13 From Charity, to Solidarity, to Inclusion: Post-Crisis Educational Responses in Chile

Verónica López

School of Psychology and Centre for Research in Inclusive Education, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile

Abstract

This chapter examines how schools in Chile have responded to catastrophic wildfires in Valparaíso (2014) and Viña del Mar (2024), analysing their dual role as both vulnerable institutions and anchors of community resilience. Guided by epistemologies of the South, the analysis engages the critical concepts of subjugation, abjection and in/exclusion to reveal how systemic inequalities, colonial legacies and educational policies shape vulnerability and recovery. Drawing on the experiences of two subsidised private schools, the chapter traces their trajectories from immediate humanitarian aid to longer-term strategies of solidarity, psychosocial support and curricular transformation. Comparative insights demonstrate both continuities and innovations across the decade, including the shift from charity to solidarity, the integration of psychosocial care into pedagogy, and the emergence of partnerships with universities and NGOs. The discussion highlights the enduring structural constraints of Chile’s market-based educational system while emphasising the situated knowledges and transformative practices generated by schools and communities. Ultimately, the chapter argues that in contexts of crisis, schools act as central nodes of survival, healing and social justice, offering valuable lessons for South–South dialogues on education in times of disaster.

Keywords

Chile, schools, wildfires, disaster, epistemologies of the South, community

This chapter reflects on two catastrophic wildfires that struck neighbouring Chilean cities a decade apart – Valparaíso in 2014 and Viña del Mar in 2024. Both events devastated urban hillsides, destroyed thousands of homes and caused profound social dislocation. Beyond the physical losses, these crises also exposed deep structural inequalities and placed schools, students and communities at the centre of both vulnerability and recovery.

Considering that these human-provoked catastrophes are not uncommon in the Global South, our analysis is guided by epistemologies of the South – a body of critical thought that resists Eurocentric frameworks and seeks to valorise Southern knowledges (de Sousa Santos, 2018). By revisiting the responses of two schools – one in Valparaíso and one in Viña del Mar – we examine how schools function simultaneously as sites of exclusion and control and as spaces of resilience, solidarity and transformation in the face of disaster.

To do so, I draw on three key concepts: subjugation, abjection and in/exclusion. These critical categories illuminate how systemic inequalities shape communities’ vulnerability to crisis, how educational institutions participate in dynamics of marginalisation, and how schools, even under structural constraints, can reconfigure themselves as community anchors.

Epistemologies of the South: Three Critical Concepts

I would like to invite readers to revisit three important concepts which have helped us to reflect on the ways that schools ‒ and the educational system ‒ tend to respond to huge crises in Chile.

Subjugation: The Erasure of Proper and Dignified Housing Policies

De Sousa Santos (2018) defines subjugation as a historical-colonial process that produces “non-existence” through abyssal thinking: a symbolic line divides what is considered legitimate knowledge from what is silenced or erased. Within this framework, knowledge and practices from the Global South are dismissed as inferior or irrelevant, legitimising both social hierarchies and political domination. Pennycook and Makoni (2024) extend this notion to language, showing how the standardisation of linguistic forms serves as a colonial mechanism that governs populations and delegitimises local practices of languaging.

The fires reveal how these dynamics persist in contemporary Chile. In the aftermath of the 2014 Valparaíso wildfire, one victim who lost his home demanded governmental assistance, only to be reprimanded by the local mayor: “Did I ask you to live here?” This response exemplifies subjugation by delegitimising the housing needs of the poor, many of whom are forced to inhabit ravines and steep hillsides due to economic exclusion. In both wildfires, these ravines were exactly the places most devastated. By naturalising precarious housing as a personal choice, the state reproduces colonial logics of responsibility and invisibilises the structural conditions that place populations at risk.

Abjecting the Community: High-Wall School Policies Regarding Local Cultures

Julia Kristeva (1982) originally described abjection as the psychic reaction to that which disturbs identity and order, what must be expelled to maintain symbolic boundaries – bodily fluids, corpses, the unclean. Later, post-Foucauldian readings reframed abjection not as a personal or symbolic state but as a political technology: certain bodies, territories and knowledges are designated as polluted or dangerous, excluded from the “normal” citizenry yet kept under surveillance.

