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Regaining a sense of belonging

The Rural Forms Laboratory
The Rural Forms Laboratory: A Project with Childhood through a Creative Place-Based Education
The Rural Forms Laboratory recognizes aesthetic education as a fundamental tool for sustainable change, incorporating traditional knowledge and practices into a contemporary educational context. The project integrates both the design of the laboratory furniture and the materials and educational programs that make up a nomadic device, adapted to different social and cultural contexts where it is installed.Its main objective is to promote the intergenerational transmission of knowledge.
Spain
Regional
- Galicia
- Valencia
- Barcelona
Mainly rural
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
Yes
2024-12-31
No
No
No
As a representative of an organisation

We understand artistic creation as a fundamental tool in shaping critical awareness of the issues affecting the natural and built environment in which we live. Our project, Rural Forms Laboratories, aims primarily to recover and highlight the knowledge and skills specific to a place, strengthening the sense of belonging and collective participation.
These laboratories serve as mobile action spaces that adapt to the context in which they are installed, allowing for the development of intergenerational and interdisciplinary creative workshops.
These portable classrooms reclaim the idea of the workshop as a space for action and research, drawing inspiration from early 20th-century avant-garde movements and the vision of Isaac Díaz Pardo in the creation of the Laboratorio de Formas de Galicia. These workshops are designed for educational communities and families who live and work in rural areas.
This project originated in Galicia and has expanded to other communities such as Valencia and Barcelona through collaborations with cultural and educational institutions. In parallel with its development, we have created a pedagogical approach called Creative Place-Based Education.
. This approach situates creative processes and territorial memory as fundamental tools for generating alternative, critical, and emancipatory perspectives. It aims to recover the shared memory and heritage of a territory, emphasizing the value of rural contexts. To achieve this, real interactions are essential, facilitating intergenerational contact and transferring key concepts of traditional cultures and knowledge into a contemporary educational setting.
The project stems from research conducted by the Escolaimaxinada educational innovation group at the University of Santiago de Compostela. The main focus of this group is to incorporate creative processes as tools for change and real knowledge transfer between the local rural population and new generations.
Creative Pedagogies
Sense of Belonging
Aesthetic Education
Intergenerationality
Educational Innovation
The Rural Forms Laboratory emphasizes the need to educate from an early age about respect for shared resources, the value of collective memory, and local identity. It fosters a critical citizenry that actively and thoughtfully participates in social, cultural, and political transformations. The Creative Place-Based Education are based on creative processes that combine environmental and heritage education with perspectives linking territory, community, and sustainable development.
The project focuses on three fundamental lines of action:
• Generating conscious knowledge about the rural territory and its challenges.
• Exploring new ways to highlight traditional knowledge and skills as strategies to address current ecological, cultural, and social issues.
• Giving voice to children as a source of hope in assuming collective responsibility for the ecological, cultural, and educational crisis.
The laboratories, installed in various contexts, have encouraged critical analysis of rural environments through participatory research. The workshops have fostered awareness of local biodiversity, the sustainable use of resources, and the identification of environmental threats, such as ecosystem loss and pollution.
Intergenerational knowledge transfer—covering traditional crafts, materials, oral traditions, and heritage interpretation—has allowed children to recognize and appreciate sustainable practices that respect the territory. They have worked in terms of care, resilience, and sustainability in response to environmental and social challenges.
The Rural Forms Laboratory views artistic processes as tools for addressing contemporary challenges, including the alarming loss of biodiversity and cultural heritage. In Galicia’s rural areas, identity, traditions, architecture, landscapes, and language are being eroded by new economic and consumer models. Many of these issues stem from a lack of aesthetic education, preventing people from valuing, caring for, and protecting their surroundings.
As professionals in creative fields, art, and architecture—and as educators in a teacher training faculty—we see creative processes as central to a Creative Place-Based Education. This pedagogy fosters strategies for thinking, creating, and coexisting with children in shared environments.
