología as a social learning approach for post-conflict reconstruction

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Colombia, nearly six decades of war have devastated the countryside and induced land-related issues that perpetuate marginalization of rural people. Although the Peace Agreement of 2016 and the Integral Rural Reform offer new prospects for resolving legacies of conflict, the reconstruction of the countryside requires participation of rural communities. Social movements advance agroecology as a suitable territorial management approach for enabling the socio-ecological reconstruction of rural areas. Escuelas Campesinas de Agroecología (ECAs) are farmer-led formative initiatives that emerge around productive, market, and political processes aimed at scaling agroecology by developing new knowledge and learning systems. This qualitative study investigates the potentialities of ECAs as a social learning strategy for empowering farmer communities confronting current post-conflict challenges. Through a systematization of experiences, the work of seven ECAs is analyzed in relation to three phenomena – problematization, social networking, and critical thinking. The different pedagogies are then scrutinized based on identity frameworks. Results evidence that the context-specific approaches of ECAs enable communities to integrate diverse epistemological knowledge into collective learning systems and move it to a broader social context through social networks. We conclude that ECAs represent a suitable approach for transforming postwar environments while facilitating the achievement of peacebuilding goals.