Using recycled paper, classifying waste, designing applications to calculate the carbon footprint, talking with neighbors and institutions about environmental problems, participating in conservation tasks, creating applications to identify cycle paths and bicycle parking spaces or walkable itineraries. All this supposes the improvement of our well-being and induces another way of teaching and learning: an organizational and curricular restructuring of the educational center.
Students and teachers become aware of the impact of their decisions and behaviors. The curriculum and relationship styles are contagious from care behaviors. Now the protection of the environment in the school institution is not conceived without the care of its inhabitants, of their interpersonal relationships. Interdependence, inclusion and the search for equality are inalienable educational aspirations. Caring for the environment becomes an engine of pedagogical change.
Deep learning that fosters a critical relationship between academic learning and the environment becomes relevant. The walls of the center are exceeded and it opens up to the neighborhood. On this path is the Alonso Quijano Public Secondary Education Institute in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid)which reinvents itself around the care and conservation of the environment.
Reinvent yourself and be more sustainable
Homework accumulates at the beginning of each school year. Teachers, students, educational agents and collaborators resume contacts, schedule meetings, launch coordination bodies, review and update schedules. In the 2022-23 academic year, they define the educational attention, as the new alternative curricular field to the teachings of religion. At the same time, they collect pumpkins in the orchard, check the state of the waste containers, the recycling workshops, birds nest housesthe planting new species of trees in the yardetc.
They plan the tasks of the Virtual Classrooms. One of them with special meaning, the one that support the sharing of project resources that identifies them as a center: Green Quijano.
This course is already the fourth that the institute maintains and reinforces, with this project, its commitment to reinvent itself and advance in being more sustainable. It serves to reference all kinds of actions to care for the immediate environmentthe neighborhood, the city and incorporate them into all corners of the curriculum and classroom work.
The project arises in 2018-19 with a debate in which the entire center participates on the consumption and use of plastics. This initiative, devised by the first-year high school English teacher, was born to exercise argued confrontation in English. The second-year baccalaureate students of Earth and Environmental Sciences, who are trained in debating techniques, assume the leadership of this project. They are the most convinced and, at the same time, the greatest promoters. They have the support of the Pedagogical Coordination Commission.
The consensual question was: Should the public powers prohibit the use of plastics? Beyond opting for a position in favor of the ban, the most valuable thing was “the research and reflection work carried out by so many students on environmental issues,” he comments. Monica Morahead of studies at IES Alonso Quijano.
This sensitivity was enhanced by the interest of teachers in the service-learning methodology and the work of the Biology teacher in the second year of high school who articulates it with environmental education. The first concern was the alternative to the accumulation of urban waste, given the environmental problems of Alcalá de Henares (closure of the landfill, air pollution from industry, transport and proximity to Madrid, the environmental risk of nearby natural spaces such as the banks of the Henares and the Parque de los Cerros). At the same time, the climate summit (COP25) was held in Madrid and some third-year ESO students, who were part of the collective CASHIER of children and young people from the neighborhood, assumed the reporters roleinforming the rest of the colleagues of the evolution of the summit.
The project is created to address these concerns, which evolve in successive editions. In the 2019-20 academic year, they deal mainly with the sensitization and awareness of environmental carein 2020-21 the waste and responsible consumptionin 2021-22 the protection and care of biodiversity and in 2022-23, basic resources: water and energy.
All didactic departments review the curriculum. The teachers link each subject with an environmental theme, establishing working hours in the classroom. By way of illustration, we recommend consulting Green Quijano project activities Course 2020-21.
Build a seedbed of acornsmount reuse workshops waste, prepare environmental awareness activities (living posters, panels, awareness videos), elaborate digital mappinges and collaborate with the City Council in the location of the organic waste containeractively participate in the reforestation of the patio, create prototypes for the efficient use of natural resources (waste sorting bin, self-generation energy system, plastic waste collector boat or speakers without energy consumption), organize photography contests environmental issues, etc. The development of these initiatives promotes new learning scenarios and discovers new purposes for the schooling of the youngest.
The confinement serves as an impulse
During the confinement, forced to follow the virtual teaching modality, they did not stop devise environmental initiatives. “The arrival of the pandemic in 2020 transformed our relationship with nature. It made us discover both the consequences of the degradation to which we subject it, and its rapid recovery capacity when our pressure temporarily ceases” (2021 National Service Learning Award Nomination. They get the Health and Environment Award).
They turned to social networks, supported by volunteers from the Alcalá de Henares City Council. They achieved great diffusion and impact, their messages appeared in the district party program. In the 2020-21 academic year, upon returning to face-to-face classes, they decided to continue and defined the objectives of the second edition Green Quijano: Waste recycling and responsible consumption.
Aware of the need for help in resources and training, they join the Network of Sustainable Schools of the Community of Madrid. Teachers receive training in environmental education. The group is created ecodelegates (yard commissions, ecoplank, dissemination, waste) and, from the 2021-2022 academic year, they have a stable schedule for their organization and development of activities. They constitute the Environmental Committee (teachers, families, students and administration and services staff), with responsibilities in the annual planning of the project, supervision of the eco-audits and evaluation. They begin to apply the first models for analysis and improvement of the environmental reality of the center (school eco-audit). They strengthen the network of schools by sharing their progress.
bet on transform the institute into a place of care for the environment. They collaborate in planting trees, optimizing the energy sustainability of educational spaces, classify, select and recycle waste, etc.; not only of the institute, its action covers the neighborhood and the town. Hence his interest in knowing the consequences of the pandemic in the lives of its neighbours, in their commercial expectations and in the treatment of waste. They decide to collaborate with the municipal services in determining the location of the organic waste containers. They go out into the street and make a interactive map of shops and containers, write to merchants and them interview.
In the 2021-22 academic year they deal with the Biodiversity and study the species of plants that inhabit the institute. they want regenerate plant life in patios with the massive planting of trees and shrubs, the varado del olivo and olive processing. create a scholar Orchard, they build houses for birds, etc. Its purpose was to reduce the carbon footprint.
“Our institute is changing” affirms Mónica Mora. There is less noise in class, because they have put panels on the ceiling that reduce noise pollution. The floor is cleaner and waste has been reduced. The ODS are not strange acronyms, they are discussed in class and can be found on a large panel next to the ecoboard. There are nice gathering spaces in the courtyard. They have taken advantage of the felling of diseased trees to build tables and benches. Meanwhile other trees, shrubs, aromatic plants and vegetables are growing.
“Our center is a place open to new environmental and pedagogical ideas, which as a community make us more respectful of the environment and with ourselves. Our educational project includes good treatment and quality education. We want both to awaken scientific vocations and to give life to our library. From an institute without labels, public, with great diversity in the student body and, therefore, with enormous wealth”, he comments White fruitsdirector of the institute and the guarantor of the planting in the patio of 190 trees of different species and adapted to their environment: cypresses, junipers, junipers, elders, hawthorns, blackthorns, mastics, etc.
Faced with the environmental challenge, teachers and students work together, families give their opinion, participate and collaborate, administration and services staff get involved. “You have to set up the compost bin”, “Do we have a date for the Morcuera refuge?”, “It is pending to meet the SEO volunteer (SEO Birdlife)”, “The Geography people are testing an urban planning model with the University de Alcalá de Henares”, “Hey teacher, where do I have to sign up to be an eco-delegate?”
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