A public school in Zaragoza that set out to transform plastic waste into functional and artistic objects, and with it to finance drinking water filters for Colombian schoolchildren.
“Enough of treating nature like a toilet” is a statement made by UN Secretary General António Guterres at the opening of the COP26 Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. “We are digging our own grave,” he adds.
The study and care of the environment are integrated in the design of learning and in their daily lifestyles, in the reorganization of the school’s resources, in classroom relations, corridors, playgrounds…
April 11, 2019, is an important date in the memory of the Public School of Infant and Primary Education Foro Romano, Cuarte de Huerva (Zaragoza). The exhibition “Transform your plastic into drinking water closed in an atmosphere of “a lot of emotion, a lot of nerves…”, say teachers Yolanda Pérez, Cristina Burriel and Tamara Villarroya. It was the culmination of two months of research, awareness and action, developed with children in the second year of kindergarten.
They had set out to transform plastic waste into functional and artistic objects, and in the financing of drinking water filters for Colombian schoolchildren; classmates from other parts of the planet, the common home, in need of this essential good.
“We were convinced of the need for our students to participate actively in caring for our world,” say the teachers.
The technology industry has made profit of developments in artificial intelligence for the creation of robots to make processors smaller and smaller and in massive quantities, which would be practically impossible for humans today.
One of these developments has to do with the analysis of data generated by satellites, which are being used both for scientific research and for the development of new business alternatives related to earth observation. In the case of the latter, some companies have developed algorithms and programs that interpret the information collected by earth observation satellites (images and data), to adequately monitor agricultural and livestock activities, track natural disasters, measure levels of atmospheric and water pollution, etc.
They call on political leaders to “include industrialists in all debates concerning education”.
A discourse opposed and parallel to that of science, the most solemn governmental declarations and some social movements. A proclamation that goes viral with each of the 26 Climate Summits, denouncing how little we have learned. The impact of our way of life on the deterioration of the environment and climate change has become clear.
Some innovative schools try to overcome this discourse of opposites and achieve it with the creation of scenarios of research, learning and care, for all and for all, in coordination with many other spaces of humanization; recognizing the power of construction and transformation of the social with others.
