Civic training as a tool to promote peace

The civic training model of the Colombian Ministry of National Education, implemented with the support of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), is a set of strategies and tools to train and support teachers and departments of education, ultimately promoting the development of civic skills in students and teachers in exercising human rights. The specific objectives of the model are to promote educational practices in the classroom, institutional management and social mobilization practices to strengthen and transform civic practices, the exercise of human rights and peace-building in Colombia. 

The model has three strategies:

• Specialized teacher training,
• Localized support to teachers in specific schools;
• Strengthening of staff in departments of education that support schools on issues related to civic training, coexistence in schools, participation and education for peace.

Its implementation is scheduled in three 8-month phases. This training and support process recognizes pedagogical initiatives that teachers have developed with their community, and supports them with action plans that develop civic skills in their students, recognizing the classroom, the school and the territory as favorable settings for civic training. 

In order to assess the impact of this version of the model, the Colombian Ministry of Education was selected in CAF’s 1^st International Call for Proposals on Impact Assessments for #BetterManagement, to receive advice from CAF-development bank of Latin America- in the design and implementation of the assessment. The experimental assessment is ongoing and includes 176 schools, of which 88 were selected randomly for intervention, and 88 are part of the control group.   

For the focalized intervention, the sample of schools was reduced to those located in the 170 prioritized municipalities affected by the post-conflict, with an educational cycle of grades 1 to 11, that are official schools and are not currently under the “Todos a Aprender” program. Once the schools with these characteristics were identified in these municipalities, 88 schools were randomly selected, both in urban, rural and mixed contexts. Targeted schools are located in 57 municipalities in post-conflict areas in 15 departments of the country, and attached to 19 departments of education. 

Through training and support, the program expects to consolidate teachers’ pedagogical strategies in order to develop civic skills in students. In turn, these skills and abilities will help create, in the long term, a more democratic, inclusive and participatory school environment. 

The researchers designed instruments that will be applied to teachers and students (grades 4 and 5, 9 and 10), in order to measure the impacts, in the medium and long term, on the development of civic skills, the use of specific classroom and institutional strategies for their development and certain elements of the school environment such as the relationship between teachers and their students. 

These instruments were built based on the review of other surveys that measure the development of socio-emotional skills and school environments at national and international level, e.g. the SABER tests on civic competencies (which measure variables, such as civic actions and attitudes, civic thinking and associated factors) in 2012, CUBE 2014, a civic capabilities instrument designed by the Bogota department of Education, Colombia’s Aulas en Paz, Peru’s Paso a Paso and Mexico’s Construye T programs. 

At least three measurements are scheduled to be performed in order to identify developments in the impact variables during implementation of the model. The experiment is scheduled to end in 2019. The results will allow the Ministry of National Education to know the effectiveness and fine-tune the model, so it can be implemented by other partners, departments of education and schools in Colombia.