K12 Digest®️ – November-December 2020 – International Edition – Must-Know School Education Reforms

LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES SPECIAL

INTERNATIONAL EDITION

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FEATURING INSIDE

Adriana Silvia Vieira; Marcia Coutinho R. Jimenez & Maria Alice Junqueira de Almeida, Brazil

Ana Maria Raad, Chile Ana Paula Gaspar, Brazil

Anne Baldisseri, Brazil Antonio González Grez, Chile

Benjamín Vodanovic, Chile Denise Curie, Brazil Glaucia Rosas, Brazil Irene Gonzalez, Uruguay

Julciane Rocha, Brazil

Leonor Merín, Chile

María del Mar Vélez, Peru

Maria Ruuskanen, Peru Mariana Resende Fernandes,

Brazil

Marlene Gras, Mexico Martha Cecilia Gómez,

Colombia

Melina Masnatta & Julieta La Casa, Argentina

Mercedes Mateo, Spain Nicholas Martino, Mexico Raquel de Oliveira, Brazil Vicky Colbert, Colombia

LEADING SCHOOL EDUCATION REFORMS IN LATIN AMERICA Dr. Lilian Bacich, Brazil

Juan Manuel Pico, Colombia

NOV - DEC 2020

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Nov - Dec 2020

Vol - 1 Issue - 5

Latin American Countries Special Editor in Chief

Dr. Manoj Varghese

Managing Editor Rose Mary

Consultant Editors

Dr. Johny Andrews Andrew Scott Joseph Alex

Naomi Wilson Stanly Lui Emma James

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Art and Design Charlie Jameson

Sales & Marketing

Jennifer Anderson Rachel Roy

Monica Davis Annie Smith

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K12 Higher Digest Education Digest Nov May-June March - Dec2019 2020 2020

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MANAGING EDITOR’S NOTE

Education Reforms in Latin America

H

ome to more than 20 countries, the Latin American region has been hard hit by COVID-19, with more than 11.6 million cases and over 400,000 deaths.

According to a recent UN report, Latin American children have lost four times more days of education from the coronavirus pandemic than students in the rest of the world, with over 137 million young people in the region still not back at school. While the rest of the world is moving rapidly to online education, there are many kids across Latin America without access to computers, the internet, or even a place to study. For these young minds learning from home is a daunting challenge.

However, several Latin American educators are striving day and night to make quality education a reality for these children. Imbibing the true meaning of an educator, these experts are changing the educational landscape of the region one student at a time with their resolve and determination. They have realized the concept

of distance education and learning from home for the children of the region, helping them stand at par with the rest of the world.

This issue of K12 Digest is focused on the Must Know Educational Reforms in Latin American Countries and introduce you to those harbingers of change. The educators mentioned in this issue have proven that a true teacher is one who shines the light of education to children no matter what the circumstances are. Of these, two names shine the brightest— Dr. Lilian Bacich, from Brazil, and Juan Manuel Pico, from Colombia, who have been trailblazers.

We hope this issue gives you an insight into the education domain of Latin America and the various reforms it is going through now.

Happy Reading!

Rose Mary

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INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD Chris Wright

Maarit Rossi

Former International School Principal, Former Group Project Director at a World Class Learning Group, Education Consultant - Wright Solutions, United Kingdom

Founder & CEO - Paths to Math Ltd, Former Mathematics Teacher and Principal, Global Teacher Prize Finalist, Finland

Dr. Stuart Grant Colesky Principal, Rundle College, South Africa

Zeljana Radojicic Lukic Exceptional Educator from Serbia, Founder of Association of the Best Teachers of the Former Yugoslavia, Founder of Magical Intercultural Friendship Network, Founder of Creative Magic - Children’s International Festival, Founder of Magic Village, Serbia

Asst. Prof. Dr. Poonsri Vate-U-Lan Assistant Professor in Education, Ph.D. Supervisor and Researcher, Thailand

Stephen Cox

Elena Shramkova

Chief Education Officer, New Nordic School, Finland

English and Literature teacher, Owner of “The Smart Teens Studio of English” in Belgorod, Russia

Liljana Luani Senior Teacher ‘Pashko Vasa’ school Shkodra, Exceptional Volunteer, Albania

Ralph Valenzisi Chief of Digital Learning and Development, Norwalk Public Schools, Connecticut, United States

Servatius (Servee) Palmans Former Director School Administration & Business Operations (Large Education Group), Chief Operating Officer - BBD Education, Dr. Lilian Bacich Netherlands & UAE Senior Educationist, Author, Keynote Speaker, Co-founder Tríade Educacional, Brazil

Hatem Slimane Founder & National President - ATAST, General director of IFEST² the international projects competition in Tunisia, General secretary of MILSET Africa, BRISECC member, Tunisia

Hidekazu Shoto

Dr. Venus M. Alboruto Angus Duthie

Master Teacher, Researcher, Innovator, Trainer, Philippines

Former Vice President Security (Large Education Group), Former British Army Officer (Airborne Forces), Senior Advisor – Resilience and Crisis Management (Emerald Solutions Group), United Kingdom & UAE

Innovative English and ICT Teacher, Author, Japan

Ian Deakin Deputy Head and Dean of Faculty, Dalton Academy, Beijing, China

Shady Elkassas

Rania Lampou Global Teacher Prize Finalist 2019, 15 International Awards on STEM, STEM Instructor, Educator, Neuroscience Researcher, Trainer & Author, Greece

Assistant Principal, Sharjah American International School, United Arab Emirates

Fethy Letaief Distinguished Senior EFL Teacher, ISA Coordinator with the British Council, Motivational Speaker, Tunisia

Herwin Hamid EdTech Specialist, Speaker and Teacher Trainer, Innovative ICT Educator, ICT learning multimedia developer, Indonesia

Ha Nga Revolutionary English Educator, Globally Connected English Studio - Hanoi, Vietnam

Dr. Leonilo Basas Capulso Master Teacher, Speaker and Researcher, Philippines

Kihyun Park Innovative Educator of Online Classroom, Pungsaeng Middle School, South Korea

Dr. Manoj Varghese Senior Director of Strategy & Partnerships – Connecta Education Ltd., Former Global Director - Technology & Risk Management - GEMS Education, Former Regional Committee Member – Varkey Foundation, UK, UAE & India.

Mr. Ngô Thành Nam Technology Academy Manager, Microsoft Learning Consultant, Global Trainer, Vietnam

CONTENTS

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34 - 38

40 - 44

46 - 50

Mobile Literacy Teaching in Distance Learning

Learning Ecosystems: Transforming Latin American Education

Adriana Silvia Vieira, Digital Technology Coordinator; Marcia Coutinho R. Jimenez e, Projects Communication Coordinato; & Maria Alice Junqueira de Almeida Coordinator of Literacy Projects, CENPEC Educação, Brazil

Ana María Raad, Director, “ecosiSTEAM”, Chile

The Pedagogy of Contingency: Education meets Design for cocreating an untested feasibility

Flag Time: Valuing Individualized and Collaborative Learning Through Daily Differentiated Practice

Ana Paula Gaspar, Author, Brazil

Anne Baldisseri, Head of Primary Division, Avenues: The World School, São Paulo, Brazil

COVER STORY

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Closing the Reading Comprehension Gap in Colombia Juan Manuel Pico, Co-founder, Education Soul, Colombia

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INNOVATIVE EDTECH SOLUTION PROVIDER OF 2020- COLOMBIA

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Blended Learning: Models Which Can Support Schools Reopening Dr. Lilian Bacich, Co-founder, Tríade Educacional, Brazil

INNOVATIVE EDTECH SOLUTION PROVIDER K12 Digest November 2020 OF 2020- BRAZIL

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52 - 56 Zero Digital SkillA Formative Hope Antonio González Grez, Educator, Chile

TRÍADE

EDUCATION EDUCACIONAL

SOUL

Juan Manuel Pico and Martha Gómez

CONTENTS

58 62 74 80 Aula Digital: One Size Doesn’t Fit All Benjamin Vodanovic, CEO, Aula Digital, Chile

A STEAM Project to Address Fake News And The COVID-19 Crisis Denise Curi, Head of Earth Science Department, Colégio São Luis, São Paulo, Brazil

Helping Schools Get On Track With Educational Technology And Keeping Them There

Pedagogy, Technology, and Inclusion: 13 years of Plan Ceibal in Uruguay

Glaucia Rosas, Co-founder, The EduTec Alliance, Brazil

Irene González, Chief Education Officer, Plan Ceibal, Uruguay

86 94 100 104 Remote Learning During The Coronavirus Pandemic in Brazil: TV Content as an Alternative to Reaching More Students Julciane Rocha, Educator, Brazil

Non-Formal Education From The Field Of Philanthropy Leonor Merín, Innovation & Content Director, Fundación Mustakis, Chile

Crack the Code!

María del Mar Vélez, Founder, Crack The Code, Peru

“In Finland, lifelong learning is rooted in children’s right to play”.

A Vision from A Finnish Educator Living in Perú.

Maria Ruuskanen, Adviser at the Finnish Embassy in Lima, Peru

CONTENTS

110 114 120 124 Building Socioemotional Skills Through Experiential Learning And Global Engagement During the COVID-19 Pandemic Mariana Resende Fernandes, Educator, Brazil

The Joy of Learning Through Curiosity and Experiential Learning: Afterschool Programs in Latin America To Provide A Better Start for Children in Vulnerable Communities Marlene Gras, Educator, Mexico

Educating Girls and Teenagers in Latin America: A Path to Prosperity in The PostPandemic World Martha Cecilia Gómez, Co-founder, Education Soul, Colombia

Diversity and Technology: A Challenge for Education Melina Masnatta, Co-founder Chicas en Tecnología & Julieta La Casa, Content and Journalism at Chicas en Tecnología, Argentina

130 138 144 152 Generation COVID: Our Responsibility to the Future of Latin America and the Caribbean Mercedes Mateo, Lead Education Specialist, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Spain

Authentic Learning Across Latin America Nicholas J. Martino, Founder, Authentic Learning Lab and NJM Global Consulting, Mexico

How to Prevent Artificial Intelligence Subjugating The Natural Intelligence of Teachers And Students In The New Normal?

Raquel de Oliveira-Hinton, Educator, Brazil

Escuela Nueva Vicky Colbert, Founder & Director, Fundaciรณn Escuela Nueva, Colombia

COLOMBIA

Closing the Reading Comprehension Gap in Colombia Juan Manuel Pico, Co-founder, Education Soul

With more than 30 years of international professional experience in Business Development and Corporate Public Relations in Fortune 500 tech companies such as Motorola and Unisys in Latin America, Juan Manuel is a point of reference in the region in the field of education projects to close digital gaps with social impact. As Education Soul Co-founder, his most recent startup, he has been devoted to bringing EdTech solutions to underserved areas, improving the lives of more than 20,000 students and teachers. He serves as HundrED Colombia Lead, a Finnish global community that brings positive change to K-12 education and identifies innovations to help them spread. He holds a B.S. in Business Administration (Los Andes University – Colombia) and an Executive MBA from Boston University.

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tudents in Colombia, a country with a population of 50 million, score lower than the OECD average in reading, mathematics and science at PISA (Program for International Student Assessment that surveys every three years the 15-year-old students on their level of knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in society). In terms of reading skills, for example, even though the country has improved its trend since 2006, the results are still weak, as it is shown below in the table of Reading Gap in Schools Years (+/-) OCDE – PISA, 2018.

The OECD reading average score in 2018 was 487. For every 40 points of difference, there is one year of delay in education level for a 15-year-old student. Therefore, in the case of Colombia, the PISA reading result was 412, meaning 2 years of school-level delay in comparison with the OECD average and up to 4 years of school-level delay with China (555)

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and Singapore (549) who were the top scores of the ranking. Within the region, despite the improvement in reading PISA results, Latin America continues to be below the OECD average, as it is shown below in the table of Reading PISA Results Trends 2000 – 2018 from IDB, 2019.

