“The world changes through consciousness. It’s a different way of seeing, feeling, understanding, and being.”
Claudio Naranjo
The Transformative Nature Project was launched in 2021 as an educational initiative developed jointly by the Cosmos Foundation and the Faculty of Education at Alberto Hurtado University. Its objective is to develop and evaluate educational experiences with nature, promoting ecological citizenship training and contributing to the projection of the transformations necessary to create better futures for all.
This initiative seeks to take a step forward by rethinking and proposing new ways of linking education and nature, with the goal of contributing to improving the quality and access to education in our country. On the horizon is the goal of educationally valuing encounters with nature.
Within the context of the Transformative Nature project, two main lines of work are developed: the first is training, and the second is related to the measurement of learning outcomes. The first line corresponds to the development and implementation of a Pedagogical Model in schools, along with its respective teacher training model.
Pedagogical Model: Transformative Education with Nature
The Transformative Education with Nature Pedagogical Model’s central educational purpose is to bring educational communities closer to education situated in and with nature, contributing through pedagogy to the development of ecological citizenship.
In general terms, the function of the Pedagogical Model in the educational field is to problematize the visions of nature and education, seeking to bring forth transformative actions from the problematization and through the development of pedagogical proposals relevant to different contexts. The proposal draws on experiences already developed in various educational communities, which foster the production of knowledge integrated by different rationalities—scientific, ethical, and aesthetic—through transformative pedagogical experiences.
“Our country urgently needs new educational horizons, and experiences with nature offer us opportunities to connect human beings with their biological, social, and cultural selves. In this sense, these experiences are capable of enhancing physical and spiritual well-being, understood as a basic condition for learning and transformation.”
Antonia Condeza, coordinator of the Transformative Nature program
Continuing Education Course for Teachers
In March 2022, the Pedagogical Model of Transformative Education with Nature was launched, with the start of the first training course for practicing teachers using this educational approach. Two schools in Santiago decided to train their teams in a new form of nature education.
The Santa Victoria School (Huechuraba) and the República de Haiti School (Santiago Centro) were developed based on the “Competencies for Transformation” proposed by the Educational Model: Being and Caring; Knowing; Learning Critical Thinking; Imagining and Creating; and Influencing and Affecting.
The following objectives were developed in the process:
- Experience the affective and sensitive dimensions of the human-nature relationship.
- Explore methodologies for co-creating and co-constructing knowledge and skills.
- Analyze scientific evidence of the socio-ecological crisis and its expressions at local and global scales.
- To didactically problematize socio-ecological issues from a critical and ethical-citizen perspective.
- Create and project new narratives for the creation of possible and desired futures.
- Design transdisciplinary pedagogical experiences based on the Education Model.
- Transformative with Nature and the Project-Based Learning (PBL) approach.
You can learn more about the Transformative Nature program on the website we developed with Alberto Hurtado University : www.naturaleza.uahurtado.cl