This document shares the experience of the project ‘Memories for Life: Dialogues for Building Cultures of Peace in Rural Colombia’, which took place in the departments of Boyacá, Caquetá, La Guajira and Putumayo, the regions of Sumapaz and Bogotá–Soacha in Colombia, and the Basque Country in Spain, between September 2023 and January 2025. The aim of the project was to contribute to the consolidation of cultures of peace in societies experiencing armed conflict and political violence, through the recovery of memories and truths, in order to foster a critical, reflective citizenry capable of mobilising transformative actions with a focus on rights and intersectionality. Innovative educational practices were developed from a critical, feminist perspective, within the framework of reflections on the pedagogies of memory and complex thinking, implementing experiential, thought and felt methodologies that mobilised the collective reconstruction of memory and the promotion of the right to truth in societies fractured by violence.
Luisa Fernanda González Moreno and Raquel Amada Benavides de Pérez, collaborators with Gernika Gogoratuz on the ‘Memories for Life’ project, contribute the article ‘Memories for Life: Dialogues for the construction of cultures of peace in rural Colombia’, pp. 45–55.
This article forms part of the proceedings of the 11th Latin American and Caribbean Colloquium on Human Rights Education, which took place in the Central American country of Costa Rica on 14, 15 and 16 May 2025 at the National University in Heredia.
In this instance, particular attention was paid to the challenges and the promotion of knowledge within that region, as well as to the exploration of insights and experiences surrounding Costa Rica’s culture of peace – one of the world’s key hubs for addressing pedagogy and didactics. Links to a human rights perspective were already evident at the previous Colloquium in Colombia, and in many respects it has been very rewarding to discover pedagogical and didactic approaches so closely aligned when it comes to upholding universal values and an ethical framework for the conduct of all teachers and learners.