Living with Water, Learning From it: Rural Educational Practices around Disasters in the Lower Salado River Basin (Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina). A Case Study

Abstract

Rural educational environments in the province of Buenos Aires are affected by hydro-social processes that transform and dynamise the territory, such as droughts and floods. CEPTs (Centros Educativos para la Producción Total, one of the modalities of agricultural education in the province of Buenos Aires) are not left out of these processes by including in their curricula tools such as Production Notebooks, Research Plans and Theses, which can motivate the study of such disasters. Through the development of these tools, the educational community manifests the productive and social impact of droughts and floods, together with the existence of local knowledge and generational coping practices. Therefore, the general objective of this paper is to examine, through a case study, how students in a rural school in Buenos Aires rebuild the socio-territorial capital of their community (a fundamental aspect for the construction of resilient communities) through territorially anchored educational practices. The research will focus on CEPT No. 28 Paraje ‘La Unión’ in the district of General Guido, founded in 2008 and noted for its continuity and interest in the subject. Following the social sciences paradigm in the study of disasters, the school will be taken as a central place of rural sociability in order to understand droughts and floods comprehensively and as processes. The methodological design of the article is qualitative, based on the analysis of the aforementioned tools, and complemented with in-depth interviews with the teaching and management staff and an experience of participant observation in the institution.