In 2018 in Colombia, 7522 students from 250 schools both private and public, completed the PISA assessment, and 50% of them attained at least Level 2 proficiency in reading (while the OCDE average was 77%). Only 1% of students were top performers in reading (the ones who reached Level 5 or 6 in the PISA test, where the OCDE average was 9%). This is a hard reality to face, even though the government in Colombia has constantly raised the education expenditure through

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the years, getting almost 4% of the GDP. This is one of the main reasons why Education Soul came to life in 2016.

During the last decade, the EdTech industry has evolved and has become an almost USD$8 Billion industry worldwide. Latin America has entered into the EdTech wave recently, especially in the last 5 years. One of the major components of this industry is the capacity to bring a personal path for skill development for every student. More than ever, EdTech platforms have been transforming the way learning needs to be conceived.

It opens the door for a new and more refreshing teacher role in the classroom. However, this is a model that faces particularly 3 main challenges: internet access (since EdTech platforms are most of the time Cloudbased as they run predictive analysis algorithms based on live student behaviour); user gap (teachers in Latin America are not digital skills savvy); and quality (how to make a real impact by addressing real problems).

In 2016, Education Soul began a strategic alliance with an Edtech company focused on reading comprehension skills improvement. We decided to make a bold move in the education ecosystem in Colombia: to provide an EdTech solution for students at low-income public schools. Since then, we have already reached 20,000 students in 12 cities and 59 schools in the country. This is a journey where we have faced many

challenges, one of them being a new company with a technological solution to contribute to fixing a never-ending problem: improve the reading comprehension skills of high school students at remote underserved areas.

We had the chance at that time to sign an agreement with one of the largest not-for-profit organizations that ran a chartered school model.

They are in charge of 50,000 students per year all over the country and are specialized in bringing education in low-income underserved areas. Despite the fact of not having used any type of similar technology to improve reading comprehension before, this organization believed in the project.

Since then, we have had the honour and the privilege to work together and be partners in a journey of innovative education thanks to its management leadership team.

During the last 4 years, our path has been as challenging as it could be. In the beginning, one of the hardest things we had to deal with were teachers, since they were not convinced of using technology to fix such a problem. In addition to that, they felt we were threatening them based on the misconception of being replaced by technology in the mid-term. Thanks to an aggressive platform training campaign, we finally overcame this issue. They were our first students.

It was the best way to show them what technology and education combined, were meant to be for.

Another challenge we faced was raising awareness among academic coordinators since they saw the EdTech platform as a heavy burden. Even though teachers were now on our side, they were not allowed to spend “too much time� with this new project. It was not an easy task to convince them that, on the contrary, teachers would be able to free their time thanks to moving to a coach model from a regular teacher model. One of the takeaways we have had during these four years is that an EdTech platform by itself does not mean anything. Thus, one of the keys to success is follow-up. Teachers are a key factor as leaders more than knowledge transfer agents. They feel great at it. Unfortunately, most of the time, the traditional education system does not let them fly.

Lack of digital skills readiness has been also another major obstacle we have found. In Colombia for instance, 50% of the teacher public body, let´s say a

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population of 300,000 is in the age range of 45 to 50 years old, that means a high number of individuals who were not born as digital-savvy citizens. This is an enormous entry barrier for any EdTech solution. Then, training has been a constant drive during these years. This situation has even allowed us to promote a special-separated training on digital skills for teachers in issues such as how to make a smartphone video, how to use free apps to make better presentations, how to use digital evaluation apps to enter into the digital era and be more aligned with students ‘requirements and expectations.

EdTech platforms come today in many flavours and colours. One of the biggest challenges is to assure a quality impact on the skills of students. Here is another take-away we have had: if a platform does not measure the performance of every single student, it does not provide any value at all. Many of them are very good at developing skills but are lacking in bringing data analytics. Any EdTech platform has a wonderful opportunity to collect performance data, behaviour data, failing data and so forth. We are in a world of mathematical regressions to

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predict future outcomes thanks to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. But all EdTech platforms are not created equal. In our case, the data has been paramount for our success. Since schools we work with belong to the public system, they appreciate data analysis, something that is highly limited in this sector. As we have stated many times, data analytics is a kind of x-ray power we have, to define the boundaries of students, their major weaknesses and their profound needs. We dream to have a national system for reading comprehension skills improvement where data analytics could feed the weaknesses of the entire system. That should be a good way to overcome the distance of almost two years of school-level delay for 15-year-old kids at PISA. The student must be the centre of any EdTech platform.

Is not always the case. In our experience, our platform has been easily adopted by students. There is one magic point that makes it possible: the platform brings a challenge to the student. We have interviewed many students about the willingness to use the platform again to increase his/ her performance in reading comprehension. In 95% of

the cases, they have shared with us that the major reason they liked the journey was that they felt challenged by the questions from the platform. They felt that the system was proposing them new questions as if it was reading their minds and establishing a path to improve their weaknesses. Through the years, we have been dealing with this project, we have seen reading comprehension improvements up to 300%.

Recently, due to the Covid-19 situation, 90% of publicschools’ students were out of school because of the lack of internet access. Colombia has around 8 million students in the public sector and 2 million in the private sector.

Having more than 7 million students out of school is a big catastrophe. Unfortunately, the pandemic raised an issue that was not so evident before: internet access is a musthave, especially in low- and middle-income countries in the world. It is the blood system for any EdTech platform.

In our case, we overcame this situation in 60% of the cases, since our students began to use their smartphones to follow the exercises from the platform. We need to remember that Colombia is a country with 62 million cellphones, and

even though there is a big underserved population, the use of a smartphone has become a common situation.

We have impacted more than 20,000 students to date, thanks to an EdTech platform that closes the reading comprehension gap of their users, based on adaptive learning and predictive analysis. Today, more than ever, the world has the beauty of getting access to technology at the service of human beings. The big challenge ahead is not the technology by itself, it’s the culture of digital citizenship, the openness to a new way of seeing the change in education, the new frontier of the teacher´s role. That is why, we have started at Education Soul, to make our platform focused on Computational Thinking, as a result of what we have seen that is missing, especially in the public schools. A different approach to face the problems and fix them. Beyond reading comprehension, students must have a mindset ready to solve the current issues of the fourth industrial revolution. Latin America deserves to make a shift in the education gap that it is unfortunately involved today. EdTech is definitively part of that solution.

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BRAZIL

Blended Learning: Models Which Can Support Schools Reopening Dr. Lilian Bacich, Co-founder, TrĂ­ade Educacional

Dr. Lilian Bacich is a passionate senior educator who has 28 years of experience in working with basic education, undergraduate and graduate education and is Coordinator of the Active Learning Post Graduation Course at Instituto Singularidades. Author of two books, Lilian believes that changing the mindset to use technology and active learning in favor of the school and teaching depends on personalized teacher training. She knows that this process is not easy and engaging teachers to implement an innovative and personalized project involves all the school community.

She holds a doctorate degree in School and Human Development Psychology from University of SĂŁo Paulo (USP).

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he reopening of schools demands from educators and institutions the analysis of different scenarios. In this context, I share some possibilities from Blended Learning, in this book I co-organized and discussed the theme but did not go further into it at that time, in 2015.

In this production, our reflections about Blended Learning were directed towards sustained attention models, possible with all students present in the classroom, and not about disruptive models, which consider that not all students will be at school, such as Enriched-Virtual Model and A La Carte Model, as shown in the image below.

As I always like to remember, our view of Blended Learning supports itself in the relationship that Dewey establishes between teaching and learning. For the author, both concepts are intimately related and making a choice for the word “teaching� considers that the counterpart is learning, once the student is at the center of the process, and it is to make this learning possible that the classes are planned.

Currently, we have been faced with some misunderstandings about the implementation of Blended Learning, which consider that the teacher is at the center of the process and this counterpoint is what I would like to discuss in this text.

What does Blended Learning mean when we consider that the student is at the center of the process?

Blended Learning has as its focus personalization, considering that the digital resources are means for the student to learn, at its own pace and time, making it possible to have a protagonist role and, therefore, is at the center of the process. Thus, the experiences created for the online environment aside from offering interaction possibilities for knowledge and development of abilities, it is also offered learning evidence, during times that the students are face to face with the teacher, present in the classroom , it is possible that the teacher uses the same collected evidence to potentialize its class learning. Therefore, according to this

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in face to face activities. A suggestion for planning these activities is working through projects, in which there is the possibility of applying knowledge built during the online period, considering that more complex cognitive processes.

Project Based Learning (PBL)Â is an active methodology which uses projects as the main focus of learning, integrating, most of times, two or more subjects. These projects can arise from problems or a specific matter, originated from authentic context, involving investigation, hypothesis, group work and other competencies leading to a solution or a final product. In this context, students must deal with interdisciplinary matters, make decisions and work as a team. Critical thinking, creativity and collaboration are essential to this process.

definition, classes happen at the school and are transmitted live to those who are home (Here or There model) are not included in the Blended Learning definition we adopted in our references; classes that happen in remote learning model, with students and teachers at their own houses, even combined in syncron and assyncron moments do not include in Blended learning definition. These are some examples of the misunderstandings I have observed.

I invite you to analyze the following as some Blended Learning models that can contribute to a partial reopening of schools.

Flex model and Project Based Learning In this model, students keep remote learning as their main part of the process and, at school, the purpose is having activities which develop skills and abilities, that can be potentialized by the presence of pairs,

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Enriched Virtual Model: being present at school with specific aims In this model, students do their studies about all curricular compounds in an online format and go to school for specific mandatory sessions with a teacher, once or more times a week. In these sessions with the teacher, discussions are deepened on aspects which deserve it, such as doubts clarification, tutoring for next steps in learning, such as personalized mentoring.

The difference between what was offered by the majority of schools at this moment, through remote classes and the Enriched Virtual model it the possibility of personalization of learning. Which means, the online proposals through concept explanation videos, texts for reading about different angles on each concept, allowing students to go further into the aspects that generate, individually, more engagement. Amplifying instruments of data collection, therefore, becomes essential, mainly to possibilitate keeping up with this personalization.

In a more restrictive scenario, this model would work with teacher’s hours dedicated to smaller student groups, which would gather, respecting all health

guidelines, for sharing essential learning, which were selected as indispensable to be worked with during the school year.

In a less restrictive scenario, this model would work with a parcel of students which would meet for creating and performing sharing strategies in bigger groups, such as debates, problem solving that apply to beforehand learning in the individual format. We see, in this model, an association with the Blended Learning model, named Flippedclassroom model. In order to make this model work as a personalization of learning, the collection of data is essential and the presential meetings are supported by it.

A La Carte model: blended curriculum In the A La Carte model, according to the authors definition, the learning of a subject is made completed by an online model, and it is more efficient

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in the new Ensino Médio (Brazilian equivalent to high school), in the elective subjects.

In a more restrictive scenario, specifically for Ensino Médio, the elective subjects could migrate completely to an online format, making it possible for a followed mentoring by teachers, with tutoring happening in an online format, through videoconferences. Exams would also happen in this format.

In a less restrictive scenario, some of the subjects, previously selected, would migrate to wrap up the year in an online format, at a close look provided by the teachers, through videoconferences for subject deepening and discussions, however with content delivered online. The exams would be made, in groups, in presential meetings.

Considerations In the different scenarios I have presented in this text, a reflection about online engagement in planning is important.

More than just considering that presential and online classes will be in the expository format, it becomes relevant to establish the function of each moment.

The online format presents excellent space for expository classes, when in the recorded classes format. Recorded classes can turn into an explanations repository on concepts and can be reused for recovery and filling in learning gaps, which eventually, some students may present.