In Latin American educational contexts, Silvia Grinberg (2009, 2011, 2022) applies abjection to describe how urban poverty zones in Buenos Aires are simultaneously abandoned by the state and tightly governed through abjectionist school policies. Schools “abject” by embodying a profound contradiction: they serve marginalised communities left outside the social body by disciplining them through educational and bureaucratic regimes that exclude students’ cultural backgrounds and funds of knowledge. This places high levels of tension on both students and teachers: while the former are pushed towards acculturation, the latter are forced to act as “superheroes of inclusion” in contexts of extreme urban poverty and environmental degradation (Grinberg & Bussi, 2015; López et al., in review).

This notion resonates strongly with the hillsides of Valparaíso and Viña del Mar and its schools, where the “tomas” – informal settlements established through land occupations – become abject territories.

Residents are excluded from state protections, stigmatised as illegal, and yet controlled through policies of accountability, security and emergency management. Schools within these areas inhabit the same tension: stigmatised for their location and populations, yet mobilised as the primary institutions of state presence when disaster strikes.

In/Exclusion: The Dialectics of Social and Educational Inclusion in the Face of Disasters

Veiga-Neto and Corcini Lopes (2007) conceptualise in/exclusion as a dynamic that goes beyond the binary of inclusion versus exclusion. Contemporary educational policies frame inclusion as an unquestionable imperative, yet inclusion always operates from a norm established by those already “inside”. To be included is to be admitted conditionally, under systems of tutelage and discipline. Thus, inclusion reproduces hierarchies: some identities (gendered, racialised, class-based) are deemed more eligible for inclusion than others.

In the wake of the Chilean wildfires, this tension became visible in both public discourse and school practices. Communities in informal settlements were only partially “included” in recovery efforts: offered temporary aid but simultaneously pathologised and blamed for their vulnerability. Schools, likewise, were compelled to “reintegrate” students into academic routines while tacitly excluding those whose families remained displaced or unable to meet attendance demands.

Taken together, these three concepts provide a critical lens for examining Chile’s educational responses to crisis. Subjugation illuminates how structural inequalities and colonial logics shape vulnerability; abjection explains how certain territories and populations are excluded while still governed; and in/exclusion reveals how schools reproduce conditional forms of belonging under the guise of inclusion.

Against this backdrop, we now turn to the experiences of two schools: one in Valparaíso following the 2014 fire, and one in Viña del Mar after the 2024 disaster. Their stories illustrate how educational institutions navigate ‒ and sometimes contest – these dynamics, reinventing themselves as both sites of control and spaces of solidarity, developing situated knowledge that, with time, enables moving from immediate emergency responses to community-driven solidarity to longer-term inclusion policies.

The Tale of Two Schools

Setting the Stage

Schools are institutions deeply embedded in their communities. When a crisis strikes, they cannot detach themselves from the surrounding devastation; rather, they become both victims and first responders. The stories of two subsidised private schools that contacted us seeking support immediately after the disaster, and with whom we maintain collaborations – one in Valparaíso after the 2014 wildfire and another in Viña del Mar after the 2024 fire – illustrate the challenges and possibilities of education in contexts of social-environmental disaster.

Both schools are privately subsidised, meaning they are administered by private parties but receive state funding and therefore must comply with state regulations. Both schools lost families, homes and community infrastructure. Both faced the immediate challenge of re-engaging students in learning while attending to urgent material and social-emotional needs. Yet each developed different strategies, shaped by local circumstances, available networks and accumulated lessons from previous crises.

School 1: Valparaíso, 2014

School 1, located on Cerro El Litre, was at the heart of the devastation. The first priority was to reopen the school and bring students back, but this was only possible once the minimum conditions of safety and community support were secured. We identify at least 6 phases in what can be recognised as different stages of responding to the disaster.

Phase 1: Charity and gathering.The school initially became a humanitarian hub. Donations of food, clothing and hygiene products were collected and distributed from the premises. This transformed the school into a focal point for community solidarity, even before formal classes resumed.

Phase 2: We don´t really know our students and their families. The initial collection of food and material relief rapidly led teachers and school staff into closer contact with their students’ families. Teachers organised and participated in house visits, which proved to be a turning point for them. Home visits exposed precarious realities – shared bedrooms, lack of desks, limited lighting – that teachers had never considered. In a reflective dialogue circle that we offered them as a means of teacher support, they realised that they did not really know, or had not fully made conscious, their students´ housing conditions or cultural backgrounds.

