Inspiration and foundation
La Casa de la Maestra is a project created by teachers to reflect on how we learn. We aim for metacognition in its purest form. We will delve into the basic pillars of educational models in a privileged environment that allows us to carry out different activities.
Communication, Autonomy and Relationship
We want a place where every attendee can bring in their contributions, in a climate of cordial but deep relations, of esteemed reciprocity, where discrepancies -understood as richness- are not erased, and where the tireless, reflexive work that any teacher must develop is stimulated.
There is a trend nowadays that pushes us to prepare ourselves and our students to live the future, and, in the meantime, we all miss the present.
We want to recover the aspiration for a single purpose in school: a contribution to the world. With this purpose in mind, we have designed experiential formations to learn how to teach from the basis of deep knowledge and emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
This space has been created to think about relational education, where the teacher’s potentialities and capacities emerge and where the teacher discovers how the student learns, reflecting on their own learning processes.
“Education is the most important enterprise that a country will have”.
Giner de los Ríos
In this spirit, we want to open a space for educational reflection, where all those who are linked in one way or other with the task of educating -whether they are teachers, fathers, mothers, friends – are invited, so that they can recover the necessary curiosity about the humanistic and philosophical training of teachers.
Our intention is to approach a different experience where personal learning finds the appropriate context to learn to teach and teach to learn.
“Perhaps the smallest amount of our knowledge (…) comes to all of us from the classrooms, outside of which (…) we have been accumulating, day by day, without knowing it (…) in books, periodicals, conversations (…) on the street, in the countryside (…) the enormous flow in which life (…) is adorned. And this non-professional, non-reflexive, free and diffuse environment, where we learn “for free”, must be precisely the field that constitutes the essential content of missionary action”, stated the founder of the “Misiones Pedagógicas” (Pedagogical Missions) in his “Memoria del Patronato de las Misiones” (Memory of the Missions Patronage)
These words could be the first third of the 20th century version of what, decades later, UNESCO will define as non-formal education. educación no formal.
But beyond this on-the-ground training, which is what we’d like to be able to do in schools like “Lolita Pérez” (Vilavedelle, 1924) and others later, it is worth highlighting the moral support that we need as teachers. “A teacher has to live in a stimulating environment. They cannot do it in an often hostile environment, full of absurd resistances” and with no time, always with no time. That’s why very good teachers give up. They end up being victims of the environment or instruments of the system.
It might seem ambitious but it is not so when the goal is so legitimated: the men and women of the “Institución Libre de Enseñanza” (Independent Educational Institution) worked to achieve a social transformation of the teacher status, place them in the social link that corresponded to them. They remain as heirs of this experience of popular education and guardians of the culture that spread. Let’s take up that legacy and give it the interpretation it now needs.