The synchronous classes, when remotely or presential, in Blended Learning, should not be a space for expository classes, but for human contact, for sharing amongst people, shedding light to such relevant matters as empathy, argumentation, critical thinking. Delivering content should not be the focus at this point, instead the possibility of problem solving and putting learning that was built previously into action, giving more sense to what we called blended learning, which is more than just the union of presential and online classes, but the possibility of learning personalization, and taking Cesar Coll (2018) as a reference: “The personalization of learning is conceived, as a group of pedagogical and didactical strategies oriented

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Project Based Learning (PBL) is an active methodology that uses projects as the main focus of learning, integrating, most of times, two or more subjects

to promoting and reinforcing the meaning of school learning for students. […] The point is not if we should or should not advance to personalization, yet how to do so.”

Perhaps this is the moment of thinking on how to do so, restarting the discussion that innovation will be more and more methodological than technological.

We know that making the best decisions, at this moment we are at, is not something simple, since there are many other factors involved. However, the choices to be made should be well grounded and have as focus students active learning. This is the only way we will be able to develop essential skills as critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, communication, and creativity!

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BRAZIL

Mobile Literacy Teaching in Distance Learning Adriana Silvia Vieira, Digital Technology Coordinator; Marcia Coutinho R. Jimenez e, Projects Communication Coordinato; & Maria Alice Junqueira de Almeida, Coordinator of Literacy Projects, CENPEC Educação

Adriana Silvia Vieira is a digital technology coordinator at CENPEC Educação (Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas em Educação, Cultura e Ação

Adriana Silvia Vieira

Comunitária). She graduated in Letters (Portuguese and Spanish languages) at the University of São Paulo (USP),

Maria Alice Junqueira de Almeida

specialized in technological management and education at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and has a master’s degree in “Language in new contexts”

from the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp). She has worked as a Portuguese teacher and has coordinated projects in Technology and Education.

Marcia Coutinho works at CENPEC as Projects Communication Coordinator. Directed institutional, educational and documentary videos. She is one of the authors of the book Techno-educational innovation by OEI Brasil, 2011. Master and researcher at School of Communication and Arts at the University of São Paulo, she works with digital literacy for teachers.

Maria Alice Junqueira de Almeida is coordinator of literacy projects at CENPEC Educação (Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas em Educação, Cultura e Ação Comunitária). She graduated in Psychology at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC), and specialized in “Literacy, relations between teaching and

Marcia Coutinho R Jimenez

learning” at the Instituto Superior de Educação Vera Cruz. She worked as a teacher in Pre-k and Elementary Schools for more than a decade and has worked with teacher training in public and private school systems ever since. She has vast experience in pedagogical counseling and teaching material development.

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he social distancing measures taken as a result of the coronavirus pandemic led to the closing of schools in almost every corner of the world, including Brazil, where they have exacerbated the country’s historical social and educational inequities. In São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil, as well as in other cities and states, public schools started providing remote activities for their students, including for those just learning how to read and write. The development and delivery of activities by schools and their completion by students outside the school setting brought about a disruption to traditional teaching and learning processes and laid the ground for carrying out experiments and pedagogical practices unthinkable prior to the pandemic.

This article will address one such experiment that used smartphones, namely the WhatsApp application, conducted by a group of women educators to teach vulnerable children how to read and write.

Access and Connectivity in Brazil Brazil is characterized by many inequities when it comes to access to digital technologies.

According to a 2019 ITCDomicilio survey conducted by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br), 20 million Brazilian households

do not have internet, a reality which especially affects families with income of up to one minimumwage salary (45%). Cell phones are the main devices used for connectivity: 58% of Brazilians connect to the internet exclusively through their smartphones, a share that reaches 85% in the poorest classes and among the black (65%) and mixed-race (61%) populations.

In addition to the trouble the population has with connecting to the internet, the lack of teacher training has been pointed out as one of the main roadblocks for incorporating ITCs (Information and Communication Technologies) in education. The 2019 ITC Educação survey, also conducted by CGI.br, found that for 53% of teachers (who teach in urban schools) the absence of specific courses on how to use the internet makes their work with students really difficult, and for another 26%, it makes it a little difficult. In other words, 79% feel that it makes things difficult to a certain degree.

Additionally, studies on teachers’ incorporation of ITCs often make the assumption that this process requires a learning curve whose arc is gradual and takes place in stages. When considering that teachers could be in different phases of incorporating technologies into their practices, it often becomes necessary to undergo a checklist to ascertain what point the teachers are at in order

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Stage

Features

Exposure

When there is no use of technology in pedagogical practice or when the teacher requires support from others to use such technology. Also, when use of technology is only for personal purposes. The teacher identifies technology as a tool, not as part of digital culture.

Familiarization

The teacher starts getting to know and occasionally uses technology in activities. The teacher sees technology as a support for teaching. The use of technology is focused on the teacher.

Integration

Technology is used periodically and can be integrated into planning pedagogical activities. The teacher identifies technology as a supplemental resource to improve the processes of teaching and learning.

Adaptation

Technology is frequently used in planning activities and in interactions with students. The teacher works with technology in a way that is integrated and contextualized in the processes of teaching and learning.

Transformation

When the teacher has innovative ways of using technology, shares with colleagues and carries out collaborative projects with others outside the school, thus showing digital maturity. The teacher identifies technology as a tool for social transformation.

TABLE 1 to organize training opportunities that help them to make progress in their training. According to UNESCO (2009), organizing standards for integrating technology into pedagogical practices can provide guidelines that help in building teacher training programs that will provide the teaching staff with skills.

Change in education requires that the teacher’s training must promote the use of ITCs as part of the curriculum and pedagogical practices, thereby “supporting the student’s cognitive development and making it possible to attribute new meanings to the teaching and learning process so that it becomes more active, significant, contextual and closer to contemporary social practices” (CENPEC; CIEB, 2019, p. 9).

Teachers’ adoption of technology can be broken down into five stages ranging from exposure to ITCs to the transformative use thereof as shown in Table 1.

One of the major challenges that teachers mentioned in relation to emergency remote education is the “lack of knowledge about adapting classes to a new format,” and the most commonly used tool adopted by public schools for remote education during the pandemic has been WhatsApp. Additionally, another research study developed by CGI.br, ITC KIDS Online Brazil 2019, found that 54%

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of children between the ages of 9 and 10 stated that they have already engaged in communication by sending instant messages, thus confirming that children know about this software.

In this context, the WhatsApp instant communication technology was identified as a helpful medium to support learning outside the classroom and as a catalyst for reducing inequality. Some projects have already used cell phones for teaching students how to read and write with the objective of minimizing educational interruptions in post-conflict and post-disaster zones, thus helping “to ensure the continuity of education in times of crisis.” Therefore, such technology have been shown to be an excellent channel for spreading educational opportunities to students who do not have access to schools during this time, and even act as a bridge between formal and informal learning, as will be shown below.

The Experiment of Using WhatsApp for Teaching Literacy in Remote Education Promoting literacy is to guarantee mastery of skills considered to be indispensable for full entry into learned society. It is also the school’s role to understand literacy in a broader sense,

considering the multiple languages (verbal text, still and moving images, sounds, figures, diagrams, etc.) that make up contemporary texts, many of which circulate digitally. “Schools also need to prepare students for digital literacy along with additional skills and ways of thinking which used to be foreseen for print text.”

(COSCARELLI, 2016, p. 17) Add to the complex tasks required for reading print the technical skills to, for example, use a mouse, download apps on a smartphone or hold a video call, as well as building relationships, projections and very fast inferences in multimedia events. Additionally, the interactivity of the digital space also involves developing values, rules and sensitivity related to participation and collaboration online, which some authors have called a new ethos in digital literacy.

However, full literacy is far from a universal reality, especially for lower income classes whose access and longevity in the school system were already weak in before COVID-19, which unfortunately seems to have been exacerbated even more with the arrival of the pandemic.

In Brazil, the results of external federal assessments reveal that the writing and readingproficiency levels of a large number of students is at elementary levels. According to the 2016 National Literacy Assessment, which takes a census approach to studying the performance of students in the third grade of primary education in all of Brazil, the majority of students (54.7%) were classified as having reading levels considered to be insufficient and 34% of them showed insufficient writing levels.

Such data reveal how urgent investment in literacyalready was before the pandemic so that children and young people could develop the reading and writing proficiency necessary to understand their civic rights and duties. The challenges that lower income classes face when it comes to access to remote education, social inequalities tend to deepen and be further exacerbated.

How to we maintain the literacy process for children in remote education when there are so many challenges? How to incorporate digital technologies favoring the learning and teaching process?

Based on the pedagogical use of smartphonesfor literacy processes in remote education, CENPEC experiments in partnership with the Tide Setubal Foundation pointout new ways of teaching and learning have made it possible to sustain students’ connection with education, even if it is in the context of many challenges for access and connectivity to the internet.

With the need for social distancing and the consequent closure of schools in March 2020, these two institutions embarked on the development of a remote project for

supporting the literacy skills of children in socially vulnerable situations.

The children served by the project are six years old and had just entered the first grade of primary education.

They study and live in the Eastern Zone of São Paulo, in a neighborhood with a series of socioeconomic disadvantages in relation to other neighborhoods in the city. The project serves 11 children and is led by a group of nine volunteer women educators who have quite a lot of experience both in literacy skills and teacher training.

The smartphone is the only device most of these families have for connecting to the internet and they do so with a rather limited data plan. Therefore, WhatsApp was the tool chosen for carrying out the project. Twice per week the teachers held videocalls on their smartphone, during which they worked directly with the children in interactions of no more than one hour. During the videocalls, the mother or other adult responsible for the child is always present to understand the activity and help to integrate it into his or her routine with the child.

Since the project coordinators were aware of the fact that the project entailed entering the children’s homes via the videocalls, the group took some careful measures from the very beginning of the project out of respect for the families’ privacy. These measures included: scheduling class times according to the routine in the children’s homes, always confirm the class the evening before via a text message, being respectful regarding the family dynamics—which the educator would often experience during the class— among other sensitive issues taken into consideration.

The meetings always follow the same ritual in each videocall. They start with the educator reading aloud, followed by writing activities with a mobile alphabet (cut-outs of the letters of the alphabet); games related to the tongue and language, such as word games or tongue twisters, rhyming songs and riddles. There are also times when the child reverses roles with the reader, thus using books from the neighborhood library and tells the teacher the story based on the illustrations.

The project has provided new learning for the group of educators who are very experienced in teaching students how to read and write, but have little practice in the pedagogical use of digital resources and have been able to dedicate themselves to thinking about technology-aided teaching. A good example of this are the situations where they read aloud at the beginning of the project that needed to be reinvented. Introducing a book in person is quite different from doing so via

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a smartphone. The group developed strategies that made it possible to achieve the learning objectives without having to diminish the quality these literacy events. Holding the book in an L to make it easier to show the entire page was one such strategy; bringing the mobile device’s camera closer to some images to show important aspects for understanding the narrative was another.

The children, on the other hand, also developed procedures that helped them build the meaning of the text. Conversations such as the one quoted below have been described by the group of educators: “Ms. Teacher, could you show me that figure again because I want to see something? No Ms. Teacher, not the one you are showing right now, the other one, that you showed us just before.” Gradually the conversations became more interactive and the children started to point at the images on the screen, “It’s this one here, do you see it Ms.Teacher?” Likewise, the educators started to answer while pointing at the screen, “Which one?

This picture here, or that one over there?” This way the teachers and the children have been discovering together what the best way of using the smartphone is during the reading times and are building strategies that drive learning.

In the writing activities involving the mobile alphabet, it is fundamental that the educator follow the child’s entire movement: the search for a letter to write a certain word, hesitations, switching one letter for another, the way of reading what was written— following the child’s reading along with a finger— among other important gestures in the process of learning how to read and write, since they give clues about the child’s logical reasoning. Therefore, the adult who watches over the child has been asked to hold the smartphoneand capture all these situations. Thus, it was necessary to teach the families how to aim the camera, keep their hands steady, not aim the camera toward the light, etc. The students, in turn, were learning the same procedures together with the guardians, and, thus, gaining greater autonomy in the use of the smartphone.

