The plants of our place

Dialogical construction of school materials for the initial and primary school levels about native plants

Abstract

But… what are native plants? Thus we were questioned by teachers of Natural Sciences of the Higher Institute of Teacher Training (ISFD) Adoratrices. They asked for a universal and academic definition of native plants, arguing that their students felt dizzy in front of the information and the diverse ways of classifying it.

We developed the extension project “Cultural diversity, native plants and heritage: multivocal educational proposals for the initial and primary levels” (2020 and 2021) with teachers and students of the ISFD, workers of the Historical Museum of Villa del Rosario (Province of Córdoba), neighbours from the department of Río Segundo, members of the Autonomous Provincial Indigenous Educational Council, the Provincial Indigenous Council and the Public Archaeology Program (Museum of Anthropology, SEU-FFyH and IDACOR). We carried out workshops on native plants, we collected local knowledge and classified it based on definitions given by neighbours and texts made by academics to create teaching materials.

We want to socialize the mutual learning fostered by the reflexivity of teachers, students and anthropologists, analysing how we negotiated definitions and meanings to seek an ecology of knowledge (Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 2018) betting on classifications of native plants that did not repeat those of manuals of botany or pharmacopoeias, but would incorporate new voices and knowledge to the educational system. This is how we created the didactic material “The plants of our place: multivocal educational proposals for the initial and primary levels” that compiles didactic sequences authored by ISFD students and teachers (Muñoz Paganoni et al., 2020).