Education for the transformation of the territory: the experience of Félix Muriel Secondary School
How can students help to create more sustainable land management models?
"For a living forest" is a transdisciplinary service-learning project that connects students with local communities and land stewardship thanks to the involvement of more than twenty teachers from different departments.
"For a living forest" sprouts from the severe forest fires that devoured 1200 hectares in 2019, approaching several towns and forcing the eviction of the school where the project is being developed.
Local
Spain
Rianxo
Mainly rural
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): IES FELIX MURIEL Type of organisation: SECONDARY SCHOOL First name of representative: RAFAEL Last name of representative: SACO FERNÁNDEZ Gender: Male Nationality: Spain Function: TEACHER AND COORDINATOR OF PROJECT Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: RÚA ANA MARÍA MOGAS 1 Town: RIANXO Postal code: 15920 Country: Spain Direct Tel:+34 881 86 66 46 E-mail:ies.felix.muriel@edu.xunta.gal Website:https://www.edu.xunta.gal/centros/iesfelixmuriel/
At the end of March 2019, smoke once again darkened the sky over the Barbanza peninsula. Spring was still arriving, but a forest fire, encouraged by an intense northeast wind and driven by the unsustainable eucalyptus monoculture, devoured around 1200 hectares in the municipalities of Dodro and Rianxo, dangerously approaching several towns and forcing the eviction of the Félix Muriel secondary school in Rianxo.
After a couple of days, the wind began to die down and the fire could be controlled by the extinguishing services, but it became a turning point. The storm did not give way to calm, but to action. In mid-April, the Platform for the Defence of the Forest was born, made up of most of Rianxo’s forest communities, convinced of the need to move together towards sustainability. A few months later, the Félix Muriel secondary school launched "For a living forest", a service-learning project which aims to link educational practice with local communities and land stewardship, promoting a more active and participatory learning model that allows for a greater impact of the students’ work in relation to ecological awareness and environmental management.
"For a living forest" began its journey in 2020 with a process of transformation of the school playground, which had been surrounded by fire in March 2019. One of the most important actions in this first phase was the removal of 45 large acacias, an invasive and pyrophyte species that dominated the area. On the other hand, the students began to develop projects linked to different subjects – currently around twenty teachers from the most diverse departments are involved in the project– from carrying out research on land use in the past by interviewing their elders or designing land management entrepreneurial proposals for the forest communities in the area to making the documentary "For a living forest", which was awarded at the short films festival FICBUEU 2021 (link in attached documents).
Service-learning
Environmental awareness
Land stewardship
Community engagement
Transdisciplinary teaching
Today’s students will be tomorrow’s land managers.
The project is based on the understanding that tackling the current situation of land abandonment, loss of biodiversity and recurrent forest fires in the region requires re-establishing the links between communities and active land management that have been progressively weakened over the last 70 years. To this ends, more than twenty teachers from the most diverse departments design research and action activities to involve students in the creation of solutions to these issues:
KEY OBJETIVES AND ACTIVITIES
• Becoming aware of the environmental limits of our planet and the need for a commitment to more sustainable territorial models.
• Understanding territories as natural and cultural units and the need to intervene in order to stop their deterioration.
• Applying academic knowledge in initiatives that contribute to the sustainability of the territory.
• Providing students with academic resources for sustainable land management that can prevent forest fires and loss of biodiversity.
• Getting to know places of high environmental value and examples of sustainable land planning and management that can serve as good practice reference.
• Conducting research on the occurrence and regularity of forest fires and their economic, social and environmental consequences.
• Studying the organisation of common land communities and their direct democratic land management models.
• Getting to know other land management model references.
• Writing reports on the challenges that local common land communities have to face, known throughout interviews to their members.
• Designing of entrepreneurial proposals aimed to local common land communities to diversify their production and improve their sustainability. Students are required to develop the branding of their proposals, present them and debate on their strengths and weaknesses.
• Learning from past land uses, circular economy and ecological balance.
A sustainable territory is beautiful.
Planned, organised and well managed land uses results in higher environmental quality and landscape beauty: mixed mosaics of crops and agroforestry activities in combination with biodiverse natural areas
As an examplary action developed in this sense, the removal of 45 large acacia trees that were occupying the school grounds was a very important element in incorporating the notion of territorial sustainability. They were replaced with hardwoods and fruit trees and regular interventions were carried out to remove acacia shoots, as well as visits to the communal land and planting work in burnt areas of the communal woodland in collaboration with the AMICOS association for disabled people.
KEY OBJECTIVES AND ACTIVITIES
• Designing, construction and maintenance of greenhouse for growing leafy trees to be planted in areas of the forests affected by forest fires.
• Cooperatively create artistic expressions and products in different languages and media about the contributions of bioculture.
• Keeping clean the courtyard of the institute.
The students' learning profiles were identified and considered in the planning of the project. Creativity was encouraged by working in teams in which action was combined with classroom discussion.