Phase 3: Emotional containment. As weeks passed, the school shifted from a storage space to a site of emotional support. Recreational activities, cultural events, and dialogue circles were organised to help students and families process collective trauma.

Phase 4: Integrating pedagogy and care. Recognising that learning could not simply return to “normal”, teachers began to incorporate emotional support into the classroom. Traditional lessons gave way to more participatory and active methodologies. Social-emotional learning was woven into math, science and history classes, helping students gradually re-engage with academic content.

Phase 5: Recognition and motivation. To restore a sense of value and belonging, the school implemented “integral learning motivation”, recognising students not only for academic performance but also for effort, creativity and resilience. This broadened the meaning of achievement and strengthened students’ connection with school, as well as their academic self-esteem.

Phase 6: Institutional transformation. By year’s end, the staff consolidated their experiences into an action plan, which gradually reshaped the school’s identity. Confronted with the insights of the home visits, the school gradually began adopting a more culturally responsive curriculum, drawing on the “funds of knowledge” framework and project-based learning. These innovations later proved invaluable during the COVID-19 pandemic, when remote learning required creative forms of engagement.

As the school principal reflected in a seminar on post-crises educational responses to which we invited her:

The fire hit our environment, our students, and our families. It pushed us to know our community better, to direct our strategies by engaging with their realities. We became more than a school; we became part of the community’s resilience.

However, at the end of her speech at the seminar, with authorities from the Ministry of Education’s Regional Secretariat of Education (SEREMI) present, this school principal referred to feeling a “door slam in their face” regarding the Ministry of Education´s lack of flexibility regarding the high-stakes consequences of the SIMCE national testing system, as well as with compliance with dates regarding the mandatory forms that had to be uploaded in the ministerial platforms. “We are doing all we can, but please be considerate” were her final words.

School 2: Viña del Mar, 2024

School 2, located in the Villa Dulce neighbourhood, faced devastation on a larger scale. This time, more than a hundred lives were lost across the city, and entire neighbourhoods were erased. The school’s response drew on accumulated situated knowledge from the prior 2014 fire crises, as well as expanded collaboration with universities, NGOs and government agencies. In this school, we identify the following 6 phases of what can also be understood as a cycle of development of post-crisis educational response:

Phase 1: Mapping needs. Immediately after the fire, the school conducted a rapid cadastre of families. Using social media and direct outreach, staff identified those who had lost homes, those partially affected and those who had lost pets or relatives. This cataloguing was not only crucial for the school’s internal planning but also served municipal and regional authorities in targeting aid.

Phase 2: From charity to solidarity. Like School 1, School 2 first served as a collection centre, opening its doors as a warehouse for food and emergency materials. But soon, staff deliberately reframed their work: rather than merely distributing donations, they organised aid collectively with families. Psychologists, social workers and teachers facilitated processes through onsite conversations with families ‒ regardless of whether they had students in the school or not ‒ that emphasised dignity and agency. This shift from charity to solidarity strengthened community bonds and avoided paternalistic dynamics. Solidarity for this school was also an act of thanking and compensating the community for having literally saved part of the school grounds, as the school principal expressed in another seminar that we invited her to share the school’s learnings:

If it wasn’t for our neighbors, the school would have burned down. Some of them lost their homes but saved this place. That’s why we said: this can’t just be charity, it has to be solidarity.

Phase 3: Preparing for school re-opening through a pedagogy of emergency. Because the fire occurred just weeks before the academic year, the school year was launched with a focus on a pedagogy of emergency. With support from the intermediate-level Ministry of Education´s Regional Secretariat of Education (SEREMI)   and an NGO, teachers underwent training to address students’ emotional needs first, integrating dialogue and collective reflection into the opening weeks. This approach acknowledged that recovery would be gradual and that academic instruction needed to be secondary to psychosocial care.

Phase 4: Circles of dialogue and service learning. Drawing from inclusive education practices, the school established dialogue circles where students, families, and staff could reflect on losses and needs. These were complemented by service-learning projects in which students themselves participated in helping fire victims. Importantly, this stage involved collaboration with my university’s School of Psychology, where undergraduate students co-designed diagnostic tools to assess the socio-emotional needs of children in grades four to eight.

