From the Playground to La Cumbre: How PE Teachers Spark Authentic Community Partnerships
Gabriela, Santiago and Nacho have facilitated collaborative experiences with students from Lincoln School in Buenos Aires and the school in La Cumbre in Córdoba. (image supplied)
It is a challenge that is mirrored in progressive schools worldwide: to integrate meaningful service learning into existing venues in international school education. But for Physical Education teachers Gabriela Bruno and Ignacio (Nacho) Lapenta at Lincoln School in Buenos Aires, the deeper question proved more compelling—how do you create experiences where students genuinely transform communities while being transformed themselves?
Their answer emerged through collaboration with Aaron Moniz, co-founder of Inspire Citizens, whose guiding questions helped them reimagine what PE could offer beyond the gymnasium walls. The result: two innovative curriculum units and a learning Expedition that demonstrate the power of reciprocal community partnerships.
“We asked, ‘how can we use our knowledge of activity and movement in PE to do something for another,’” reflects Nacho. “not only just to make a big event or a simple donation, but to help students go farther and transform someone’s reality?”
Building Connections Through Cooperative Games
For Nacho and Gabriela, along with vital colleague Santiago Pastorino, the journey began with a cooperative games unit designed to counter the world's competitive nature. Students study the characteristics of cooperative play, create their own games in Spanish—integrating language learning with PE—and then share them with younger learners.
Building connections with students at another school inspired Lincoln students to install and teach enduring playground games. (image supplied)
This year, high school students piloted the unit by leading games with Lincoln's own elementary students, testing the dynamics of rotating between activities, giving explanations, and managing game logistics. The trial run worked perfectly, setting the stage for next year's expansion: taking students to partner schools where they'll lead the games, then leave behind a book of student-created cooperative games along with all the materials needed to continue playing them.
"We challenged students to avoid making something that the partners cannot play anymore after we leave," Gabriela emphasizes, highlighting the team's commitment to sustainable impact. The approach reflects a core principle: "Our students could understand and could realize that there is another people, another community in our society that is living in a different way." She adds, "In this way, we receive more than we give."
Peer Teaching Through CPR and First Aid
A second exemplary unit that was crafted to incorporate authentic service learning integrates life-saving skills into peer education. High school students create a gamified series of videos demonstrating correct CPR techniques along with common mistakes, which middle schoolers must identify, analyze and discuss.
Sharing a First-Aid and CPR workshop offered points of interaction that served to deepen friendships and cultural understanding. (image supplied)
"When the knowledge is coming from a school mate, from someone similar in age, they take it in another way," Gabriela observes. "They pay more attention." While initially designed as a unit that bridged the 10th grade “instructors” and their middle school “students”, the valuable template was set for integration into an “Expedition” that would see the CPR and First Aid resources having an even wider impact, as described below.
The Learning Expedition: Student Agency in Action
The most ambitious initiative came during the tenth-grade learning Expedition to La Cumbre, Córdoba. Following Aaron's suggestion to center student voices from the start, the Lincoln PE educator team arranged for students to interview the principal of a public school serving children with limited resources, identifying needs and designing responses. Reflecting on how they came to develop such a bold line of inquiry, Gabriela credits the Inspire Citizens support that the team received. “I believe that first of all, Aaron gave us the time to reflect and think about it," Gabriela notes about Aaron's facilitation. "Because during the day and the week we don't often have time to plan to this level.”
The planning process itself became transformative. Students met at least six times in advance, organizing into committees with distinct responsibilities. Some designed playground games to paint, measuring spaces and preparing stencils. Others created activity circuits for elementary students, establishing rules and delegating roles for who would explain, demonstrate, and facilitate. A third group prepared to deliver CPR and choking workshops—an idea that emerged from the team's brainstorming sessions with Aaron.
“He asked the right questions to trigger us," is how Nacho describes Aaron's approach, helping them "organize the questions and “ideas that were already emerging.”
The Expedition results exceeded expectations. One committee painted interactive games on the playground—Twister, tic-tac-toe, and even a giant calculator. Another group facilitated activities with elementary students, building connections through play. The CPR committee delivered life-saving instruction to more than thirty people, including staff and students encountering these techniques for the first time.
"All the love that the kids receive, we receive as teachers, but they are the important ones," Nacho reflects. "All the connections they can see with their own eyes—it is true that they now understand better the place where they are living."
Measuring Success Beyond Traditional Metrics
The evidence of impact came in unexpected forms. The partner school principal sent a message expressing amazement at how Lincoln students worked "with so much care." At a separate foster home visit during the same Expedition, students didn't want to part, asking "can you come back tomorrow? Can you come back next week?"
Perhaps most striking was watching students transform in real time. "At the beginning, our students were very shy, very nervous," Gabriela recalls about the CPR workshop. "And then when they realize that they know a lot about CPR and that people that were there, they didn't know much. They started feeling more confident. It was like a click and they switched their mindset.”
This transformation reflects a crucial evolution in the teaching team's approach. "This is something that Inspire Citizens helped us realize," Gabriela acknowledges. "To give the students the opportunity to create and to plan–and we were just a guide."
Working alongside PE assistant Santiago Pastorino, who Nacho describes as a true colleague despite formal titles, the team literally embodies this collaborative spirit—they plan while gathered at a round table in their office, a physical reminder that great ideas emerge from genuine partnership.
The principal of the foster home captured the ultimate measure of success in her message to the team: these students represent "the future of the country, the future of the world." For physical educators proving that service learning belongs everywhere in the curriculum, that future looks remarkably bright.