Widen the school. Territorial practices for the guarantee of a public space for children during isolation

Abstract

On March 20, 2020, the Argentine national government ordered preventive and compulsory social isolation throughout the country and, with it, came the closure of educational institutions, although not the closure of all educational practice. In the most adverse conditions, the children, their parenting groups, the teachers and the social organizations of each neighborhood deployed the most diverse strategies to maintain contact between schools and their students, and thus guarantee the existence of a public space where children and teenagers are considered equals. The following research aims to analyze, from an ethnographic perspective, the experience of AulaVereda, a field organization that works with children and young people in the neighborhoods of Almagro and Villa 31 (City of Buenos Aires, Argentina) during the pandemic. It will study the ways in which this organization articulated with the public schools so that no student would lose contact with the institution or the possibility of continuing to inhabit a space separate from the rest of their daily lives, far from the logic of capital production, closer to freedom.