ENSEÑAR SOBRE EL TERRITORIO COLOMBIANO EN LA ESCUELA: un reto apremiante de la educación geográfica.

The aim of this paper is to describe what is taught about the territory in Colombian primary and secondary schools. The study focuses on describing the contents about the territory that appear in the textbooks of wide circulation in the country according to what is established by the Colombian educational legislation, more specifically, in the curricular standards of social sciences. A qualitative methodology focused on content analysis was used. Two sources of information were used: (i) the social sciences curricular standards, one of the quality curricular references published by the Ministry of National Education (MEN) in 2004. This analysis is of the utmost importance in a country like Colombia which, although it has a territory rich in biodiversity and natural resources, also has serious problems of inequity in land tenure, lack of territorial control by the state and processes of deterritorialization of populations in both rural and urban areas. The problems of land tenure and deterritorialization have given rise to other problems, such as voluntary and involuntary internal and external migration processes, but they were also one of the main causes of Colombia's armed conflict and the expansion of illegal economies such as drug trafficking. The results show the need for the teaching of territory in school textbooks in Colombia to be configured from complex concepts and procedures that integrate the different dimensions of this category in the light of current debates on the didactics of geography. It also shows the need for the diversity of authors and editorial proposals that are taken to the classrooms of the country to contain relevant learning proposals that encourage students to understand and analyze the dynamics of their territories beyond the descriptive, so that what is taught in school contributes to the formation of citizens who propose and commit themselves to the solution of the problems of their environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]