Mastery of these procedures started to make a major difference and to help both with teaching and learning.

New discoveries such as recording voice messages, turn them into text and send them were also performed by the students, which led the educators to think about how to make the most of this resource. The idea is to ask the student to write out a word (within the student’s concept of writing) and then go in the opposite direction, thus turning the text into an audio message.

Consequently, the student who still has not achieved

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alphabetic writing can compare what they had intended to write with what they actually did and then, through the teacher’s help, think about it and move on.

Finally, it is possible to see that in the activities where the children read to their teachersthe appropriation of the smartphone helps learning how to read in this context. The way that the way that they position the book before the camera of the mobile device and ask, “Can you see properly, Ms. Teacher?”They point at the names of the author, illustrator and publisher on the cover of the book, point out details about a certain image by brining the mobile device closer so that what they want to show will be visible, and finish the reading saying, “And they all lived happily ever after,” just as the teachers tend to say.

The potential of interaction made possible by the smartphone-assisted pedagogical practice is another important aspect worth pointing out. Although none of the 11 children ever met in person with their teachers, the affective bond between the two became increasingly tighter. This also happened in families, which started to share the development of their children with the volunteer educators, talking about different things and working as hard as possible not to miss a single meeting.

There was even a situation in which two families who needed to go back to their home states due to losing a job as a result of the pandemic and picked up the remote classes as soon as they were settled into their new hometowns. This is how the project also included students from other states in Brazil (Bahia and Piauí).

It ought to be stated that although the educators use WhatsApp for personal purposes, none of the educators had ever learned to read and write through this technology, much less considered it as a potential aid for teaching language or as a supplementary tool for improving the teaching and learning process. In other words, the educators would not even be in the “adaptation” stage, according to the levels of digital technology adoption set out for training teachers for its pedagogical use.

However, the complexity of the context and the joint discovery among the educators (in their weekly meetings) and between educators and students in classes about the potentials and limitations of WhatsApp provided a sense of the challenges that were overcome in a participative and collaborative way. This engagement created a new dynamic in the teaching and learning process and signaled a step up in terms of the stages of adopting technology, as well as an active immersion in digital culture, both for the students and the teachers.

Upon entering the students’ homes through the videocalls, the teachers were opening themselves up to experiencing new ways of creating bonds, of interacting and teaching; and the students and their families delved into the new challenges of learning through a screen, in addition to establishing bonds with the educators whom they had never met before. These new educational practices created in the context of the pandemic could signal a transformative use of this technology.

Final Considerations The mobile literacy project in remote education shows the importance of thinking about the policies for training teachers in the use of ITCs as a dynamic rather than linear or sequential processin which the stages of adopting technology require being in sync with the complexity of the context, such as emergency remote teaching.

In this sense, appropriating technology ought to surpass the instrumental use of technology, the technique by technique, and appreciate human participation therein, thus providing collaborative work (among teachers and between teachers and students) so that the jointly-created teaching

strategies could involve the students and meet their needs, and that these have prominence in their learning activities.

The literacy teachers’ experiments also demonstratedthe understanding of how digital technologies change the practices of reading and writing and demand new dynamics in educational work, considering the multiple languages and the participatory and collaborative ethosthat characterize digital culture.

The educational paths for teaching and learning with (and through) ITCs need to identify digital technology as resources for social transformation, thus enabling innovation in pedagogical practices with the purpose of preparing students—and teachers, too, in their early and continued education—to act effectively with autonomy and criticality in contemporary society.

The experiment presented in this article shows that the pandemic can favor innovativeeducational practices, as it can also exacerbate educational inequalities for those without access to remote learning. It is urgent that the public policies for offering quality education in Brazil contemplate including digital literacy as a right, and the pandemic has only stressed this fact.

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CHILE

Learning Ecosystems: Transforming Latin American Education Ana María Raad, Director, “ecosiSTEAM”

An anthropologist, Ana believes in learning, re-learning, and un-learning every day. She is the director of “ecosiSTEAM”, an initiative developed by the David Rockefeller Center of Harvard to promote collaboration and collective impact in STEAM education. She also develops and leads a regional educational initiative named www.aprendoencasa.org that promotes regional collaboration and a vibrant ecosystem that generously shares best practices, digital resources and knowledge in times of Covid-19. She is also a member of the National Council of Arts, Cultures, and Heritage from the Ministry of Culture in Chile. Is a former Director of the Center for Innovation in Education of Fundación Chile, from where she promoted educational programs to accelerate the development of human capital for the 21st century.

She is the winner of WISE AWARD from Qatar Foundation in 2012.

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I

n words of the UN General Secretary, Antonio Gutteres, the pandemic has caused the biggest disruption in the history of education. More than 1 billion children have been affected, and the most vulnerable, “students with disabilities, those belonging to a minority or disadvantaged communities, displaced and refugee students and those living in remote areas are at the greatest risk of being left behind. This catastrophe is real, a setback that we cannot ignore amid the opportunity to change and generate the necessary traction”.

This situation is dramatic in places like Latin America where we are facing a real learning “pandemic”. 50% of students at age 10 cannot read. Also, 30% loss of learning is expected as a result of the COVID 19 Crisis, as well as very high and dramatic school dropout rates. Additionally, the majority of teachers in the region do not have adequate training to face this crisis and have tried to transfer to the digital world the same experiences they did in their traditional classrooms.

All the evidence suggests that in Latin America we need to prioritize and work urgently on the development of students’ agency capacity (students’ ability to be active agents in their own education), and their resilience and socio-emotional capacities to recover the lost rhythm to reduce school dropout.

Also, to improve the effectiveness of teachers with techniques and methods in the use of technologies inside and outside the classroom. And facilitate collaboration and provide them with access to resources and platforms for collaboration (curated educational resources and technology) so they can stay updated on rapidly evolving challenges and educational and social responses. There is no doubt that we have the opportunity to creatively manage immediate problems while building a bridge towards a reinvention of the education system.

Learning Ecosystems To Accelerate Change AprendoEnCasa.org was developed precisely to face the challenges the pandemic has raised, but also the educational change that we have left behind for decades. We are a Latin American

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A teacher in Ecuador teaches with her computer.

coalition and an ecosystem of organizations that promote the transformation of learning. We do this by connecting different disciplines and perspectives from expert organizations that are working in science, arts, pedagogy, technology, humanities, socioemotional learning, anthropology and other areas. All of them are united by a common goal to support learning that ensures greater inclusion and participation of children and young people from Latin America in the 21st-century society. We support teachers, administrators and parents in their transition to the digital world, providing high quality and prioritized content, strategies, and effective practices to address learning in hybrid contexts, as well as promoting the development of critical social skills for students. We promote a regional educational ecosystem, through collaboration, non-duplication of efforts, joint work, and adaptability to different realities, through digital solutions to facilitate radical collaboration without borders. During this experience we have rapidly learned some lessons we would like to share.

5 ideas to transform education through radical collaboration • Align efforts to develop 21st century and SEL skills To meet these challenges, people must be equipped with a fundamental skillset that will help them, not only compete in the job market but also grow and achieve higher levels of well-being throughout their lives. Socioemotional skills (SEL) such as empathy, adaptability, perseverance, and resilience are more important. Other fundamental skills are digital skills; advanced cognitive skills such as teamwork, communication, creativity,

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critical thinking or problem solving, and the ability to aspire to lifelong learning. None of these skills are new, but they are critical now.

At AprendoEnCasa.org our model is based on an open and collaborative digital platform and embraces key principles of learning, including the assumption that it is effective when there is interest, exposure (access), it is done practically, it encourages reflection and collaboration. This vision of education is being included in all the interactions and spaces that we are designing in our platform.

• Promote inclusion through transformative learning experiences The lack of interesting and transformative learning experiences, plus the disconnection with the real meaning of education has a brutal impact on school dropout. Exactly for this reason we must “refocus” students’ learning experiences.

Among the main “active” didactic models identified to promote transformative learning experiences (that are centred on students and promote greater inclusion), are personalized learning (Tutorials), flipped classes (hybrid learning); the development of competencies to creatively and strategically solve specific challenges; projectbased learning; experiential learning that allows linking everyday life situations through real work (including Co-op); or maker spaces available for everyone. At AprendoEnCasa.org, we have enabled a space dedicated to highlighting these transformative methodologies and it has implied recognizing the work of hundreds of teachers and organizations that have developed this type of pedagogies inside and outside the classroom. We understand that to innovate with pedagogical practices we need to consider multiple approaches and efforts. This kind of innovation usually demands permanent communication within partners, as well as rigorous processes to identify and promote better practices.

• Supporting teachers: the “vaccine” against exclusion and school dropouts We know that teachers are those who have learned the most during this covid-19 crisis. We have seen their willingness to change their practices. It is not easy for them because it takes time, their schedules are complicated, however, their ability to adapt has been remarkable. We know that teacher-student relationships remain the key to success, as Michaell Fullan has been appointed so many times. The education that we need to reimagine should not be an agenda of students “learning on their own”; learning alliances and environments remain essential elements of a future-focused learning model. We need to facilitate collaboration and provide them with access to resources and platforms for collaboration. In that sense,

what we have learned with AprendoEnCasa.org is the key consideration of diversity, both in the capacities of teachers and in the contexts in which they work. For us, it has been a priority to be able to incorporate diverse content and experiences, that allows its implementation in rural contexts or less connected environments, as well as in spaces with better conditions and connectivity, but above all, it has been key to link the work teachers must do, with the specific demands from its institutions and the resources they already have. We need to complement them, instead of duplicate or simply distract their priorities. We do this for example, by complementing the work each Ministry of education is promoting (for example in Chile and Ecuador we are delivering our content and solution through the local Ministry of

education platforms). In other words, we are driven by the demand of their local needs, but with a broad and diverse regional perspective. • Democratize technology and make it more inclusive Most countries in Latin America do not have a national digital education strategy to develop an effective distance educational model and to take advantage of the new technology. Digital inclusion implies, on the one hand, ensuring connections and internet access, but on the other hand, delivering high-quality educational resources, in a simplified and easy-to-access way. In AprendoEnCasa.org (in addition to having simplified resources in terms of formats), we have ensured that they are in Spanish, very accessible and free of charge. This is because we know that we operate in a very dissimilar

Aprendoencasa.org home page including content and strategies from more that 70 organization in 7 countries in Latin America

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There is no doubt that we have the opportunity to creatively manage immediate problems while building a bridge towards a reinvention of the education system

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and unequal region and therefore, multi-platform and multi-channel strategies are undoubtedly the most effective way to address these challenges. Efforts to reduce digital gaps must be oriented to improve connections, allowing access for agile and effective contents, but also, to develop the capacities of teachers to enhance learning experiences mediated by technologies.

• Promote open innovation and strong learning ecosystems “When engaged with a variety of resources within a larger community, charged with the power of social interaction in the connected world, students of all ages, temperaments and abilities can take advantage of greater opportunities that better meet their needs.” It is clear that (among other benefits of having a collaborative learning ecosystem), the promotion of equity is one of the most important. This pandemic has shown us the need to establish extensive collaborative networks.

Schools need partners, inside and outside the building, to share and shape their vision. The involvement of the entire community is essential if students are to have the opportunity to engage in meaningful real-world learning that extends beyond the classroom.

Through AprendoEnCasa.org we have been able to connect more than 70 organizations with a common purpose: to reduce inequities and transform 21st-century education for all students.

We have achieved a real “glocal” impact (global and local at the same time) by formally integrating seven countries (Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Spain) and having visits from 90% of the countries in the region.

At this time of the pandemic when we are facing the most challenging future that education can imagine, we know and embrace the principle of understanding that the real learning transformation is a shared process and not an individualized action. AprendoEnCasa.org has been a real challenge and a very meaningful process of providing an open and collaborative digital platform. We have no doubt that the future will be hybrid, but it will be very dynamic and with constant change, that is why we need to assure more collaboration, a unified vision of how to reduce inequities, as well as how to promote better learning experiences that can ensure full participation in the society we are designing.

