A sustainable school in rural Argentina as a strategy for protest: planetary challenges and scale tensions in governing school infrastructure

• In Event: Protest, Activism and Education

Proposal

This paper advances research about global education policy by drawing attention to how tensions between global, national, regional and local actors affect – and are affected by – school infrastructure and provisioning. Conceiving infrastructure not only as the ‘natural’ and built environment, but also as ‘shared standards and ideas’ that shape their use (Easterling, 2014), we show how attempts to foster a whole-school approach to sustainability education comes into conflict with the educational ideas and values held by variously situated actors. To illustrate these tensions, we draw on a case study from a recently built sustainable school in rural Argentina, which can be regarded as a strategy of protest against a deeply engrained school grammar that stands in the way of transforming education to address current planetary challenges more effectively.

The sustainable school was built in 2018 in Mar Chiquita, a small seaside village in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, to house the relocated Primary School No. 12, founded in 1962. It is next to a lagoon, a delicate ecosystem that is a provincial natural reserve and was acknowledged by UNESCO as a biosphere reserve in 1966. Much more than a landmark, since the creation of Primary School No. 12 in its foundational location, the Mar Chiquita lagoon has been highly significant beyond being a natural reserve, and many of its projects have always revolved around it. So, when the original rural school’s building was outgrown, moving closer to the shore became another driver for the move to a new building. Thus, the aim of this initiative was to address the need of the community for better-suited premises to house their pre-existing rural school into a larger building, while providing a design that reflects more aptly the school’s pedagogical as well as physical closeness with the lagoon. The new building was designed by a US architecture firm with support from Latin American NGOs and the state, following an “Earthship” concept, which is based on the use of renewable energy and the reuse of waste. It was rigged up by a diverse group of volunteers, many of them belonging to the local community, including students and their families.

Thus, this case study materializes in a setting that results from the intersection of three spaces: the Mar Chiquita Lagoon as the natural environment, a pre-existing and now relocated rural public-school as the institutional framework, and the new and rather disruptive sustainable architectural design that houses this community. This new building design is not originally suited for a school, and therefore it has entailed adaptations. The process of forging partnerships and adapting structures has not been exempt from tension, and in the complexity of the intersection in which this scene takes place, a new and peculiar school culture is in the making.

Through the lens of a place-based education approach (Mckenzie, 2008; Smith, 2002, among others), we delve into the relationship between the community, the environment, and space as the main driver for this educational project. Inspired by the literature on Whole School Approaches to Sustainability Education (Henderson and Tilbury, 2004; Shallcross and Robinson, 2008; Eames et. al., 2010; Mathar, 2014, among others, and more locally, Sabbatini and Ezcurra, 2019), we have organized our exploration around four different dimensions of school life in order to portray an integral picture: teaching and learning, participation and outreach, management of support areas and strategic leadership. These dimensions are systemically intertwined and allow us to showcase the unique interplay between the community and the environment in this particular place where the school stands today, in this very peculiar building. The portrayal of this interplay stems from on-site visits, in-depth interviews with key stakeholders and the analysis of salient documents like the prescribed curriculum, specific unit plans and projects and students’ productions, among other inputs.

Our key findings show that both the natural and the built environment of the sustainable school are embedded in students’ learning and the community. Likewise, a sense of ownership and care for the lagoon and built structure of the school among students is critical to its vision. Yet, given the specificity of the school’s design and use and despite being the building’s owner, the state does not fund or appropriately resource its maintenance. This places financial burdens on the school and demands labour time of the community. At the same time, the state regulates what must be included in the school’s curriculum. But in this particular case, the curriculum combines the contents prescribed by the local government with specific interdisciplinary projects that focus on gaining a deeper understanding of the local wealth in biodiversity, in order to strengthen the community’s capacity to preserve it from human impact. However, standardized tests are designed on the assumption that students should read a set of specific books that are alien to these issues, among other prescriptions that stand in the way of the school’s own project. Yet for the school community, its own surroundings and infrastructure – such as the protected lagoon where it is situated, the vegetable garden it houses and the building itself – might ideally comprise and shape the content of curricula.

In short, a strong public-school grammar - state-owned and run, with a prescribed curriculum linked to standardized expected outcomes - shapes much of the school’s life, sometimes at odds with the integral outlook that the very shape of the self-sustainable building inspires. Navigating these tensions has placed pressure on school leadership, who attempt to reconcile the school’s vision of sustainability with that of the state’s tendency toward standardization. These tensions are made more difficult given the schools growing popularity due to families approving of its vision and proposal for their children’s education. Like threads that are braided into one, these narratives shape each other and blend together in this setting where the building stands out as a landmark of protest. Thus, centring the notion of infrastructure offers novel ways of unpacking how tensions play out in global education policy and practice as it becomes situated in particular places.

Authors

• Carla Andrea Sabbatini, Universidad De San Andrés

• Marcia Mckenzie, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne

• Jason Beech, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne