“La Calandria” Primary School: an opportunity for a multicultural development

The School of Basic Particular Education " La Calandria " is an educational infrastructure that works in Vilcabamba, Ecuador, from 2009.

The school offers an alternative education, from the Inicial I up to the Seventh degree of Basic School, personalized and respectful, to provide a different learning.

The process of education includes several methodologies of alternative education, which Montessori and Waldorff, adapted to the social and cultural contemporary context, who consider the child to be a subject, capable of taking part actively in his own learning, according to his times and interests.

The school “La Calandria” was born for will of a group of parents who were wishing for their children a not conventional education, where the freedom of learning, the multicultural exchange of knowledges and the contact with the nature are the fundamental beginningfor a good development.

The school, therefore, arose thanks to a particular initiative, the economic contribution comes only from the parents.

For such reasons, the institution faces constant economic difficulties, since the monthly pension of the children covers the essential costs of the school, for instance the payment to teachers and the managing of pedagogic material, butit doesn’t allows to implement new infrastructure, nor to increase the formative offer.

Nowadays in the school “La Calandria” 36 children are studying. In spite of the will to incorporate children of local families, this has turned out to be very difficult principally for the fact that it is necessary to to pay for the service and often it results exaggerated for the native families.

With the idea of conditioning the school to increase quotas for children of the locality, and to do it in a free way, a project has been generated as an association with the university “UTPL- Universidad Tecnica Particular de Loja”.

The propose of the construction of additional infrastructure would allow the Calandria to extend the offer of quotas for the school, cause to the high demand.

With this condition, the School promise to receive children from local families of low resources of totally free form, since with major revenue of monthly payments it would be sufficient to cover the expenses of the students with economic problems.

The institution is compromised with the social labor; for it an important point is to improve the integration with Vilcabamba's community andanother is to establishstable links with the University by means of programs related to architecture, education, psychology, ecology, art, etc..

Therefore, La Calandria, is committed to open its spaces to realize workshops and extracurricular inclusive activities with the community.

Nowadays, we are in the phase 1 of the project, which consists in the construction of the first additional classroom, destined for the children of thefirst cycle.

For it, we are implementing methodologies of community participation and free contributions, but those are not sufficient to cover the entire amount of the works.

Therefore, we ask to help to the international community to be able to continue with this project of alternative education in a country, Ecuador, where the Calandria represents the unique opportunity for the education of many children.