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BRAZIL

The Pedagogy of Contingency: Education meets Design for cocreating an untested feasibility Ana Paula Gaspar, Author, Brazil

Ana Paula graduated in History and Digital Communication and completed her Masters in Design. She has 13 years of experience working with innovation in education. In the first 6 years of her career, she worked for museums and founded a startup. In the last 7 years she has been working as a consultant for EdTech and service design companies. She has had international experiences in Silicon Valley and London on accelerators, innovation hubs and maker spaces. She researches, develops and manages projects for complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives that contribute to educational innovation, strengthening teacher training in technology and supporting managers in decision making by adopting technology for public and private schools.

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T

he occurrence of the closing of schools around the world due to the coronavirus pandemic created the emergence of a new mental model. It was no longer Cartesian, linear or logical for all education professionals and society in general as we were facing an unprecedented situation. It is clear that throughout history it was not the first episode of a pandemic with millions of deaths, but the new fact is the set of contemporary factors such as the rapid and intense exchange of information and people, a different political scenario, more polarized and at the same time with diffuse leadership, and the new status of education in society with the integration of technology in the educational process. As we contemplated the beginning of the closing of schools, education professionals around the world began to ask themselves: with what mentality are we going to act in one of the strangest occurrences of our lives? What kinds of thoughts and actions should nurture decision-making in these scenarios? What set of skills should be mobilized to navigate on this journey through the unknown?

The design view of the world for realities like this was the one that seemed to be the most appropriate.

The contribution of different areas of knowledge to education is fully developed and vast, however, the encounter with the design is recent and has been taking place, among other factors, due to the need for education to redesign and innovate in its methods and practices, as well as, for the new skills of design that moved from

the organization of industrial productions to the resolution of the so-called wicked problems like education during the pandemic. Wicked problems are a “class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision-makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing.�

This mentality of Design was added to the previous reading of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy, which also formulates a concept to define problems that are difficult to overcome, a limit-situation. For this author of education, a limit-situation, as a concrete reality, can cause oppositions of themes and tasks in individuals from different areas and even subareas in the same area, which therefore require programmatic diversification for their unveiling. This is a situation that presents itself as a barrier and obstacle for the subjects that after being critically perceived have the desire to act and solve problems in the best possible way with hope and confidence. The resolution of a limit-situation occurs through the collective discovery of an untested feasibility, which are unnoticed practical solutions, an unprecedented thing that goes through a theory of dialogical action or any other that seeks the same end.

When connecting the views on complex problems of these two areas, Education and Design, it is clear that the object and practice of professionals who work with complex problems depend much more on

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the current reality in which there is a problem or situation-limit than the pre-established definitions by the scientific fields of each discipline. Thus, the meanings around the wicked problems and the limitsituation and the proposals presented by the authors were what we chose to observe, interpret and act in the face of the challenges that the pandemic presented us: a reasoning to solve complex problems, based on interactions and flexibility, collaboration and a deep understanding of human factors. This model of thinking has been incorporated into our view of the world before the pandemic and has intensified in recent months to organize complex experiences in new intentions, in new possible designs. The

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pandemic, as a limit-situation, made us glimpse an untested feasibility from our view of the world, enriched by Design. The first viable that we built in this sense was the Pedagogy of Contingency.

The Pedagogy of Contingency and its three axes: a manifesto The Pedagogy of Contingency was born in the face of the unpredictable, the desire to investigate, record, and systematize the observations and the lived, to signify personal and professional experience and to share with the people around. The term seemed to make sense to the Education and Design community and was first published in mid-March when schools in

Brazil started preparing their contingency plans.

Since then the meaning of the term has been built on different opportunities for dialogues in podcasts, webinars, papers, interviews, and in two exclusive actions: an unprecedented tool created to support teachers in the planning of activities and a learning and practice community of educators around the theme. Pedagogy of Contingency is a project to investigate reality, think about practice, create and realize visions, and possible futures for education during and after the pandemic. A pedagogy that fuses fields. Just as Paulo Freire fused pedagogy and awareness, Contingency Pedagogy fuses Pedagogy and Design. It is organized into three axes: Contingency, Complexity, and Transformation (image 1). The axes represent inherent and indispensable characteristics for thinking and acting in complex scenarios. They are also an attempt to organize points of contact between Education and Design around meanings that can be recognized as valuable for both fields.

Contingency A contingency is what may or may not be, it may or may not occur. It is being in contact with the unpredictable, it is touching uncertainty, it is the non-necessary and the non-impossible, so it legitimizes the action even in the face of the unknown. A contingency is revealed in the unpredictable and uncertain, in the limitsituation and the uncontrollable context. It was the nature of the contingent that placed schools and educational managers in the face of preparing contingency plans for the closure of schools and the continued provision of remote learning experiences. It is the contingency that should be guiding society in the debate about the reopening of schools. In this way, a Pedagogy of Contingency is one that deals with uncertainties and unpredictability as an inherent element of the process, which is why it considers different nuances and possibilities and does not focus on solutions created only on certainties. The contingency admits the uncontrolled situation and tries to create a shared vision of the risks and powers behind each solution generated collectively. We got it wrong together and got it right together. It is our radical collaboration and a social pact that a contingency demands from us all.

Complexity The historical journey of the two main areas involved in the Pedagogy of Contingency, Education, and Design, seems to reach a place of scientific maturity where both recognize their problems in the common field of complexity.

We don’t talk about education and design and its problems without taking into account the complexity involved in its multiple subject scenarios, relationships, circumstances, expectations, impacts, actions, and realities.

Education and Design present themselves as polycompetent fields as they present a huge variety of circumstances that allow advancing in each field and breaking the isolation of both by the exchange and circulation of concepts, cognitive schemes, overlaps, interferences, and the emergence new explanatory hypotheses as well as the constitution of organizational concepts that allow the articulation of scientific content in a common theoretical and practical system, in our case, innovation in education.

The complexity in the Pedagogy of Contingency means an investigation that constitutes an effort to feel and act together and build a noncompartmentalized communication that helps to interpret the reality in the complexity of its permanent becoming. Complexity reveals our already announced need for a systemic understanding of life and the networks that support it.

Transformation Faced with the contingent and the complex, the school as a social institution goes through a growing movement of the search for innovation and transformation in the face of contemporary challenges. The effort of managers and educators to change practices and create alternative paths to the traditional functioning of schools has been noticed in isolated cases, and the evidence of a transformation on a relevant scale to impact the majority of society has not yet been noticed.

During the pandemic, a recurring question hangs over all of us and especially education professionals: what transformation will this historical fact be able to cause in education?

Transformation calls for our design reasoning and our utopian hope for creating possible futures. How can we design viable new experiences from this wicked problem?

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A tool and a professional learning community Based on the elaboration of the Pedagogy of Contingency and its three axes, we built two proposals around this meeting: a tool for planning remote learning experiences and a professional learning community around the theme. We know that there is a long way to a more robust elaboration of new pedagogy for the complexity that embraces so many aspects of education, but the investigative thinking and the desire for a design that are characteristics of the Pedagogy of Contingency filled us with freedom and courage to create these two initiatives.

The first one was “PERA” (Remote Learning Experience Planning), a framework that was co-created by a team of designers and educators to help teachers think about activities for students in this closing period and also to remember that we have a very unusual

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situation and that we need to pay attention to the new components of this new configuration when proposing activities (image 2).

The second one was the “Pedagogia da Contingência” website to communicate and organize our productions and bring teachers together in a learning community on the topic. Conversations around the theme are taking place at live transmission, webinars and other online events and we are investing so that more professionals will join us in this initiative. We want to gather experiences from different educators in this period and organize reports of experiences that inspire other teachers.

Creating realities with an investigative and projective look from the challenges that arise along the way is what Pedagogy of Contingency proposes. We are working in this direction to transform education in the direction we believe.

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BRAZIL

Flag Time: Valuing Individualized and Collaborative Learning Through Daily Differentiated Practice Anne Baldisseri, Head of Primary Division, Avenues: The World School, São Paulo, Brazil

Anne Taffin d’Heursel Baldisseri is a doctor in zoology with extensive experience in school management. She has a postgraduate degree in educational management and is currently a research member of NEAPEL (Núcleo de Ensino, Assistência e Pesquisa em Leitura e Escrita) at UNIFESP (Universidade Federal de São Paulo), and aims to complete a postdoctorate related to bilingualism, metacognition and self-regulation. She has published several articles and a chapter of the book Biology and Ecology of Vertebrates. Anne worked as Head of Pre-Preparatory at St. Paul’s School, São Paulo, Brazil, from 2007 to 2016. During this period, she was responsible for organizing two Education Conferences, bringing speakers from Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education, in addition to other important international names. Anne has given workshops and courses at national and international events, focused on differentiation, formative assessment and teacher collaboration. These experiences led her to create, together with some colleagues in the field, a strategy for individualized learning, called Flag Time.

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ducators use differentiated instruction in order to face the dilemma of implementing the curriculum while developing each student fully and responding to each student’s needs within class time. However, common forms of pedagogical differentiation, such as learning centers, readiness groups and choice tasks, generally do not place students as protagonists of their own learning.

For example, children can switch between a wide variety of engaging activities or complete tasks assigned by the teacher without knowing the purpose of the learning or reflecting on why the task was assigned or what was learned. In other words, the required curriculum standards do not always consider the interest of each and every student.

BONDIE and ZUSHO (2018) define differentiated instruction as the result of a continuous decision-making process in the classroom where the teacher recruits the academic diversity of the students to make learning more effective and efficient.

The authors define differentiated instruction in three ways: 1. Adjustable Common Instruction, where the same objectives, resources and assessments are used, but the instruction is modified to meet the needs of individual students.

2. Specific resources, where students use different resources and materials to achieve the same goal.

3. Individualized, where all students have the possibility to practice, review and challenge themselves in different skills according to their interest and what they need to improve.

Research on the development of interest assumes that it can be triggered and maintained through external references, such as the teachers’ support for learning. Teachers strengthen student autonomy when they consider the preferences and interests of students when selecting and designing tasks, justifying their relevance and offering the opportunity for questioning. Thus, they embrace the students’ perspectives and do not pressure them to think, act or feel in a single way.

Therefore, to meet the wide range of learning needs, the choice of tasks by teachers for each of their students, when done carefully and accurately, is as essential as choices made by the students themselves. Simply offering task options to students may not be enough to generate motivation. Equally, or even more important, would be to consider whether the tasks selected are relevant to the interests and learning objectives of students, in addition to assessing whether these choices are synchronized with their skills and aligned with their family and cultural values. Motivational theorists claim that the possibility of choosing tasks by students themselves only becomes effective when it satisfies the fundamental psychological needs of autonomy, competence and belonging.

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It is important to note that not every student will need to work on the same activities, requiring more planning time and more time for assigning individual learning tasks

Flag Time is a daily deliberate practice routine where differentiated instruction becomes individualized and positions students as protagonists of their learning, improving their strengths and, at the same time, providing practical reinforcement in areas that need further development, whether to close gaps in learning or to challenge student thinking and understanding.

During Flag Time, students work alone or in small groups on tasks specifically designed to promote their individual independence and reflective learning. Teachers prepare the environment to carry out the routine by placing a flag with the name (and photo or symbol for younger students) of each child in a learning station where a specifically designed activity awaits. This activity considers the strengths and/or interests of the student(s) as well as the skill(s) that need(s) to be practiced. Each day, children are strategically reorganized into new groups, which are usually composed of different students who either share the same interest and the same skill to be developed or have different needs to develop and challenges to focus on. The tasks prepared for Flag Time last a maximum of 20 minutes and the role of the teacher at this moment is to observe, evaluate and offer feedback to the students whilst encouraging them to complete their tasks in a collective and individual way. At the end of the Flag Time activity, students self-assess their progress and think about their next learning goals.

