- PUBLISHED BY Alfredo Cohen Montoya
I will try to use this space to talk about what I am passionate about: understanding education and communication as two sides of the same coin. The recognition that every educational process is essentially an act of communication, and that every means of communication is also a means of education, although it is not explicitly proposed to do so. elParlante does explicitly propose it: it not only wants to communicate ideas, it expects them to move foundations, corrode the system, transform everyday life. Paulo Freire already said that education cannot be isolated, but closely connected with social, economic and political reality. So if education is communication and vice versa, I will take advantage of this space to explain what I have been learning from theory, reflection and action.
There was little point in learning to use lenses or Photoshop, if communication was not understood as a social process based on dialogue, capable of generating trust, exchanging knowledge, debating and learning, to achieve significant change.
I started studying Social Communication and Journalism at the Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia, but my interest in radio, television or press acquired another dimension when, on the outskirts of the municipality of Malambo, an hour from home, when faced with the question “what do you want for your neighborhood?” a 12-year-old boy answered: rice.
Actually, I was there to participate in a project of “Communication for health promotion“. Unplanned pregnancy was the order of the day, teenagers used small plastic bags as fake condoms that infected the vaginas of their very young partners. Sexual encounters were secretly consummated in the cemetery, virginity was “lost” with animals.
At that time, university professors, but especially the daily practice in fieldwork like this one, showed me that education could not be reduced at school or at home, but had to be a permanent instrument of social transformation: creative, critical, emotional, participatory and popular. There was very little point in learning to use lenses or Photoshop, if communication was not understood as a social process based on dialogue, capable of generating trust, exchanging knowledge, debating and learning, to achieve significant change.
And that’s what I’ve been with ever since. 15 years ago I migrated to Barcelona and with young people and old people, to formal schools and squares, universities and cinemas, I dedicated myself to repeating and putting into practice, the same “cantaleta”.
Or in these I was, until a chilli appeared. An invisible chilli that generated a global pandemic to question everything with a beautiful premise: “no one is safe if we are not all safe”, as the subtitle of Epidemiocracy says, a book that I recommend by Javier Padilla and Pedro Guillón.
And then, a year later, what is educommunication for?
Well, to remind us that public health is not only an issue of vaccines, doctors, beds and artificial ventilators, but also an educational, communicative and community issue. That in reality, the communicative fact and the communitarian fact its origin is common. It serves to show us that every community process is an emotional and intersectional process, crossed by different oppressions and cultural, religious, sexual, class or capacity inequalities.
Because as was clear in Malambo, there can be no health, where there is no rice.
To explain that these are not so much dissemination campaigns, as strategies for dialogue. The dialogue to which Habermas referred and which is only possible with ethics, recognizing the participants as free and worthy.
It serves to accompany the most vulnerable people, especially the so-called pre-citizens and post-citizens. These kids who don’t vote, these seniors who don’t produce money.
To understand that emotional fatigue also needs to communicate and that the pandemic of unwanted loneliness, apathy, and hopelessness, is as dangerous as that of a lung infection.
And since then I’ve been, or we’re in the Cultural Association elParlante , and I’ll talk about that in the next few columns. From the educommunicative strategies that we have implemented and that we continue to redesign to put care at the center, insisting that caring is the opposite of scaring us, and that the most important curve to flatten is that of social inequality. Because as was clear in Malambo, there can be no health, where there is no rice.
Text originally published in EL COMEJÉN.