Descolonizar la praxis ambiental: sistematización de la experiencia de la huerta escolar para la construcción de una propuesta pedagógica de educación ambiental en la Institución Educativa Rural Labores, del Municipio Belmira, Antioquia

Abstract

Contemporary environmental education faces a civilizational crisis that cannot be addressed through the mere transmission of technical knowledge or the promotion of individual green behaviors. Conventional approaches, often imported from Eurocentric frameworks, fall into what has been termed "colonial environmentalism," rendering territorial conflicts invisible, disregarding ancestral knowledge, and depoliticizing the society-nature relationship. In the village of Labores (Belmira, Antioquia), this problem is exacerbated: dairy farming replaces home gardens and native forests, potato monoculture uses agrochemicals that contaminate soil and water, and the school prioritizes standardized curricula that fragment knowledge while devaluing peasant knowledge. Given this scenario, the question arises: how can local knowledge about the garden be systematized to build a decolonizing environmental education pedagogical proposal, rooted in the territory and in dialogue with the community? Therefore, the objective is to systematize the experience of the school garden at the Institución Educativa Rural Labores to build, from a decolonizing approach, a pedagogical proposal for environmental education through the recovery of ancestral knowledge and the resignification of the territory within the educational community. The research was framed within the constructivist paradigm and adopted the systematization of experiences proposed by Óscar Jara (2018). The study involved 15 third-grade students (ages 8–12), 8 parents, grandparents, and community leaders. Techniques included participant observation in four garden workshops, narrative interviews, and field diaries. Analysis was conducted through open, axial, and selective coding using ATLAS.ti software, processing 999 citations that generated 555 open codes and 15 axial codes. The results identified a central category: the integral knowledge of planting and caring for the land, characterized by six properties: (1) integrality: a high co-occurrence (131) between seed planting and traditional techniques; (2) planting times: anchored to lunar cycles (waning moon) and the period from February 2 to March 19; (3) community-land relationship: land conceived as a living being with which one negotiates, not as an extractivist resource; (4) concrete practices: knowledge expressed through situated bodily actions (thinning, hilling, weeding); (5) intergenerational memory: inheritance of centuries-old knowledge ("that seed could be more than 100 years old"); (6) tensions: conflict with the hegemonic dairy model that replaces gardens with pastures and uses agrochemicals. Based on the information gathered from the community of the institution, it was concluded that the peasant knowledge of Labores constitutes a knowledge system with internal coherence, epistemic legitimacy, and deep territorial roots, challenging the fragmentation imposed by the conventional school curriculum. An epistemic shift is required in rural schools: moving from the reproduction of abyssal thinking that hierarchizes knowledge toward a space for the ecology of knowledge (Santos, 2009), where peasant knowledge dialogues horizontally with Western scientific knowledge. The school garden reveals itself as a privileged pedagogical territory for materializing a decolonizing environmental education that, with hands in the soil, cultivates food autonomy, territorial memory, and a critical commitment to the defense of life.