The steps for planning and executing Flag Time are summarized below.

1. Assessing and Planning Monitor students’ learning and work process in order to determine their specific skills and those that each student needs to practice. Design a table with the following data for each student: interests, strengths and academic needs.

2. Assigning and grouping Think of activities that need to be practiced and that consider the interest or strengths of each student. Use

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a small flag with the student’s name (and photo or symbol for younger students) to identify the activity created specifically for that child. Group students strategically, so that everyone is properly challenged and, at the same time, is able to successfully complete the activity in 20 minutes.

3. Giving directions Help students monitor time (20 minutes maximum) using a sand-clock or digital countdown. Make a checklist of what students are expected to do during Flag Time and help them remember the agreements and expectations of high-quality work. These resources will help in the monitoring of activities by the teacher, besides promoting student independence.

4. Learning through Flag Time Invite students to look for their respective flags and start the activity. The teacher should be always providing support and feedback, as well as explanations to students who have questions. It is imperative to keep the assessment table organized. Only then will the teachers be able to manage their observations and assessments, and easily plan the next Flag Time activity for each student.

5. Daily: Monitoring and Reflection.

Instruct students to use stickers and checklists to reflect on the important aspects of the activity performed during Flag Time. These should be separated into motivation to learn (e.g. I liked it, more or less, I didn’t like it) and types of learning skills used (e.g. visual, auditory, verbal, cognitive, conflict resolution, etc.). Ask each student to explain their thoughts to the teacher or to a peer.

6. Weekly: Individual learning diary.

Invite students to choose one of the activities completed during the week, for example, the one they liked the most or found the most interesting. Ask them to record an audio or write about it in an e-learning diary and to post a photo of the activity followed by a comment. This will serve as

evidence of their learning process and academic goals.

The teacher can interview the students, asking them about the learning process they experienced during Flag Time and help define strategies for the next academic step. Based on the study by HAIMOVITZ and DWECK (2017), we suggest using the following questions: “What did you learn?” “What was difficult?” “What strategies did you use to try to overcome the challenge encountered?” This data will be extremely important for student self-reflection, for teacher planning and for communication with parents.

Flag Time brings value to deliberate individualized practice In Flag Time each student practices a single skill in an area of work ​​ that was intentionally designed and assigned to them by the teacher, in order to narrow gaps or expand learning. According to the expectation-value theory by Eccles and Wigfield (2002), most individuals will choose not to work on a task if they think they can fail, even if they are interested in it and value it.

Because practice requires intense and concentrated effort, students may find that an activity where they need to practice a certain skill is not inherently enjoyable.

When students are successful in solving the problems proposed in a task, the benefits of this practice are enhanced. However, when students are frustrated with poorly planned tasks or problems that are disconnected from their reality, they usually lose motivation, do not receive all the benefits of this practice and may become reluctant to perform future tasks. Several conditions must be considered so that deliberate practice becomes more enjoyable whilst still being effective in bringing students closer to the expected performance (see HAMBRICK et al. 2014 and BOALER 2019), such as the design of activities with the previous knowledge and interests of the students in mind, a very important step for setting up Flag Time.

We know that to progress, many students need to have repeated opportunities to practice the same task and, by changing the format of the activity, even if the same skill is being worked on, teachers make practice more stimulating. The design of activities that maximize the success opportunities of each student is an important planning stage for deciding the groupings for Flag Time, as well as which activity will be assigned to each group. Flag Time promotes the development of a growth mindset through stimulating activities that are carefully planned to be in each child’s zone of proximal development by being sufficiently challenging while considering the interests and needs of the child.

Planning deliberate practice in small groups during Flag Time Unlike many forms of differentiation, with Flag Time, students do not rotate through a series of predefined activities. The surprise of finding their flag and discovering which classmates they will work with, in addition to the possibility of reflecting on how and what has been learned, involves and motivates the students.

Flag Time is therefore an excellent opportunity for children to develop and improve their social skills because of the alternating composition of students in each learning group working on a specific skill.

This generates a spirit of collaboration and mutual challenge. In this environment, a culture is built in which children expect everyone to have strengths and make valuable contributions.

Flag Time provides ample opportunities for teacher feedback The greatest benefits of practice occur when teachers provide specific and timely feedback to students.

Therefore, while students work on the Flag Time activity, the teacher circulates among the groups to help and provide feedback. BONDIE and ZUSHO (2018) believe that when teachers are walking around the classroom, they are open to reflect on why students may or may not be involved in a task and, therefore, are able to give immediate feedback helping the students to remember the purpose of the activity. It is also at this time that teachers can make instructional decisions by responding to perceived learning needs in a precise and efficient manner. Flag Time should be seen as a deliberate and intentional experience, focused on objectives and paired with reflection and feedback.

Development of self-assessment and selfregulation through Flag Time Flag Time activities are structured in such a way that students can receive immediate feedback from their peers or can refer to a rubric or checklist. Therefore, children do not need confirmation from the teacher when they complete an activity. They reach this conclusion on their own, becoming increasingly autonomous learners. This promotes self-regulated learning skills as part of Flag Time. Also, in line with research that suggests that self-regulated learning can be further developed by maintaining learning journals, students are asked to think metacognitively about how they are learning, and use an electronic journal to describe how they were able to use their skills.

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Transforming Flag Time principles to a distance learning environment We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. - John Dewey While distance learning does not provide the opportunity for Flag Time to happen for 20 minutes during one moment of every day, the many learning and growth opportunities provided by Flag Time can be envisioned in a distance learning mode.

Providing time every day for individualized deliberate practice An asynchronous moment for practicing a specific skill can be deliberately and intentionally planned for each student. Students can be given a moment in their daily schedules to work on a single skill from any discipline for 20 minutes. It is important to note that not every student will need to work on the same activities, requiring more planning time and more time for assigning individual learning tasks. Linear reasoning, normally used for developing lesson plans, is not sufficient for this practice. This proposal requires the teacher to use strategic reasoning to solve the puzzle, which is the planning of individualized differentiated instruction.

These asynchronous activities can also be structured in such a way that students can receive immediate feedback from a rubric or a checklist.

Providing small group live moments Small group live moments can be designed for 2 to 6 students to practice a skill that may need teacher guidance and/or to receive immediate teacher feedback.

Students should be assigned specifically to a group when they need practice in a skill because they may be struggling to master it. They may also be assigned to work on an enrichment activity to learn and practice a new, more challenging skill. This can be organized by teachers for any discipline depending on student need.

As these groups are strategically planned and the teacher carefully chooses activities within each child’s zone of proximal development, students feel confident and able to tackle the assigned tasks. Students should therefore feel more motivated and more comfortable to engage with the group as they become aware of their strengths and those of their peers, in addition to the skills that each needs to develop.

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Organizing individual meetings with each student at least once a week A live meeting between a teacher and a single student should take a maximum of 20 mins and should happen at least once a week. The teacher can determine the course of the conversation based on observations combined with strategic questioning. This conversation should guide the teacher to determine student interest, strengths and needs. It is also an opportunity to discuss which tool or model might help the student to tackle a certain activity, and to give the student feedback and encouragement to help them persevere in learning a specific skill.

Providing opportunities for self-assessment and self-regulation Students can be given a specific moment to work on an asynchronous activity that supports them in looking at teacher feedback on activities they have submitted and reviewing their work. Students should also have a daily slot of time dedicated to talking or writing about their learning. This is an individual reflection moment.

Journaling helps students to be less restrained when expressing themselves. It also gives students time to organize their thoughts and prepare responses, which can give them the extra confidence they need to participate in small group discussions. Journals are a great assessment tool for teachers as they reveal students’ level of understanding, as well as what students require in order to improve in areas where they may be struggling. This will develop self-regulation skills and support students to become more metacognitive. Live moments, at the end of the day, can also be used for students to share their reflections about their learning and goals related to their next steps, usually facilitated with either a protocol or prompt. For teachers, it is a moment for observing and assessing students’ thinking about their own learning.

Flag Time differs from previous attempts at differentiated instruction in significant ways. First, it focuses on the specific skills that need to be practiced or extended, rather than easier and harder versions of the same task. Second, the interests of the students are designed into the learning, enabling students to easily see the value of engaging in the activity. Third, the design of each activity recruit students in their own assessments, fostering selfregulation and motivation. It is important to keep these principles in mind when designing learning experiences for individual students, whether in a face-to-face routine like Flag Time or within a distance learning program.

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CHILE

Zero Digital SkillA Formative Hope Antonio Gonzรกlez Grez, Educator, Chile

A Doctorate in Educational Technology, Antonio has a Masters in Competency-Based Education. He was also an Alternate Researcher of the Didactic Research Group of the University of Sevilla, Pedagogical Advisor in Educational TechnologyCommunications and Academic at the University of Playa Ancha, Chile. He is also a board member of RedCad Chile, member of the MESA TIC FID, linked to the Mineduc ENLACES Innovation Center of the Ministry of Education, Government of Chile. He is an EdTech Ambassador for Genially, AoniaLearning and Pioneer in Nearpod.

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B

efore the pandemic, Chile was hit by a “social outbreak” phenomenon, which had effects in the constancy of the classes, many times suspended by strikes and for teachers and students’ safety. This instance worked as a preparation from which the education institutions searched for tools of distance teaching. However, those isolated and very simple intentions were not enough to confront the actual sanitary emergency.

“A precarious liberty is better than abundant slavery,” says a popular saying, and it fits perfectly the positive sight of this situation of technological implementation that we need to apply to work through a crisis of this magnitude from any public education institution, and as an example, public universities representing the 16% of the national higher education enrolment, have little technological tools access and they even use the free-version of many (selected by a scrutinized process), and probably the same goes for public schools. In scenarios where precarity reigns, this is a furtive field to activate people’s creativity, and that’s precisely in what I’m going to focus in this report.

In the phase previous to the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) crisis, in the university where I work as an Adviser in Education Technology, we had time to

work in person with professors in a methodology that allowed them to virtualize the formative processes. We used the “Diseño en Experiencias Formativas” (Design in Formative Experiences, in English) methodology, that works under the questions: What is the most important in a lecture? and What makes that lecture essential and high impact for the school curriculum and the alumni profile? This methodology, also with strengthened planning in other methodologies like Design Thinking and articulated by a Microlearning strategy for its implementation, also with the perspective of an adaptative learning process and flexible to the conditions of the sanitary context, was potentiated through tools of easy acquisition by the teachers and their students. I have had the privilege to transmit this same methodology to some public-school teachers, due that because of its nature is allowed to be used for any teacher in any classroom.

One of the key benefits has been the flexibility, which motivated the teachers to use Learning Management Systems (LMS) traditional tools as Moodle (the one that works as “institutional”) in a higher education level, but also allowing them to use other alternatives as Google Classroom, and even less orthodox tools as Facebook,

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to save video call recordings and avoid that the students pay extra charges in their cell phone bills when usually they have no budget to get high amounts of wireless data to download.

All these tools are having a very good performance in schoolteaching environments.

Thanks to this previous process, we have designed support programs to aid teaching in this pandemic context, from one side, by selecting applications (of wide use) that proved to be useful to the different uses, disciplines and modalities at different school ages, subjects and programs (in the case of universities), and from the other side, classifying the most pertinent methodologies to this context. Today we can’t talk about success, because we need to widen the coverage to every teacher affected by this emergency. In the training modules that we have done, the attendants have experienced the teacher’s solidarity and collaboration. This process will step into a plan of auto sustainable training, because our trained teachers act as a source of active transference of the learned skills, training other teachers, expanding the network of the support program for the strengthening of the use of teaching flexible methodologies in digital learning environments.

We are living a change of era, of paradigm since the education will not be the same anymore. Today the distance has given the needed space of self-reflection about “How have I done my classes? And How I can support the teaching process of my students?” The hope of a new education is being born, less centralized and more contingent on the changes that this new world demands.

