Teaching with the Territory: Students from Villarrica Explore Their Surroundings through Art and Environmental Awareness
Re-establishing the bond between students and their natural environment was the focus of the project Building Bridges between Classrooms and the Territory, developed within the framework of Fundación Mar Adentro’s 2025 Docente Activo program. Through creative pedagogical experiences and field trips, the initiative sought to foster critical awareness and values of respect toward nature, strengthening the connection between school, territory, and community.
How do you teach students to observe the territory? In what ways can young people once again feel part of the place they inhabit? These questions guided teachers Carlos Celedón (History, Geography, and Social Sciences) and Jocelyn Glaves (Visual and Performing Arts) in Building Bridges between Classrooms and the Territory, a project aimed at reconnecting 11th and 12th-grade students from Colegio Filadelfia Tabancura in Villarrica with their natural surroundings through art and sensitive, participatory educational experiences.
Through activities such as participatory mapping, field trips to the Mallolafquén wetland and the Voipir glacier, and the creation of fanzines, calligrams, and a collective map, students embarked on a learning journey in dialogue with the landscape. Between May and June, the sessions invited them to observe, explore, and create from a situated perspective.
The first session involved a participatory mapping exercise, where students located their homes and meaningful spaces in Villarrica and Afunalhue on a map, then reflected collectively on the shared territory. They also worked with group journals to record their observations, emotions, and learnings throughout the process—materials that later inspired the creation of their fanzines.
Learning Beyond the Classroom
Expanding the educational experience beyond the classroom and bringing a deeper understanding of the natural environment to young people was one of the main goals of this educational initiative. Through outdoor activities, the project sought to create learning spaces grounded in attentive observation, free exploration, and direct engagement with the territory.
The first outing was a guided visit to the Mallolafquén wetland in Villarrica, where students identified local biodiversity, understood its importance for ecological balance, and recognized the threats facing this ecosystem due to human intervention and climate change.
During the visit, each participant carried a blank fanzine to record thoughts, drawings, and emotions that arose along the way. They also consciously collected natural elements to later create drawings using the sgraffito technique, representing textures, shapes, and structures from the observed landscape.
The second outing was to the Voipir glacier, located within Villarrica National Park. There, students explored the notions of scale and perspective and understood the interdependence among local and regional ecosystems. To conclude the process, they created calligrams that intertwined words and images in a poetic synthesis of their experiences and wrote a collective manifesto expressing their learnings, emotions, and commitments to the territory.