Citizenship, Memory, and Peace Culture in El Salvador: A Toolkit for Teachers and Educators

Citizenship, Memory, and a Culture of Peace in El Salvador: A Toolkit for Teachers and Educators is an educational material designed to facilitate work on democratic citizenship, memory, and a culture of peace in schools and other educational spaces for children and adolescents in El Salvador. The materials were created in collaboration with the National Office of the Ombudsman (la Procuraduría para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos – PDDH) and the Ministry of Education of El Salvador (MINED).

The materials, aligned with the country’s educational priority of Morals, Urbanity and Civics and its social sciences curriculum, were created specifically for work with students in grades 7 through 12. Equally, the toolkit works to integrate itself into national-level efforts to promote coexistence and a culture of peace in school. The first book of the toolkit, for its part, offers a brief theoretical and methodological introduction meant to orient educators to the material and the possibilities that the toolkit presents.

The second book, on memory and citizenship, represents a proposal for strengthening the capacity of teachers to work on democratic citizenship in the classroom. It does this from a point of reflection on El Salvador’s recent past in a manner that is sensitive, critical, and pluralistic.

The third book, on a culture of peace and coexistence, looks to offer a set of strategies for teachers and managers of educational institutions for contributing to the prevention of scholastic violence. This is accomplished through the strengthening of the role of the school in addressing these issues.

As a whole, the Toolkit for Teachers and Educators offers a series of strengthening strategies which bolster to capacity of teachers, educators, and managers of educational sites to work on democratic citizenship in schools and reinforce the solidification of a culture of peace in El Salvador. Equally, the documents are designed in such a way that civil society organizations who are interested in these topics can use the toolkit outside of the context of formal education.

The Auschwitz Institute would like to express its thanks to the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen for its permission to reproduce several images as classroom resources.