Territorios que hablan: la crónica fotográfica para resignificar la memoria histórica y la identidad de los estudiantes de secundaria de la Institución Educativa Simón Bolívar

Abstract

The research addresses the identity uprooting and the fragmentation of historical memory among secondary school students at Institución Educativa Simón Bolívar, Bemposta campus, located in la Nohora neighborhood of Villavicencio, Colombia. This territory, inhabited in 1999 by families who are victims of forced displacement from Mapiripán, Puerto Alvira, and El Castillo, has been stigmatized as a space of marginality, poverty, and insecurity. As a result, young people exhibit a weak construction of cultural and territorial identity, perceiving their environment as transitory and showing distance from their peasant roots, along with limited participation in community life. Through Action Research framed within the socio-critical paradigm (Fals Borda, 1999), the study analyzed how the photographic chronicle, as an interdisciplinary pedagogical strategy, enables students to resignify the historical memory of their territory and strengthen their cultural identity. Through cycles of planning, action, observation, and reflection, students produced photographic chronicles that allowed them to transition from a stigmatized self-perception as “invaders” to that of “city builders.” The socialization of their visual and narrative accounts in a community exhibition and digital blogs fostered intergenerational dialogue, made silenced memories of displacement visible, and valued the resistance trajectories of their families. The main collective learning demonstrates that the photographic chronicle is a powerful tool for educational contexts affected by armed conflict. It promotes critical reading of the world, the reconstruction of collective memory, and the consolidation of the school as a space of re-existence and symbolic reparation, where students recognize themselves as historical subjects with transformative agency.