For specific activities, groups of students were constituted mainly on the basis of their affinities and origin. Only when necessary and on an ad hoc basis, the groups were compensated at this level according to the definition of their potential learning profiles.
In this process, no specific reinforcement of gender equality was necessary, since, the groups were egalitarian and balanced.
Dialogue with local communities agents and the students' awareness of the relevance of their elders' knowledge for the problems of the present, as well as the elders' own consideration of their interactions with the boys and girls, brought about a real revitalisation of the process and renewed the meaning of the service-learning.
KEY OBJETCTIVES AND ACTIVITIES
• Recognising and integrating the knowledge from the local community in the management of land and sea.
• Recover the links between the local knowledge of older generations and the younger ones, that the last decades of unsensitive development and abandonment has broken
• Understanding cultural traditions that are symbiotic with land use, against the dichotomy nature-culture based on the paradigm of their difference.
Education and action
The project is conceived with the aim of integrating educational learning processes and social contributions, using service-learning as the main tool, so that knowledge and actions are simultaneously constructed through the involvement of different agents. That is to say, the aim is to converge in a formative praxis in which education is put into dialogue with action, starting from a very real situation, such as the problem of fires and the need for sustainable management, and in which the contributions from agents outside the educational system acquire full meaning: community informants, elderly people, students' families, representatives of the common land communities... At the same time, the academic knowledge and competences of the students want to be applied as ways of influencing the improvement of these problems, thus forming a community in the broad sense of community knowledge and formative learning, on the horizon of an effective sustainable transformation of the territory and the construction of alternatives for life in rural areas.
Open project
The learning process is committed to common good, which requires bringing together the agents and bodies involved in the sustainable territorial management of the area. In this way, a network of collaborations and links was forged that feeds back and reinforces the very meaning of the community instances around service-learning.
First, the common land communities in the area, organised in the Platform for the Defence of the Forest lay the foundations for sustainable management and an alternative to the productivist model based on eucalyptus monoculture. The students receive from the communities a wealth of knowledge about the uses of the territory and the integrative and democratic ways of organisation, building intergenerational bridges that also provide affective learning about community assets and the necessary awareness of the reality of the communities and their needs. The contribution of the service-learning to these communities, as central agents in the land management of the area, is at the heart of the project.
The project also involves the Rianxo Fishermen's association, which coordinates lectures to discuss the effects of forest fires on shellfish resources.
The Town Council of Rianxo also collaborates, providing information to the entrepreneural initatives designed by the students.
Private foundations as Fundación RIA and Fundación Banco Santander, collaborate throught the joint initiative Barbanza Ecosocial Lab, providing advice and financial support to the initiative.
On the methodological level, the project was advised by the research group Esculca of the Pedagogy Faculty of the USC, which prepared the students for the interviews, providing criteria. They have also written research articles on this educational project.
There was also constant interaction with the association for rural development AVOAR, which provided a vision of the context, advised and intervened by carrying out activities.
Transdisciplinary approach
The project is oriented to the students of the Secondary School Félix Muriel de Rianxo. It is developed throughout different subjects depending on the conformation of the final staff. At the moment, nearly 20 teachers from the departments of Philosophy, Geography and History, Technology, Galician Language, French, Biology and Arts, are already involved in the project
An active and participative methodology is applied, orienting the practices and activities on the development of the key competences of the students and integrating the specific competences of the subjects or areas in correspondence with their educational level.
The different curricular subjects establish the programming of the activities and knowledge that make up the project according to the didactic programmes and the dynamics that arise with the students. Coordination and curricular specification processes are developed in teachers' working groups.
The activities are programmed according to the educational levels of the students and their previous participation in the project.
The school as an agent of eco-social activism
The project brings together elements that contribute to educational innovation, not only in the field of service-learning but also regarding the sources of knowledge and the reinforcement of the identity of the community.
The learning of the students themselves makes sense within the framework of an intervention of environmental transformation, and on socio-economic initiatives that are needed to preserve and improve the territory. The personal dimension, the construction of knowledge and the development of competences are all involved in the conformation of their own and conscious project.
On the other hand, community knowledge such as the historical management of the common land or toponymy are integrated in order to recognise their value, linking them with academic knowledge and curricular developments.
The confluence of these strands on bioculture makes the educational process a collective activity to face shared challenges,
Firstly, the problem of forest fires. Secondly, compromising the very way of being in the world, the forms of communal organisation in a relationship with the territory in a context of eco-social crisis. In short, to explore and develop new paths for the ecology of learning based on an integrating notion of community.
Therefore, the school becomes an agent of eco-social activism: not just awareness-raising, but the application of knowledge for the protection of the territory. The academic knowledge that the school can accredit is put at the service of the collective.
Dissemination of learnings as a premise
The service-learning approach that guides the project can be transferred to other places, groups of beneficiaries and contexts.
