Abstract:

Increased attention to the question of peace and violence victims in their diverse dimensions has been witnessed in several national and international university actors. The latter is because the university is not an island estranged from society, but an institution that has a moral obligation and a social compromise to bring a more egalitarian, less imbalanced and less antagonism-ridden world.

This work is the result of a 150 university students’ project carried out in scholarly subjects related to ethics, and which main objectives were:
1. To recognize peace and violence as a usual problem.
2. To build up action capacity through narrative imagination.

To achieve the first objective, we included a module with three core variables in the syllabus: common sense as a political and ethics category, the need for peace and violence rethinking and the importance of language to think and act in a peaceful-bearing manner.
For the second objective, once the aforementioned theoretical framework covered, students were commended to carry out two processes throughout narrative imagination: firstly to study the concept of peace depicted in their experience of choice and secondly to creatively communicate this experience and the peace concept cognition to their classmates.

With these two stages, we believe that peace culture building capacities were enhanced. We used imagination in this case to build a bridge between theory and experience. The use of metaphoric language demonstrated the plasticity of peace thinking and the possibilities for non-violent action.

Keywords:

Peace culture, conflict resolution, narrative imagination.