Generating a solidarity practice community to reduce the digital breach in educative spaces.

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In this hope and collaboration scenario, a new movement of national and international cooperation has spontaneously emerged, this is how Competencia Digital Cero (CD0) was born.

This is a non-profit social project that searches through a teacher’s network formation the breach shortening of the objective population, defined in teachers that even having access to technology and connectivity, they have still not been able to perform a didactic transposition from a traditional praxis to one mediated by digital technology. In a study, 97% of the teachers declared to have Internet access, and the 90% declared to be developing any kind of remote education, interestingly, more than the 87% of the teachers declared not having any previous experience in virtual education before the emergency.

The proposal of CD0, from an innovation perspective, involves the design of a system of non-linear formation which aims to rescue the identity of the teacher in the process of formation.

It is not centred in the curricular documentation, and with that, it is inspired in the blockchain philosophy to decentralize the traditional model knowledge of the formal education. This is done with the use of Blockcerts, a kind of block to add to the blockchain specifically planned to document titles and academic certificates by performing this, the conception of the use of blockchain in education eases the application of seamless learning since, in the same praxis, previous teachings from formal, non-formal

and informal processes can be validated to promote a contextualized learning and connected in communities among different kinds of activities of learning in diverse topics to achieve discontinuous learning.

Why is it necessary for the utilization of new formative processes in the professorship preparation for its capacity to handle a digital ecosystem? There is a high number of frameworks that promotes the development of digital skills in teachers; DigcomEDU’s standards, the Spanish common frame of Teacher Digital Competence, ISTE

standards, the British frame of competences and standards ICT for the Chilean teacher profession, however, despite the existence of this rules, we need to tailor our teachers in the recognition and effective development of digital competences to profit the ICT’s in teaching processes.

This, a series of stages has become necessary to collaborate with teaching activities, where in this emergency period we started with a consultative aim, where the teachers would find a list of voluntary trainers with a long trajectory in education and educative

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technologies in different Iberoamerican countries, previously classified by their digital skills in teaching. With this analysis as a first input, we have uploaded a catalogue of capacities that the organization has, some sort of formative areas that we can offer to cover the needs of teachers that requires help in the didactic transposition in a pedagogy based in “in-person” teaching to one that involves digital environments.

The system’s functioning is simple, since in a first instance, the teacher that claims for aid, just fills a form that provides him with a profile in the system. Then, a match is performed between his profile and the voluntaries internal capacities, generating a link between the voluntary (which we have called Astronaut) and the teacher (which we called Cadet) associated by its previously declared characteristics. The process is gamified since we did not contemplate a traditional formative process, but one based in Cadet’s questions, this was created based on observations that we have detected and a previous study that shows the teachers do not have time for formal processes, where teaching objectives are determined by thirds and not by their formative needs, applying at the same time a tutorship in the same level as a strategy of the professorship formation.

Next to this process, we are registering the full procedure to elaborate according to the evidence, a method that allows working more efficiently the strengthening of the professorship’s digital competences. Practically, while the real key to an improvement on this topic relays on the initial formation of the professorship, intervening the curriculum to incorporate in a transversal way lectures that contain deeper aspects about the importance of forming

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the new digital society. Part of this change happens to motivate and raise the interest in this segment of teachers. As an example, just 18% of education departments in Chile has more than one lecture associated with ICT. The study besides indicates that the departments who has between 1 and 2 courses associated with ICT are basic, not diverse and with a limited set of digital tools (mainly projectors and computers). Traditional teaching and activities are predominant, as the frequency of activities about how to teach with ICT is lower to the ones that when the professor is the only who uses.

On this road of collaboration to reduce the digital breaches in Iberoamerica, the community of CD0, proposes a change in the way to support the aid process in teaching, from the perspective of pedagogy, since the results reveal a positive attitude and the technological capacity of the advantaged students in learning, raising the impact that this has in factors like frequency of use, autonomous and collaborative learning, progress auto perception and motivation.

Having in consideration that focus will allow the development of a model where the teachers in exercise can generate links with more experienced partners, will determine the focus where the validation will not be present from a stereotype of formal education, but from the relationship of the learning between partners solving together didactic problems, evaluation with similar characteristics, and we can add what the interaction of support will generate from different locations in Iberoamerica, allowing the teacher to grow not only in the instrumental side of their teaching skills but also in the reference context, applying social and disciplinary connections, which will finally allow the development of collaboration networks where the communities, in other words, the students and their families will be benefited with an ecosystem that will keep a sustained growth in the exercise of a conscious community in the duties and rights of citizenship on a digital coexistence. A little space of hope to reduce the digital problems of our new generations.

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CHILE

Aula Digital: One Size Doesn’t Fit All Benjamin Vodanovic, CEO, Aula Digital

Benjamin Vodanovic graduated from Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile with a business degree and a Master´s in Finance. He later continued his studies in the United States getting an MBA degree at the University of Chicago.

For the past 10 years, Benjamin has been working either directly or indirectly in the educational world. He started as the founder of an educational nonprofit organization that was focused on tutoring low-income kids to enter into college. Benjamin has also experience working in investment banking and venture capital, both in Chile and the US. AulaDigital is nothing but a project aiming to democratize access to education in Chile and the rest of Latin America.

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A

ulaDigital is a technological platform aiming to modernize how mathematic tutoring is conducted nowadays. This platform consists of an adaptative learning tool to prepare students in the learning of mathematics. Adaptative learning systems can be described as those that go beyond the simplistic decision trees algorithms. The difference with old-school´s software is that adaptative learning is dynamic and therefore able to adapt in real-time (it changes based on every interaction it has with the student). Adaptative learning not only considers whether your answer was right or wrong but also ponders the optimal patterns of the other classmates, the weight and complexity of the question, the time and engagement of the student, and his overall learning pattern.

Adaptative learning goes hand in hand with what education is: trying to teach something to a pool of students with a very asymmetrical set of skills and learning paces. What is the problem AulaDigital tries to solve?

According to an OECD study, 49.4% of Chilean students do not possess the minimum mathematical skills to conduct themselves in a civilized society. Also, OECD studies show that Chile leads one of the higher students to teacher ratio and

alarmingly overcrowded classrooms.

Local studies on the average college entrance scores also show that students comprehend less than 60% of the demanded curricula needed for rendering standardized testing. AulaDigital is conceived in a context in which the existent alternatives (such as private tutors and old-school software) have not dealt with these problems. Classrooms are still overcrowded, teachers overwhelmed and students not learning enough. Not to even mention that most of the existent alternatives are either too expensive or geographically unavailable for most of the Chilean students. This is why we urgently need products such as AulaDigital.

Has the pandemic accelerated the process?

Yes, most definitely. The COVID pandemic ended up accelerating a process that we already saw coming.

It accentuated the lack of technologization of both schools and teachers. But the main problem we are identifying is that the solutions that are being offered (basically online teaching) still lack the key element of education: personalization. Currently, students are still being taught content but are not being attended the way they should be.

Teachers barely have time to give one on one

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assistance to their students. Maybe it is the moment we start investing in alternatives to get that personalized teaching back. Let’s not forget. One size doesn’t fit all!

And AulaDigital is definitely a way forward that path.

How is the Chilean EdTech environment?

According to studies conducted by the OECD Chile is one of the leaders in the region in terms of a) the number of computers available per student, b) the internet connectivity of its schools, and c) the number of teachers trained on how to use technologies. This is not random, but the culmination of a project started in 1995 (Proyecto Enlaces) which was aimed at positioning Chile in terms of connectivity and ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies). Also, Chile has increased its public expenditure on education (public expenditure has grown from 16% to 23% or

the past 15 years). On the other hand, the government has encouraged Startups based on technology through programs such as Start-Up Chile and Corfo. We do not expect this dynamic to change any time soon considering the exponential efforts and infrastructure investments that have been made in Chile for the past decades.

This is, of course, a fertile ground for forefront EdTech entrepreneurship, all Made in Chile.

What does AulaDigital do for teachers?

This is a great question. There is this myth that educational technologies are trying to somehow replace teachers. But it is completely the opposite. What platforms as AulaDigital are trying to do is to ease and compliment the irreplaceable work that teachers do.

This is why our platform was developed under a threepronged structure. One, to have students interacting with this adaptative learning platform. Second, to get teachers the metrics related to said platform-student interaction.

And third, to provide teachers with materials aimed at continuing to emphasize a student´s weak spots. And this is no coincidence. The reason why we did this was

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mainly because all of the founders of AulaDigital have former teaching experience. And due to this former experience, we were able to identify and narrow down what teachers needed. Two of our team members are alumni of EnseĂąa Chile (the Chilean chapter of Teach for America) and I was a teacher at the NGO I founded. And believe it or not, it is working. The information we have gathered so far shows that our platform saves teachers an average of 3 hours weekly in the preparation and correction of student testing.

How has the project grown in time?

We started mid-2018 developing the prototype of AulaDigital.

I was studying at UChicago back then and the Polsky Center (the university´s entrepreneurship incubator) gave me the ideal environment to focus on this project. In September 2018 we started testing our pilot in three schools. The testing was a challenging process but also a very fulfilling one as it proved that both students and teachers were willing to give EdTech a try. The results were showing. We started 2019 with our first milestone: 1,000 users. And since then we have escalated to what we have today, more than 17,000 students using our software. We have grown exponentially in time and we hope to continue to do so.

What are the main obstacles AulaDigital has faced?

The main obstacle we have faced is definitely this overwhelming sense of not trusting in technology. People tend to identify technology with this kind of grim, obscure and cold creature. Technology seems like something too distant and abstract to trust it with the development of future generations. So definitely the main resistance has come from the fear to face change. This is why we have fought hard to give this Frankenstein a heart. To infuse soul and purpose into our platform. Some of the ways we have been trying to do this are by having a user-friendly platform. We have invested not only in creating a neat looking interface but also in having little details such as avatars and encouragement messages for its ease of use. And we are not stopping there. We are currently working in an amazing project aimed to equip AulaDigital with mindfulness content.

We are strong believers in the need to imbue education with other skills. And mindfulness is one of our top listed skills.

We hope to continue with initiatives as this is time and to hopefully convince people that technology can also be friendly and approachable.

Where do you see AulaDigital in 5 years?

Our main goal is to expand through Latin America. We have identified Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Peru as countries in which we would like to have a presence. And one of the reasons why expanding is incredibly exciting is because of the impact we could have. Imagine having a clear image of what education is lacking not only in Chile but in Latin America as a whole. We are firm believers that public policymaking is much more effective once you have information available. And we are not going to lie. We would love for this Latam technological revolution to be: Made in Chile.

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BRAZIL

A STEAM Project to Address Fake News And The COVID-19 Crisis Denise Curi, Head of Earth Science Department, Colégio São Luis, São Paulo, Brazil

Denis has a Ph.D. in Chemistry and before becoming an educator she was a post-doc fellow at some of the best university in Brazil and the world, as UNICAMP, USP and Harvard University. After teaching for 13 years she decided to take a sabbatical at Schumacher College, in England, in order to refresh her view on life and education. Back to Brazil she decided that her main contribution would be to work with teachers, helping then to think Education, and specially Science Education, with new eyes, in a more systemic and interconnected way, bringing together the learnings from Schumacher College with her experience on the science making.

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O

ur school year had started in January and we were all happy and anxious. After all, this would be the first year of our new program – STEAM classes for our kids, from k2 to k5. This program was a result of a major innovation process that had started in 2015 and included a new curriculum, aligned with our BNCC – Base Nacional Comum Curricular, the Brazilian Standards for Basic Education, and a new build for our school.

We spent 2019 designing this program in all its details, which included a beautiful curriculum where the main learning goals of Science, History and Geography, Math and Languages were contemplated. In order to achieve those goals, we chose to have two teachers working together – a STEAM specialist and the head teacher, in a weekly class of 100 minutes.

