teaching innovative in the rural school of Alpartir

For more than two months, Guadalupe Caireta, a native of Girona and student of the double Degree in Pedagogy and Education Primary Education at the University of Navarra, has been enjoying the opportunity to do her internship as a teacher and pedagogue in the rural school of Alpartir, a small town in the province of Zaragoza.

Thanks to the Princess of Girona Foundation'sscholarship "Generación Docentes", Guadalupe and 29 other young people can train for four months in rural schools in Galicia, Extremadura or Aragon. One of the requirements of the program is that the work of End of Degree is related to the rural school. In the case of the student from the University of Navarra, she will carry out two projects, one focused on "Attention to diversity in rural schools" and the other on "The different educational dynamics generated in rural schools".

As she explains, although this experience is part of the practicum of the Degree in Pedagogy, for the CEIP Ramón y Cajal de Alpartir she is not only an intern, but a teacher with all the competences. Guadalupe leads some projects at the school, such as "Philosophy for children", in which she deals weekly with fundamental issues for students to reflect on, or "Learning to undertake", a program supported by the Ibercaja Foundation in which students in 6th grade create and manage a cooperative, working in a way multidisciplinary between different subjects.

Educating for life

The model of teaching in this school is different from other educational centers. "The children do not work with textbooks, but with projects that integrate several subjects," explains the student. For example, students collect data such as rainfall or temperatures and later use them to do math problems or deal with geography or natural science questions. In this rural school, she says, "children are educated for life, working a lot on consensus among them, respect for others ...".

It is common to hear that rural schools must compensate for the inequalities that are generated for students by living in a village rather than in a city, but for Guadalupe "this model has many things that can enrich if integrated with other educational models". For this reason, the student of Pedagogy and Education Primary would like to be able to incorporate everything she is learning during her stay in Alpartir in her professional future. The student remembers her arrival at CEIP Ramón y Cajal de Alpartir as "somewhat chaotic, although beautiful". She landed in the middle of the snowy Filomena and immediately began working with the students. "The message I have received from the beginning has been that this school is all of us, and that the most important thing is that the children are happy," she says.

Guadalupe encourages future teachers to participate in this program. Although it is and requires organization and time, since the students who benefit from this scholarship receive training sessions, "it means betting on something that will help you in the future," she continues.