The 2009-2010 Winter Flood in the press, an educational resource for the social sciences.

Abstract

In the winter of 2009 to 2010 took place in Andalusia (Spain) an important episode of floods that occupied a prominent place in the media for more than three months. The article presents a study that analyzes and evaluates the educational potential of the journalistic treatment of this event, in order to offer new resources and educational options for classroom work, surpassing the simplifying models that are proposed from textbooks in education high school.

Based on a review of nearly four hundred news items, information units are identified and organized, structured into categories with desirable school content, offering a complex and multifocal view of the phenomenon of floods and their relationship with the urban system.

The media with the highest circulation in the area generated a great deal of information, especially in reference to the Guadalquivir and Guadalete rivers, the most affected, with numerous data on the territorial and social characteristics of flooded areas, river dynamics and models ideological and scientific that use different social agents to interpret these phenomena.

The enormous amount and diversity of information collected, with its filters, biases and conflicts of interests, offers educational opportunities of enormous interest to bring students to a more complex, integrated and sustainable conception of rivers, their relations with the city and the flood episodes.

Keywords

Floods; social science education; press ethics; environmental education; social perception of the flood