School Experience as a Trench: Conversations on Everyday School and Education

This article derives from doctoral research with a qualitative design and hermeneutic paradigm, which sought to understand the meanings of the existence of the Colombian school through a multiple case study method. This method guided the way the daily reality of four public schools (urban and rural) located in Antioquia, Colombia, was documented through observations, photographic records, and accounts of experience in focus groups and conversational interviews. The findings leave contributions to the field of school culture by describing the school experience as a multidimensional, conjunctive, and tensional framework in which shared practical knowledge circulates and opposing logics converge, whose forces erode and promote the growth of the Colombian school territory. In its tactical quality, the Colombian school entrenches itself to resist the criticism of its detractors and to enable, from the daily inventions that teachers and students generate, other possibilities that sustain its historical existence.