Learning Through Paths: Reimagining the Multigrade School

Colombia’s school infrastructure operates across a territory of extreme diversity. Mountains, plains, rainforests, rivers, coasts, humid regions, dry regions, and dispersed rural settlements shape how communities live, move, build, and maintain their schools.

However, rural schools have been planned through standardized infrastructure models, where the classroom becomes a repeatable unit that can be measured, contracted, and delivered across very different contexts. This creates a spatial tension: the same type of school space is expected to respond to different climates, distances, materials, maintenance capacities, and ways of life. In multigrade schools, this tension becomes even more visible. One teacher works with children of different ages, levels, and rhythms at the same time, while the classroom is often still organized for one group, one lesson, and one shared pace.

This reveals a gap between the diversity of Colombia, the reality of rural education, and the spaces provided to support it.

How can rural school improvement programs better support multigrade learning through context-responsive and culturally grounded spatial strategies?

Guiding principles

1. Build with what the territory already has

2. Design for multigrade flexibility, not graded rigidity

3. Incorporate nature into the educational space 

A series of paths becomes part of the pedagogy. Learning happens through walking, observing, waiting, remembering, and gathering across the school landscape. The learning paths are guided by booklets, which explore the relationship between story, time, and movement. The stories and songs included in the booklets belong to the Sikuani tradition. They are presented in their original language, sikuani, and in English.