The activities developed in the framework of the project and their products are available for reference in the blog “Aula Verde: Biocultura por un Monte Vivo” (Green Classroom: Bioculture for a Living Forest), https://rafasaco05.wixsite.com/website , which, like a logbook, records the evolution of the whole project and its achievements. Conferences are recorded and can be revisited in the blog.
From its products, the project achieved new recognitions. It is worth mentioning the first prizes won by the short film made by the students themselves, in the education sections of the FICBUEU and CINEDUCA competitions of the Ateneo de Compostela. The project was disseminated in the magazine EDUGA and was presented in other centres.
Service-learning
A service-learning methodology was adopted from the very beginning, in which the participation of the students in the activities and projects is aimed at providing services to the community, in this case to the common land communities and the families of the students themselves, which in many cases form part of these common land communities.
On the basis of the knowledge of the effective reality of the community and its needs, students will delve into the achievement of the project's objectives by means of multiple activities applying the key competences and integrating the specific ones in a real contribution that puts the knowledge and skills acquired at the service of the improvement of the community.
The new pupils will start from the knowledge of the different realities of the territory defined by the communal forest, the estuary and the landscape over time, the archaeological witnesses and their cultural significance and the socio-economic importance for the community.
Students who have already participated in the project will develop initiatives, interventions and products with a sense of community, contributing to the sustainable management of the forest and the estuary and the improvement of natural community spaces.
The methodological development will be supported by the association for cultural and educational development in rural areas AVOAR and the group ESCULCA.
The project will promote coordination with the various bodies of the educational community, with the Platform for the Defence of the Forest, with the Barbanza Ecosocial Lab, the Rianxo Fishermen's Association, the Platform for the Defence of the Arousa Estuary and with possible initiatives from other educational centres.
Sustainability is local
In the current academic year, with the legislative framework that is opening up with the implementation of a new educational regulation in Spain, we are offered a valuable opportunity to give meaning to school praxis by addressing global issues and challenges from a local perspective.
We need ways of tackling the climate crisis that we are experiencing from an eco-social perspective that encourages collective relational dynamics on which to build alternatives based on the development of the students' competences.
In this framework and on the potential of the notion of bioculture that links the achievements of culture and human action on an indisputable background that as nature we need to live and to which we belong, the educational community can face the problem of the sustainability of the territory as a complex totality in which the community reality is committed in a broad sense, integrating academic and community knowledge and generating proposals that engage the students' own personal project.
In addition to continuing the development of the lines of work underway, the main initiatives for the current academic year are, on the one hand, and in relation to the sustainable management of the forest:
- The funding in the provision of services of the greenhouse that we are starting to build. It will have to be equipped with a photovoltaic energy system for lighting and to feed a system of streams in the seating areas and to coordinate the collection and selection of seeds that will allow us to obtain leafy shoots in the installation itself in order to plant them on communal land.
- Work on the problem of the fires of last summer, especially that of Barbanza peninsula, which affected 2200 hectares.
- Generate QR codes to identify the trees on the school grounds and the trees planted on communal land.
- To study the community management of the water supply as part of the common heritage and the memory of the territory.
Another new aspect that we want to develop has to do with extending our projection on the territory as a whole in which we can integrate the Arousa estuary, thus expanding the environmental, economic, social and historical-cultural factors that are being considered:
- SWOT analysis of the estuary; real threats and potential for its sustainability.
- Forms of organisation and management of the estuary's resources and work at sea.
- Myths, symbols and stories that come from the sea.
This aspect of the project will allow it to converge with the other projects of the institute, such as Creative Poles and Blue Schools.
We will also lay the foundations for an ERASMUS programme involving schools in communally managed areas and organisations of forest communities at European level, expanding our project beyond borders.
At an organisational level, procedures for coordination and curricular specification will be established, as well as initiatives that will allow the training of the participating teachers.
The project activities will aim to acquire and develop the following key competences:
Learning to learn, promoting students to be the protagonist and manager of their learning processes; defining objectives and planning tasks in which they assume shared and individual responsibilities, as well as preparing arguments and resolving proposals.
Mathematical competence and competence in science and technology, through key notions related to ecosystems and the environment, as well as geometric projections and mathematical calculations and design of structures, calculations of surfaces in the plane and calculations of resource and material yields, data management, statistics, etc.
Linguistic communication, acquired through the written and oral expression of the realities and conditions of the territory as well as its affectation by fires and the possible prevention and reversal of its effects from the contributions of bioculture.
Digital competence, using information and communications technology resources to produce their own digital documents and products appropriate to their age and the task undertaken.
Cultural awareness and expressions, through access to the condition of the territory as a cultural and socio-economic construction of human action, interpreting and valuing the ways in which it was and is both an extension of human habitat and a source of resources threatened by forest fires and unsustainable development.
Initiative and entrepreneurial spirit, implementing through meaningful and active methodologies the motivation that leads to give shape to a personal project in the realisation of products resulting from a genuine and ethical commitment to the challenges assumed.
