What if I Defend Myself? Students’ Experiences of School Conflict in the EFL Rural Classroom in Colombia

School conflict in Colombia is a multifaceted phenomenon shaped by inequality, exclusion, and the legacies of armed conflict. While schools frequently reproduce these dynamics through silence and superficial reconciliation, they also hold potential tranformative spaces. This study explores how rural Colombian students make sense of school conflict through narrative in the EFL classroom. The study was co-constructed with 39 tenth-grade students in a rural school using qualitative narrative inquiry. Participants designed interviews, created stories in Spanish, translated and adapted them into English, and rendered them as multimodal comics. Their narratives were analyzed through recursive cycles of coding and dialogue, positioning students as epistemic agents rather than objects of research.