‘Weaving resistance from mountain to mountain’: Peasant-to-peasant dialogue about traditional knowledge from an ethno-educational and oral perspective, to train 14–16-year-old students as record keepers, weavers and curators of collective memories and traditional practices.

With the peasant-to-peasant dialogue on traditional knowledge – framed in principles of ethno-education and orality – a direct intervention to the curriculum is promoted by the community. The aim is to train students aged 14-16 as record keepers, weavers and curators of collective memories and traditional practices. We are guided by the question, what are the practical possibilities and challenges of using ethno-education principles in an Andean Paramo peasant community, to restore cultural memories and traditions as mechanisms of resilience?

The project seeks to study the potential of the dialogue about traditional knowledge amongst peasant farmers, to train students aged 14 to 16 as record keepers, weavers and curators of collective memories and traditional practices, in a rural school in the agricultural zone of Santurbán (in Santo Domingo de Silos, North of Santander). The peasant-to-peasant dialogue takes place between the communities of Los Montes de María and Santurbán through their representatives, aiming to guide the intervention of the curriculum based on principles of ethno-education and orality.

It is a collaborative project of folk education applied within the context of a memory project – including cultural heritage and artistic traditions which are part of the daily life of the local peasant community – set up in the IELEP three years ago by the teacher Nancy Mendoza, who has been working under difficult conditions due to the lack of adequate resources.

The project is both practical and research oriented. From the research point of view, it employs a participatory methodology in which representatives of the peasant communities, are involved right from the beginning of the project until the co-production of the results. It is therefore co-directed by a mixed team that includes these peasant leaders.

As a research project it seeks to answer the question, what are the practical possibilities and challenges of using ethno-education principles (developed by Afro-peasants from the Montes de María) in an Andean peasant community (Paramouno), to restore cultural memories and traditions as mechanisms of resilience?

Among its main objectives is the design of extracurricular seminars and workshops for the project’s students, which include visits to memory sites in Los Montes de María and the itinerant museum El Mochuelo. It also facilitates local memory works and creative weaving that express the findings, feelings and reflections arising from the students’ fieldwork.
The project comprises three levels of learning and different beneficiaries:

1. Students will explore their own peasant identities through oral memory and weaving practice, becoming both researchers and teachers of themselves, hence this will be a lifelong learning.
2. The farming communities involved will engage in a dialogue about their traditional knowledge and the transfer of this knowledge from peasant to peasant.
3. The research team will learn from this experience guided by the research question.

Meet the team: