Dianova Chile’s “Living Together” Programme

Dianova Chile’s “Living Together and Preventing School Violence” programme seeks to promote the understanding and development of an inclusive and supportive environment at school

"Living together" programme

One of the classes participating in the programme – photo: Dianova Chile

According to a report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Chile has low levels of classroom violence compared with other Latin American countries, but is the most affected in school performance due to the greater impact of violence on students.

In the context of the educational actions and initiatives that Dianova Chile carries out in the country, the project was successfully finalized in five municipal schools in the community of Curicó, in the region of Maule – these schools having an average vulnerability index (VI) of 95%, and a total population of approximately 1,500 people who benefited from the project.

The initiative called the “Living Together and Preventing School Violence Program”, lasted more than one year, beginning in the second half of 2016 with the team’s first actions to raise awareness. The field implementation considered actions aimed at the schools’ different actors (teachers, non-teaching professionals, assistants, students, and parents), from the first half of the 2016 through all of 2017, and completing the last action in January 2018.

The work allowed for the incorporation of other actors and the development of collaborative and online work, both between the schools themselves and with institutions of the Childhood and Juvenile Justice Network, who look after the students in these establishments.

On the other hand, the work that has been done allows us to confirm the need to generate and install processes in the context of learning, even more so when we talk about social spaces and relational dynamics. Occasional actions, milestones, while important, will not have an impact if they are not in the logic of a process and do not adapt to the times, emergencies, in short, to the rhythm of the establishments themselves.

We were able to establish the need for an operational perspective, fundamentally human and relational, which actively assigns these initiatives to educational assistants and non-teaching professionals, important actors because of their permanent and daily interaction with students, but who are often invisible or whose actions in schools are decontextualized.

Finally note that our Dianova Coexistence Model, allows us to observe the context, the practices of our beneficiaries, and at the same time allows us to identify levels and lines of action that is reactive, preventive, and/or promotes coexistence, making a comprehensive intervention possible.

Project presentation

Presentation of the project to the teachers of the Culture and Art Centre of San Antonio – photo: Dianova Chile