Pedagogías del Mañana is a program directed towards schools and teachers in Spain, whose goal is to “foster eco-social education” through artistic creation. Several classes, from 5th to 11th grade, in various locations throughout Spain, worked with educators and artists to explore a topic that connects ecological issues, social issues, and local characteristics. From becoming aware of plants and learning to care for them, raising awareness of harmful touristic projects in their valleys, or creating a news bulletin from the future of their urban town, the pupils learned to work together, to project into the future, as well as to think about the environment as a complex system on which they depend.
Pedagogías del Mañana
Country(ies)
Spain
Organisation(s)
Cooperativa Garua, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia
Year(s)
2023–2024
Short description of the project (Spanish)
How
Pedagogías del Mañana is a program directed towards schools and teachers in Spain, whose goal is to “foster eco-social education” through artistic creation, and “affirm the role of School as a place capable of leading transformative activities, and of imagining alternative futures”.
Over the course of two years, several classes, from 5th to 11th grade, in various locations throughout Spain, worked with educators and artists to explore a topic that connects ecological issues, social issues, and local characteristics. Then the groups met in Madrid’s Reina Sofia museum to share their experience.
Alongside those experimentations, the project also developed training courses for teachers, whose goal was to help them integrate futures and “ecosocial education” in their activity.
Photo courtesy of Jose Luis Fdez. Casadevante Kois. Cooperativa GARÚA.
What
In the Vargas (Cantabria) high school, visual artist Seila Fernández Arconada helped the 40 young participants become aware of “vegetation blindness”: the invisibility of vegetation in most representations, from their absence in cave paintings to the selective gaze of present adults looking at pictures of landscape and identifying only animals or man-made artefacts. Then they reconnected with plants, learning to name them and care for them.
Pedagogías del Mañana, Museo Reina Sofia, 2023. Photo credit: Román Lores
In a school in Caldearenas (Aragon), pupils took sides against the development of skiing installations in a preserved valley, creating posters and building fake equipment such as a cable car cabin, which they located in unlikely places, in order to develop awareness in the community that “something was out of place”. The project named itself as a slogan in the Aragonese language: “Ya ye prou!”, meaning “Enough, already!”
Photo courtesy of Jose Luis Fdez. Casadevante Kois. Cooperativa GARÚA.
In Leganes, near Madrid, students created a news broadcast from the future, describing how their community was transformed by agroecology. Previously, they visited the neighborhood association, an organic produce store, and an urban garden, and made collages to illustrate the news with images.
News bulletin from the future (Spanish)
In Cabuérniga (Cantabria), young pupils explored the ecological, social, economic and cultural aspects connected to the Saja river, connecting knowledge, emotion, and ecological challenges. The biodiversity of the Saja, health, biocultural memory, literature, and the school community have served to structure the educational intervention. Interviews, photographs, field trips, an exhibition, and the creation of new signage for the river are some of the creations that came out of this work.
Image courtesy of Jose Luis Fdez. Casadevante Kois. Cooperativa GARÚA.
At the end of the project, all participating students and teachers travelled to Madrid to meet within the Reina Sofia museum. This allowed both students and teachers to meet and reflect on their respective experiences. For the students, it added a layer of importance to the project, helping them to become more deeply involved.
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