Laura Poy Solano
La Jornada Newspaper
Sunday, November 16, 2025, p. 8
The violence that impacts girls, boys and adolescents in Mexico “although it is part of their daily context, it does not define their world,” stated specialists in pedagogy and psychology, gathered at the 18th National Educational Research Congress, where they presented the results of the project Cogeneration of knowledge and knowledge with children and young people on peacebuilding and collective care.
Ana María Méndez Puga, professor-researcher at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo (Umsnh) and coordinator of the project, highlighted that by promoting the exchange of letters between dozens of primary school students from Querétaro, Hidalgo, Michoacán and San Luis Potosí, residents of marginal neighborhoods, so that they could narrate their contexts of violence and concerns, as well as learn about those of other children, “we were able to demonstrate their capacity for reflection and reconfiguration of their environments.”
At the meeting, convened by the Mexican Council of Educational Researchers, which took place from November 11 to 14 at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, Salvador Tenorio Maya, professor at the Autonomous University of Querétaro and promoter of children’s rights, indicated that it is necessary to “abandon this vision that only happy and playful childhoods can exist, when in reality they question the world they inhabit and the relationships of violence, but also seek to transform it.”
The participating minors, indicated Socorro Ramírez Vallejo, teacher-researcher at the Benemérita y Centenaria Normal School of the State of San Luis Potosí and expert in school coexistence, managed to generate narratives to share their experiences, in a process that was carried out within the school and from their neighborhoods.
In addition to confirming the importance of care as a central dimension of citizenship, since it includes a set of values and activities vital for well-being and survival. “Learning to dialogue with others involves conditions of openness to the world,” with the construction of one’s own messages.
In this regard, Nelva Denise Flores, psychologist and researcher at Umsnh, highlighted that the study made it possible to identify that despite the contexts of violence that children face, “stories of loving spaces appear at home, school and the city.”
