This text introduces the issues discussed during the event Public thinking:
a tribute to Guillermo Hoyos-Vásquez. The bottom line is the problem of civic education in social movements, which implies considering social movements as platforms for education that are capable of constructing new social realities and emerging subjectivities. This approach to social movements as actors in civic education brings along some fundamental characteristics of the potential of collective actions: a) the reflexive capacity in order to put forward moral criteria to judge and value situations of domination and exclusion naturalized by the systems of power, as unfair situations and to question the politically correct; b) to define the authority of social collectives to communicate relevant experience for the construction of collective memory; c) to explore the possibilities of shaping political identities; d) to emphasize on the emotional repertoire that moves along expressions of struggle and resistance; and e) to understand antagonisms and dissents as political dimensions of collective actions.