Phase 5: Psychosocial interventions. Based on the diagnosis, the school organised workshops to build coping skills, manage stress and improve peer relationships. Special focus was placed on high school students who had been directly affected and were identified as more emotionally unstable; they participated in targeted emotional support groups. Home visits were conducted to sustain connections with displaced families and prevent dropout.

Phase 6: Strengthening the role of homeroom teachers. Six months after the initial crisis, the school created a formal plan to reinforce the role of homeroom teachers (profesores jefes). Teachers were given additional hours and support to connect families and schools, coordinate with inclusion teams and foster student leadership. This model emphasised the relational core of education in times of crisis.

The principal later noted that while the fire destroyed homes, it also revealed the community’s capacity to organise around the school. Without neighbours defending the building from flames, the school itself would have been lost. That act of solidarity foreshadowed the ethos that guided the institution’s entire recovery. However, by the end of the school year, the school staff was beginning to express burnout due to the school administrator’s pressure to focus on the chronic absenteeism of students, which affected the school’s state funding. School staff did not understand why the school administrator could not see that what they were doing was a strategy directly aimed at reducing absenteeism by re-engaging students. At the beginning of the following school year, I know of at least one teacher and one psychosocial staff member who resigned.

Comparative Insights

Though separated by a decade, the experiences of these two schools illuminate important continuities and differences.

First, some continuities can be depicted. Both schools became immediate humanitarian centres, both relied on dialogue circles to process trauma with initial support from our university, which was later adjusted and transferred, and both struggled to balance psychosocial needs with the demands of resuming academic learning. In each case, the school curriculum eventually shifted – infused with community engagement, social-emotional learning and recognition of students’ lived realities. Both schools also struggled with the realities of the educational bureaucracies and high-stakes pressures.

Regarding differences, by the year 2024, we can say that both schools had more tools and partnerships. Whereas School 1 improvised a bottom-up transformation, School 2 built upon previous lessons, engaged universities in service-learning, and introduced structured interventions such as the pedagogy of emergency. The discourse of “charity” gave way to the discourse of “solidarity”, and psychosocial support was more systematically integrated into school planning.

Lessons Learned in 10 Years

The experiences of Valparaíso in 2014 and Viña del Mar in 2024 reveal both persistent challenges and emerging innovations in how schools respond to crisis. A decade apart, the fires exposed enduring systemic obstacles while also demonstrating the capacity of schools to reinvent themselves as community anchors.

Together, these stories show that schools in crisis contexts evolve into far more than educational institutions. They become the central nodes of community resilience – spaces where humanitarian aid, emotional healing and pedagogical renewal converge.

From a critical social-ecological lens, we can identify some main challenges and lessons learned at the macro, meso and microlevels of educational response.

Macro-Level Challenges

At the macro level, three conditions continue to undermine schools’ ability to respond effectively:

1. 1. Financing through enrolment and attendance: Chile’s voucher-based system ties public funding to student enrolment and attendance. In the aftermath of a disaster, when families lose homes and children cannot attend regularly, schools face reduced funding precisely when their needs are greatest. This structure exacerbates inequalities and punishes schools for conditions beyond their control.
   2. The pressure of high-stakes testing: The SIMCE national assessment has historically imposed severe consequences on low-performing schools, including the threat of closure. While these stakes were temporarily suspended after the COVID-19 pandemic, the culture of standardised measurement continues to shape priorities. In crisis contexts, schools must decide whether to prioritise psychosocial recovery or re-take the “new normal” preparation for the SIMCE tests, with little systemic flexibility.
   3. Managerial accountability: Principals and staff remain burdened by layers of reporting, deadlines, and evaluation instruments that assume normal operating conditions. Even amid disaster, bureaucratic demands are rarely suspended. This managerialism places enormous stress on educators, diverting time and energy from urgent community needs.

As Sisto (2014) points out, in Chile, there is a tension between advancing inclusive goals and preserving market-based structures. While the 2015 Law on Inclusion attempted to curb profit motives and democratise access, it did not dismantle the voucher system or the entrenched logic of educational markets. Instead, the reform tended to layer inclusion on top of the existing neoliberal architecture, resulting in only partial transformation and, in some cases, reinforcing inequalities and segregation. These systemic pressures illustrate the concepts of subjugation and in/exclusion in the context of disasters: schools serving poor, disaster-prone communities still need to “adapt” to the market-driven, managerial and high-stakes national system, with minor flexibilities regarding timelines and financing, with their lived realities remaining mainly invisible in policy design and implementation.