We work on aesthetics and quality of experience from three perspectives:
• Enhancing the relationship between aesthetics and methodology, creating spaces where furniture design, resources, and materials encourage aesthetic experiences.
• Encouraging children's sensitive and aesthetic perception through creative processes that value their own imaginations over pre-designed, stereotyped images and products.
• Expanding visual culture by introducing contemporary art references that link with local cultural and artistic traditions.
The final catalogs documenting children's artistic productions demonstrate their aesthetic and sensitive engagement with their environment, offering new ways to interpret and appreciate rural heritage.
This project adopts a humanistic and holistic learning perspective, emphasizing each individual's right to creative self-expression and aesthetic experiences. The laboratory concept is understood as an inclusive and accessible space on all levels. Its simple design—both materially and pedagogically—allows for adaptation to diverse contexts and groups, fostering collective participation and collaboration with various organizations.
Key inclusive strategies include:
• Creating creative spaces and processes that ensure full participation in learning, incorporating diverse visual and formal exploration methods.
• Establishing material exchange and reuse networks, using local and natural resources.
• Forming partnerships with schools, neighborhood associations, municipalities, and other organizations to ensure active community involvement.
• Promoting co-creation spaces, where educators, families, artists, researchers, and cultural managers collaborate in designing meaningful experiences.
The project has fostered democratic and horizontal participation in decision-making, ensuring that all voices, including those of children and vulnerable groups, are heard. Through open consultation and dialogue processes, the community has been able to express its needs and proposals, strengthening its involvement in the development of the project. Additionally, participatory methodologies have been implemented, facilitating active collaboration in the design and management of initiatives, promoting inclusive and shared governance.

The project has involved active and significant participation from citizens and civil society, promoting an inclusive and collaborative model where various stakeholders have played a key role in its development and implementation. From the outset, the involvement of the target groups was encouraged, positioning them as protagonists of the process through creative and participatory methodologies.
The Rural Forms Laboratory carries out its main activity in collaboration with schools, serving as a bridge to connect with society and the territory. The students from early childhood and primary education assumed a central role, actively participating in exploring and narrating the territory through various artistic languages such as drawing, writing, photography, and collage. They were encouraged to reflect on their surroundings and express their perceptions in artistic productions that were later shared in final assemblies, where their learning and concerns about the transformation of the landscape and heritage preservation were discussed. Furthermore, the children played the role of narrators of their own experiences, establishing an intergenerational dialogue with their families and the educational community.
Families and local associations also played a fundamental role, particularly in transmitting knowledge about the environment, actively collaborating in implementing information related to traditions, legends, and ways of life in the rural setting. The involvement of older individuals was especially valuable, as they provided stories about old trades, memories of the land, and traditional knowledge, enriching the students' experience and strengthening their connection to the local cultural identity.
The synergy between schools, families, associations, and the community demonstrated that learning can be a collective process, where each individual contributes knowledge and experiences that enrich both education and community life.
This project began in Galicia, with the participation of several rural schools in the province of Lugo, where the university campus of our educational innovation group is located. Locally, all members of the educational community (schools, teachers, students, and families) were directly involved in its development, organizing working groups and ensuring the continuity and implementation of the project. This allowed the teaching staff to continue integrating the project into daily teaching, applying active methodologies and promoting more participatory and creative education. Local participation ensured that the project was rooted in the community, fostering citizens' ownership of the process and strengthening the sense of identity and belonging to the territory.
The successful outcome of this phase has allowed it to be expanded to other communities and specific territorial contexts, with the support of various institutions. In Valencia, the Consorci de Museus de la Comunitat Valenciana selected the project to work in a school in the town of Alcora, within the Resistencias Artísticas program. The la Caixa Foundation chose it within its Art for Change artistic project grants program. The City Council of El Prat de Llobregat (Barcelona), through the CaminsVius program of Teatre L'Artesà, programmed the laboratories to carry out activities with all the local schools. These entities provided logistical support, facilitating access to public spaces for activities and contributing to the dissemination of the project through events and local media. This multiscalar collaboration model demonstrates that a participatory and inclusive approach is essential for building innovative, sustainable educational projects with a real impact on society.
