Agroecological project of environmental pedagogy (p.a.p.a.)el Salitre-Suba school, Bogotá

Abstract

Our public school, “El Salitre Suba”, was founded in 1904, has three campuses and offers education from preschool to 11th grade. Our Site "A" school goes from 8th to 11th grade. This site is in a rural area and it is the unique campus of a school located in an ecological reserve in the city of Bogotá, on the “Conejera” hill, “vereda la Salitrosa”, in the “Suba” area.

The sociocultural diversity of our students makes them have, for example, different learning rates. Therefore, in informal discussions, the teachers proposed different strategies to meet these demands of the teaching and learning process of our students. In these discussions, the need to respect the differences of our students and the need to program different pedagogical approaches that meet those expectations was proposed. Of all the proposals, project-based pedagogy was consolidated and, to unify in one, those independent projects that the different subjects and teachers worked in 2014.

Being in the Thomas Van der Hammen ecological reserve, the natural Sciences teachers from site “A”, afternoon session, Javier Fernando Romero Acosta and Edward Gonzalo Roa Gaitán, they proposed to work around an environmental project, a proposal that was accepted. It was proposed to work on this project taking meaningful learning theory as a common thread, with the aim of transforming traditional educational practices, since "a pedagogy understood as a unidirectional and abstract transmission of information from the teacher to the learner / passive receiver has also lost its validity" (Vergara, 2016, p. 15).

The project began in 2014, at the campus “A”, afternoon session, with 10 sub-projects and with the participation of all the teachers of this campus (each teacher leads a sub-project), and with an initial purpose, to appropriate our “Conejera” hill, create environmental awareness and improve school coexistence. The sub-projects that have been worked on over the last six years are the following: Green Wall, Environmental Culture, Ancestral connection, Agroecological Garden, “Salitremun”, Bilingual Tour Guide, Environmental Classroom, “Futbybal”, Planimetry, Ecological pathway, My Pet and I, “Chequeando ando”, and Creative Hands. Some of these sub-projects and for different reasons were replaced by others.