Intermediate-Level (Precarious, But Progressive and Innovative) Supports

At the same time, local intermediate-level practices reveal some hopeful alternatives which can even be thought of as interstices or fissures within the system:

1. Creative literacy projects. After the 2014 fire, a language teacher hired by SEREMI led a project in which children wrote and illustrated their experiences, later published as Boys and Girls Tell Us about Their Valparaíso. This initiative combined psychosocial support with literacy development, giving children a voice and visibility in the recovery process.
2. Regional guidelines. In 2024, a more systemic approach was initiated by SEREMI, which issued General Orientations for the School System, drawing on expertise from UNICEF, UNESCO, universities and local organisations. While not transformative in themselves, these guidelines represent an attempt to consolidate multi-level support systems for schools in crisis.
3. Support through training in pedagogies during emergencies. In 2024, as a way of responding to the “lessons learned in the 2014 fire”, SEREMI rapidly developed a teacher and school staff short training course on what they called “emergency pedagogies”, which was offered free of charge, in-person and online. They teamed with an NGO that had previous experience in this approach, and that offered very practical, hands-on instruction.
4. Partnerships with universities. In Viña del Mar, the collaboration between my university and Schools 1 and 2 illustrates how academic institutions can serve as allies in co-producing knowledge and interventions. Service-learning projects mobilised university students to support diagnostics and psychosocial workshops, building reciprocal links between schools and higher education.

Conclusions: Lessons learned

The title of this chapter, “from charity, to solidarity, to inclusion”, attempts to capture the movement from immediate emergency responses to community-driven solidarity, to longer-term inclusion policies. It also echoes the principal’s quote from School 2, anchoring it in lived experience.

The tales from these two schools show that moving from responding to fires to transforming educational practices is a slow but possible journey. In this journey, at least 2 main transformative strategies form part of the lessons learned.

Perhaps the first most important lesson is the recognition that, in the context of crises, schools act as “community keepers”. Before state agencies can mobilise, schools are already open, organising aid, and supporting families. They are simultaneously humanitarian centres, spaces of emotional healing, and sites of pedagogical renewal.

The stages observed across both cases track, more or less, the following school-level trajectories: a) immediate relief (distribution of food, clothing, shelter); b) emotional support (dialogue circles, recreational activities); c) integration into learning (merging psychosocial care with pedagogy); and d) institutional transformation (redefining curricula, roles, and identities).

This progression demonstrates how schools can move from emergency response to long-term change, using crisis as a catalyst for reimagining educational practice. Therefore, the second main lesson learned is that the first shift is moving from humanitarian aid to a next stage of socio-emotional contention strategies, towards designing more “transformative pedagogies”. Both schools eventually integrated social-emotional support into curricular practices. In Valparaíso 2014-2024, this took the form of project-based learning and culturally responsive teaching; in Viña del Mar 2024-2024, it emerged as a pedagogy of emergency and an expanded role for homeroom teachers. These shifts point to the possibility of curricular transformation arising from the crises.

Yet, a third and final lesson learned is that the cost for teachers and school staff is significant. Teachers, principals, and psychosocial professionals carry the emotional weight of their communities while navigating bureaucratic and financial pressures. The system demands continuity – the show must go on – even when the material and emotional conditions for education are profoundly altered. Amidst educational policies and cultures that demand educational inclusion but are not willing to lower managerial accountability, school choice and high-stakes pressures, crisis conditions create, as Sisto (2024) posits, “bubbles of micro-resistance”.

Conclusion: Building Theory From the Bottom-Up

Author Note

Verónica López https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7405-3859

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Verónica López. Email: veronica.lopezl@gmail.com.

Acknowledgments

SDG Alignment

Goal 4: Quality education

Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities

Goal 13: Climate action

Cite This Chapter

Attribution

Research Integrity Statement

Ethics approval was not required for this publication as it does not report primary research involving human participants, identifiable human data, or animals.

The author declares no known competing financial or non-financial interests that could have influenced the content of this publication.

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