The Escola Imaxinada educational innovation group emerged in response to the need to create an interdisciplinary team of research and action, whose ultimate goal is to bring arts-based methodologies to schools and contribute to the design of quality educational spaces and resources. Based at the Faculty of Education in Lugo, since 2019, we have conducted workshops in various schools and other entities linked to the dissemination of training and culture in diverse areas, leading to multiple collaborations.
Working from a Creative Place-Based Education requires adopting an interdisciplinary approach, always adapting to the local context, focusing on territorial research, and seeking the collaboration of all actors who can provide information and references about the characteristics of the place and associated issues.
This particular project involved collaboration from artists, biologists, historians, researchers, teachers, and, above all, participation from families with diverse trades, education, and occupations. Knowledge of the territory and its history has been a central focus of the project. Through dialogue, knowledge about traditional trades, legends, and landscape transformations was shared, contributing to the rescue of collective memory.
All these agents brought, from their different disciplines and situations, knowledge on biodiversity, sustainability, and current ecological issues. This process allowed for the connection of university research with school reality, demonstrating that education can be greatly enriched when working interdisciplinarily and in collaboration with the community.

The innovative character of the project lies in its interdisciplinary and participatory approach, promoting the dissemination and transfer of the Creative Place-Based Education and its Rural Forms Laboratory. This proposal integrates education, art, heritage, sustainability, and the design of educational spaces in a collaborative framework.
The project not only focuses on the dissemination and transmission of knowledge but also seeks to transform the educational experience through the design and creation of dynamic learning environments that foster creativity, critical thinking, and commitment to the local context. While many educational actions follow a conventional structure centered on the curriculum, this project stands out by integrating methodologies based on creative processes from the arts into the teaching-learning process.
The project is also notable for its ability to integrate diverse generations, creating an intergenerational dialogue. This approach allows learning to be directly connected to experience and knowledge, rescuing traditional wisdom and promoting critical awareness of the environments we inhabit. The proposed actions not only aim to reflect on the problems that affect us daily but also to question the origins of these problems, as well as developing actions and strategies that empower children, positioning them as active agents of change
To address these issues, we have developed a pedagogical approach we call Creative Place-Based Education. This approach positions creative processes and territorial memory as essential tools to generate alternatives for resistance from a critical and emancipatory perspective. Its goal is to recover the shared memory and heritage of the territory, valuing rural contexts. For this, generating real interactions that facilitate contact between intergenerational experiences is key, transferring the essential concepts of traditional cultures and knowledge to the contemporary educational context. We base this on six essential principles:
- Analyze the immediate context, working from local to global, based on proximity imaginaries.
- Value the know-how and practices derived from the structural and historical legacies of the local context, ensuring their transmission to future generations.
- Use creative processes from the arts as tools to question and transform the world we live in.
- Advocate for the need for aesthetic education that broadens perspectives and promotes diverse and personal styles.
- Bring the classroom-workshop to the context itself, using adapted materials (furniture, unstructured materials, educational tools, etc.) to create spaces conducive to experimentation and shared learning.
- Promote the expression of children through their creative processes, understanding their productions and narratives as interpretations of the world around them.
An education based on these principles can be profoundly transformative. It is aware of the challenges of our shared reality and works actively to generate changes, prioritizing the right of children to understand and critically inhabit the space around them. We propose that the educational system ensures the transfer between the classroom and the context, consolidating a collective sense of belonging that values the local heritage and fosters awareness about the transformation of the spaces in which we live.
