Students from the Santa María de los Volcanes-Nazaret School join together to transform a reality marked by the pandemic within their Solidarity Week. Specifically, the 4th year ESO students have tried to analyze the consequences that Covid has left in their closest reality, and loneliness is one of them.
It seems impossible to think that a year has already passed since the first cases of Covid19 were detected in our country, and since then everything has been a coming and going of phases, confinements, restrictions and measures that were born with the aim of seeing this pandemic die. Since then, many people have felt alone, especially young people and older adults. And society has forgotten to soothe the wounds of an abandoned group, that of those students who, in some cases, suffer from previous pathologies and have been condemned to constant confinement in their own homes. Consequently, this has made it impossible for them to attend their educational center in person, and the only window open to the world has been a 15-inch screen.
It is difficult to understand how a student can feel in this confinement, deprived of daily contact with their classmates, sheltered in golden cages, when the rest of society found it difficult to overcome the first confinement of just a few months.
Thus, immersed in the international movement, Design for Change, we try to give students the opportunity to change the world from their own environment, transforming the educational reality.
In 2001, Kiran Bir Sethi, a mother concerned about the education of her children, decided not to stand idly by and founded the Riverside School in Ahmedabad. With her, in 2009, the Design for Change project emerged, which quickly spread internationally to more than forty countries, thanks to the support of Howard Gardner, the Stanford School of Design, IDEO, and the National Institute of Design of India (NID).
This trend arrived at the schools of Lanzarote twelve years ago, landing at the Nazaret school, generating change from the voice of the students themselves who feel the needs of their environment with a more objective view and with a range of more creative and practical solutions. The student discovers that he can become a generator of change, an active member in citizen participation and transformer of his city.
Today, the 4th year ESO students put themselves in the shoes of their classmate, listen to his broken voice through technology and discover the testimony of a student who has been confined for a year without any physical contact other than that of his parents.
Thus, they try to make life easier for their classmate by designing more versatile platforms among young people, where leisure is combined with academic support. Through a set of servers, users can exchange information, audios, images, videos, among many other services. The opportunities offered by this application make it an excellent candidate for collaboration between students, while allowing them to share music, online games, calendar, live broadcasts, mentor exchange, expert chat, class diary, etc.
On the other hand, students in face-to-face training need to have their classmate close by in the classroom, work with him through collaborative groups, so they have designed a physical avatar, with a front camera, speakers and the Center's own uniform, which make these circumstances more bearable.
Let us take these actions as a starting point so that loneliness does not make us vulnerable, but rather members of a more human, closer, less lonely world. And let us discover that education must discover that student learning is found in their environment and that learning situations in real contexts are more fruitful and enriching than traditional methods.
