Category: Cycle 3

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Santiago Aparicio is a former Applied Imagination student with experience in environmental issues in Colombia. I originally wanted to focus the conversation on research, but the most valuable part ended up being the personal side: his experience in the course as a Colombian, his future plans, how his interventions worked, and how the program has helped him professionally.

What surprised me most was how generous he is with his contacts. He was very open to connecting me with interesting people and offering feedback. That was probably the most valuable outcome of the conversation.

He also clarified an important point about my approach. He warned me to be careful not to fall into a “saviour” dynamic, where it seems like I’m bringing oratory to people from the outside. It’s a useful reminder, although it’s something I had already discussed with Carlos León.

Link interview

Through Carlos León I was connected with Pedro Alfonso, a professor and expert in rural pedagogy in Colombia. He is part of the Salesian Order, which, like many religious orders in Colombia, combines ecclesiastical work with deep involvement in education. It was striking to see how much he knows about ethnography and rural learning processes.

He confirmed two key points. First, storytelling and oratory training are genuinely needed in rural contexts. Second, and most importantly, he highlighted the lack of systematization in Latin American education. It is common for teachers to design workshops, test methods, or create learning strategies, but their work remains in personal notebooks or memories. Even when someone writes their process down, it rarely gets published. And even if it is published, it is not indexed in a way that allows others to discuss, challenge, or build on it.

The result is serious: our work is not scientifically debatable. We repeat the same efforts again and again, trying to design workshops or methods that others may have already developed. The question of how to teach storytelling in rural communities is difficult, long-term, and I am not the first person to think about it. But we keep starting from zero because we cannot access each other’s knowledge.

This made me rethink my own project. One contribution I could make is designing a format that is open, explainable, and easy to discuss. People should know where my ideas come from and why I propose certain steps. And it should be accessible enough that others can use the same structure to document their own processes. If the system is too complicated, people will not use it.

In fact, this diary itself shows the problem. The moment the process felt too complex, I stopped documenting consistently. That is exactly the gap Pedro was talking about.

Link interview

I interviewed Carlos León Quintero, who holds a PhD in Rural Colombia, he now works in the Ministry of Agriculture in the rural development section. We talked about the role of rurality in Colombia, and I asked him two main questions: whether storytelling workshops make sense in rural contexts, and what the right approach should be.

He told me they are relevant, but only if they respect the fact that rural communities already have their own forms of oratory and storytelling. The goal is not to arrive as saviors or to impose external methods, but to create a two-way learning process. According to him, rural dialogues can teach Colombia and the West a lot: how to deal with slow consensus-building, alternative ways of resolving conflicts, different rhythms of conversation, and different cosmogonies. He mentioned an Indigenous community where a dialogue lasted fifteen years.

From this conversation, I realized that my project should act as a bridge between rural communities and the Western or institutional world. He emphasized how communication often breaks down when communities need to speak with companies or the State. In many rural areas, oral communication is the main medium because of educational gaps. He noted that it is common for people not to finish primary school, although this is not the case everywhere. Still, it is a factor that shapes how communication works.

We also talked about Orlando Fals Borda and participatory action research, which fits well with the idea of mutual learning. The main takeaway from this interview is simple but essential: any meaningful work in rural Colombia has to be a two-way process. Learning from them is the starting point.

In November, I traveled to Sweden, which gave me the opportunity to meet with the Swedish Popular Education Association and share the evaluation method I have been using in my workshops. Their first reaction was that my 1-to-4 self-assessment scale might feel too direct or even harsh, especially immediately after participants speak. I had not fully considered how exposed people can feel in that moment.

They explained their workshop structure: start with an icebreaker, then discuss expectations and shared goals, then move into the main topic, and finish with reflection. For them, reflection works best after the session and sometimes even days later, because learning needs time. This made me realize that I had been structuring my workshops like speeches, trying to open with impact. A workshop is different. It needs to begin by helping people feel safe and comfortable.

What matters most to them is cooperation. Their Study Circle model is fully self-managed, which matches what I want to develop. They told me that mastering the specific skill, whether guitar, storytelling or cooking, is not the most important part. What counts is learning how to work together, how to organize a group, how to understand one’s own way of learning, and how to identify what works and what does not. Several people in Sweden said that Study Circles have shaped their culture. They work well in groups because they grew up learning in self-organized circles guided by interest rather than obligation.

This conversation helped me see my project with more clarity. If I want a self-managed model, I need to design sessions that invite participation instead of pressuring it, and that treat cooperation as a central outcome.