The transferability and replicability potential of the project is remarkable due to the flexibility and adaptability of its key components. The collaboration of institutions like laCaixa and Consorci de Museus de València has been key in ensuring rigorous documentation, creating a transferability tool that enhances the project's impact in different contexts and ensures its long-term sustainability.
The design of educational spaces as "classroom-workshops" is a key component that can be easily replicated in different contexts. This space model not only allows movement and interaction but also encourages connection with materials and fellow collaborators. The ability to modify and transform spaces according to the needs of the creative process is an essential characteristic that can be applied in any classroom, workshop, or community center, regardless of size or resources.
The pedagogical methodology based on creative processes from the arts (Creative Place-Based Education*) can be transferred to any context, as we have seen in the development of the project. This methodology places creativity as an active, participatory, and transformative process and allows participants, regardless of their context, to become active agents of their own learning.
The context as a content generator is a key principle of the project that strengthens the connection between participants and their surroundings. This idea that the creative process is directly related to the space and place where it takes place can be applied in different locations, taking advantage of the local cultural, social, and environmental characteristics to generate relevant and meaningful content.
* Freire-Pérez, E. F., Blanco, V., & Cidrás, S. (2024). Creative Place-Based Education: Thinking, creating and inhabiting a commonplace with children. International Journal of education through art, 20(3), 379-392.
The project addresses several global challenges by offering local solutions adapted to the community's needs. Among these challenges, the ecological crisis and climate change stand out. The project promotes environmental awareness among children through creative workshops that allow them to reflect on changes in their environment and the importance of preserving it. Similarly, it tackles social inequality and the lack of inclusion by highlighting the active participation of vulnerable groups, such as migrant children, and promoting intergenerational dialogue.
In relation to the loss of cultural identity and heritage, the project strengthens children's connection to their collective memory and local heritage through activities that explore traditions and popular knowledge, promoting their preservation and transmission to new generations. The project also addresses the lack of innovative educational methodologies, offering a creative methodology that allows students to be active agents in their learning, developing critical and expressive skills through creativity and art.
Additionally, it fosters community collaboration and active participation through a participatory approach, involving families, associations, and schools, thus strengthening the sense of belonging and shared responsibility for the care of the environment. This project also facilitates the connection with both natural and urban environments, allowing children to explore their territory and better understand their context.
Together, the project offers solutions to global challenges by applying local approaches that contribute to a more inclusive, sustainable, and culturally enriched community, integrating art as a transformative educational tool.
As part of the documentation and analysis of the generated experiences, a catalog of experiences has been created for each laboratory, which classifies and presents the information gathered from each local context.
The project has had a profound impact on the recovery of the sense of belonging, both among direct and indirect beneficiaries. Through participation in creative workshops, children have strengthened their connection with the territory and its traditions, developing greater awareness of the importance of preserving their cultural and natural heritage. This process has reinforced their collective identity and sense of belonging to the community.
Direct beneficiaries, such as students, have gained confidence and self-esteem by actively participating in the creation of artistic productions that reflect their interpretation of the environment. At the same time, educators have adopted new methodologies based on art and creativity, improving classroom dynamics and promoting a more inclusive and collaborative learning environment.
Among the indirect beneficiaries, families have strengthened their bond with the community, thanks to intergenerational dialogue that has allowed the exchange of knowledge. Older individuals have played a key role in preserving local cultural identity by transmitting traditions and knowledge to new generations, creating a sense of cultural continuity.
Locally, the involved stakeholders, such as schools, were fundamental in executing the workshops. At the regional and national levels, the university, through the Faculty of Education of Lugo, provided the methodological foundation and trained teachers. Additionally, laCaixa was a key partner, offering financial and strategic support that facilitated the expansion and sustainability of the project. The Consorci de Museus de València and Teatre L'Artesà in El Prat also played a crucial role in valorizing cultural heritage through their resources and integrating their experience into the project's methodology. The final cataloge also facilitates reflection on the applied methodologies and the impact generated, providing a foundation for future replications of the project.