The first project designed for our k4 students were related with vaccines and the promotion of health. Our main idea was to introduce coding using Scratch by having the students developing a campaign, or a

game, that would help people to understand the need and the importance of vaccines.

Learning to code is a well-known STEAM learning goals, and vaccines are a classical Science contend, so why not put them together asking students to design an animated campaign? In a world where fake news related to science and health in general, and vaccines in particular, are continuously growing, we thought that this would be a proper theme to be explored with the students. Having the head teacher working together with our STEAM specialist would make the integration and connections of all the knowledge developed during Science, History and Geography classes much easier.

Then, March came and with it the pandemic crisis, and we had to go home, the school had to go home as well our brand-new STEAM program. Our first reaction was “What now? What are we going to do with our STEAM classes?” As the Head of the Earth Science department, and responsible for the implementation of this whole project, I had to

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Figure 1 – Some of the storyboard created by the students

step aside so I could breathe deeply in order to say to my teachers: “Ok, this is happening and we cannot change it, let’s embrace it and do what is possible now.

We will make mistakes, but we will also learn a lot.

So, let’s work with what we have, keep it simple, and be creative.!”

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Our school had decided that from k1 to k5 students would receive weekly lessons plans, and k4 and k5 would also have 3 hours online classes in the morning (ordinary those students would stay at school from 8am to 4pm). That meant that our STEAM program would, from now on, have only one 50 minutes

class per week, and only with the specialist teacher.

Knowing that, we sat together with one question in mind: “What are the STEAM essentials that we cannot lose in this process?”

First, STEAM is an approach to Project Based Learning, and all project needs a context and a question to be answered; also, all project requires research, planning, and the development of the answer to the question posed. Many times, the answer is the construction of a product, for STEAM is based on Constructionism. But STEAM is also about coding, and in our case, we have chosen as a product an animated campaign, made with Scratch, a coding platform from Lifelong Kindergarten Group of MIT Media Lab, available for free on its website.

Back in 2019, when we were designing our new program and this project, we have envisioned to discuss the importance of vaccines, its history and contribution to general health, the anti-vaccine movement, and the problems related to that, as measles resurgence, for instance. Ironically, the pandemic crisis came at hand: we had lots of misinformation (fake news) on the COVID-19, on how to prevent it, its treatments, and vaccines and its development.

Because of that, students ended up talking mainly about the coronavirus problem on their projects.

So, what were the step by step approach? Because now we did not have two teachers working together with students, we had to attack the problem in different ways during each discipline classes in order to put all together at the end.

At Science classes students learned everything they would usually learn - what are vaccines, how they act in the prevention of diseases, how they were developed, and the diseases that could be prevented by them. They also learned about COVID-19: what is a virus, the symptoms, how to prevent, why the quarantine, what is a pandemic crisis. Using videos, music, animations and books specially designed to talk with kids about the pandemic we were able to cover the main aspects of this huge problem taking into consideration the age of the students.

In order to start to work with the idea of designing a campaign to promote health and to prevent COVID-19 based on reliable information, during Science classes students were asked to elaborate a short video for a campaign using Flipgrid, a tool that allows students to share, to discuss, and give feedback on videos on a collaborative way. To teach students on

how to give a good feedback, we used the beautiful video “Critique and feedback - the story of Austin’s butterfly”, from Ron Berger, an elementary teacher in a school in Portland, ME, available on YouTube.

During History and Geography classes, students learned about some of the epidemic’s crisis in our history and the importance of vaccines on public health politics.

At the same time, during STEAM classes students started learning how to code using CODE.org Studio.

Detailed video tutorials were prepared teaching the students how to access the studio, how to create an account, and how code with it. Small challenges were proposed, and students were encouraged to always go one step further. It’s important to say that the core ideas of Computer Science and coding were first introduced through unplugged programming activities while we were still at school, before the lock down.

After having the students mastered on how to use CODE.org we started our Scratch lessons. A new series of tutorials were prepared, and small challenges proposed to the students: • Having one character making some movement.

• Having one character saying something.

• Having one character making some movement and saying something.

• Having two characters, both making some movement.

• Having two characters talking to each other.

• Having two characters talking to each other, moving around and with a background other than a white screen.

When all students were able to complete all challenges described above and were ready to develop their animated campaign, we went back to the core steps of a project-based learning so they could see the big picture. The problem posed to them: how could we promote health based on reliable information? We then talked about fake news and the COVID-10 crisis (the contextualization and anchoring step), we reviewed all they have learned about vaccines at Science and History classes (the research step), and gave them a task: to develop an animated campaign that: • Would promote health in general.

• Would help people to understand the main ways to prevent COVID-19: the importance of washing hands, using masks, and staying at home.

• Or would help people to understand the importance of vaccines.

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Figure 2 – Examples of students animated campaign on Scratch

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All campaign starts with its storyboard, so their first step was to elaborate their storyboard, which could be in a form of a text, a draw, a collage or a painting, any form they thought could be useful to communicate their ideas. Figure 1 shows some storyboards designed by the students.

They, then, presented their storyboard to their colleagues in order to get feedback so they could improve their campaigns. The previous work done at Science class on how to give feedback proved useful here, with students giving ideas to their friends, and being able to listen carefully to them and to the teacher’s comments.

After that students had two weeks to work on their animated campaign. Some of them were quite interesting, some of them had a better storyboard than the real campaign. We noticed that some students lost their interest on the campaign, and we believe that one reason for that was that the coding lessons took a little too long on this online version.

A few examples are shown in Figure 2: Also, when we had to go home and get ready to a whole new way of teaching kids we lost sight, for a little while, of the main idea of working with BPL: that the students need to have a clear picture of the whole project – the problem, the question to be answered, the proposed solution (in this case, the campaign), the need for instrumentalization, which for us was learning about and how to code, and clear criteria on how their work will be evaluated.

At the end of this whole process though, all of them were introduced to the basics of coding, our main goal with this project together with a better understanding of the importance vaccines and the ways of preventing COVID-19.

As for the team, here are some of the lessons learned: be patient, and always have in mind that a project requires prototyping and that a final product requires quite a few “versions” until getting to the final one – this is valid for the students projects as well as for our own STEAM program, which is in its first year of implementation, and will require a re-thinking and re-designing before we start it again in 2021.

To finish I would like to thank my teachers, specially Felipe Cavalcanti and Rafael Kocamahhul, our STEAM specialists, my colleague Joana Abbiatti, our Head of Math Department, and Tríade Educacional, our consultant partners on this beautiful endeavour.

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INNOVATIVE EDTECH SOLUTION PROVIDER OF 2020- COLOMBIA

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EDUCATION

SOUL

E Juan Manuel Pico and Martha Gรณmez

ducation Soul is a Colombian company founded by two local entrepreneurs with a significant history in education projects. In 2016, Martha Gรณmez and Juan Manuel Pico decided to move forward in their lives and created a private organization focused on making social impact, leveraged by the use of technology.

Latin America has traditionally been a region where public school education level is way behind the private school one. In addition, the digital gap has widened this situation, especially in the last ten years.

Education Soul has been committed to close this gap in low-income public-school areas.

At the beginning, the challenge for the company was to get visible in the market and establish a long-term relationship with local organizations who were looking for solutions in the digital space. The founders spent almost six months travelling internationally to nurture and curate different EdTech solutions to implement back in Colombia, under one main condition: stateof-the-art platforms that could be used easily in both urban and rural areas with low Wi-Fi signal, with a strong data analytics engine to provide instant feedback to local governments in the country and promote public policy.

The team decided to use two EdTech platforms, one for reading comprehension and digital skills, and another one for closing the gap in math fundamentals. In addition,

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they decided to incorporate a Finnish methodology to encourage children to programming with open source code through the use of music, arts and robotics.

The duo’s story has been successful, thanks to a strategic ally who has understood the relevance of the quality of education through the use of EdTech, to get a better performance in the lives of their children. This ally is Fé y Alegría (Faith and Joy), a non-government organization that provides formal and no-formal education at different levels in more than 15 countries, mainly in Latin America, and also in Europe and Africa.

Fé y Alegría started in 1955 as a project of the Jesuit Chilean Father José María Vélaz to educate 100 poor children in a room in the house of a construction worker

in Caracas (Venezuela). Today, it has expanded to an international organization reaching almost one million students in 1,000 centers. Fé y Alegría´s prime mission is to provide quality education to the poor with the potential to inspire others, as expressed in their motto “Where the asphalt road ends, where there is no water, electricity or services, there begins Fé y Alegría”. It also expresses the philosophy of educating in places that government provision does not reach. Most of its work is in the formal education system, where their basic operation principle is to create partnerships between the organization, the State and the local community to provide quality education to poor children. Fé y Alegría trains and supervises the teachers (in some cases it also selects them), manages the school

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and co-ordinates activities so that the school operates as a center for community development. It defines itself as a movement of integral popular education.

Their primary objective is to provide education for life that provides socially disadvantaged children with opportunities to increase the quality of their life.

The national chapters of Fé y Alegría are legally registered as private non-profit organizations. It is an institution of the Catholic Church sponsored by the Society of Jesus. The national chapters have agreements with the Ministry of Education. They are also part of a federation – Fé y Alegría Internacional – that is recognized as consultative member of UNESCO and UNICEF. At a national level, Fé y Alegría has a tight budget and its own organizational structure, that is very small and efficient, responsible for implementing the different components of the innovation.

The importance of a sense of mission, which Education Soul has aligned with As stated before, Fé y Alegría has a very clear sense of mission. It could be called the “spirit” of the innovation, which glues the different components of the innovation together, including the technologies and the people involved (teachers, trainers, administrators, students and parents). This vision articulates why the innovation make sense. It reflects an understanding of the main problems of education and how the proposed set of activities will address the problem.

The spirit of the innovations is often captured and transmitted in symbols. For instance, Fé y Alegría has a logo that is widely recognized in the region: a heart with the silhouettes of three children.

The organization has a desire to focus on socially disadvantaged students and to provide them with skills and attitudes that will increase their sense of control of their environment, a necessary condition for democracy.

Public schools ran by Fé y Alegría have better mastery of basic skills in reading, writing and mathematics. In addition, students come to schools Saturdays and Sundays to play in the sport yards, where the school is making a fit with their social needs. In most of the schools, there are youth groups which work on special projects such as Christmas activities, field trips, sports, and cultural events.

The case of Fé y Alegría demonstrates that NGOs can promote the participation of civil society and complement state efforts, and that they can also play a helpful role in demonstrating how to deliver quality education. Fé y Alegría has demonstrated that it is

the magic to promote adaptive learning to every student, so the team has had the tremendous opportunity to track every single child performance and produce analysis with clear paths of what is missing in terms of academic and digital skills and, on the other hand, what have been the trends of what have worked well, in order to fill the gaps.

As previously mentioned, teaching training is also a key factor at Fé y Alegría. During the coronavirus period this year, Education Soul started a pilot program focused on teacher’s digital skills improvement, a major challenge especially due to this new virtual experience that has been in place since March. There is in fact a major concern

indeed possible to provide quality education to the poorest children of Latin America and that it is a helpful reminder to ministries of education, which sometimes suffer from system fatigue, that poor children can learn and that it is possible to teach them well.

Education Soul has been a private partner of Fé y Alegría during the last four years. The team considers it as a privilege and an inspiration to witness, at first hand, that their mission is in fact a living proof on how an NGO provides quality education to the more underserved communities. In the case of Education Soul, the team has reached almost 18,000 students in 12 cities in Colombia, through the use of an EdTech platform that helps children to improve both their reading comprehension skills and their digital skills, key elements to prepare them for the future of work in a fourth industrial revolution society.

One of the organization’s major takeaways, thanks to Fé y Alegría, has been the importance of data analytics. An EdTech platform has

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from Fé y Alegría to quickly overcome a digital gap in terms of better skills to create more attractive virtual classrooms, using digital tools and apps to improve the student experience through Teams and Zoom classes.

In brief, Fé y Alegría has been for us a vivid example of what education is all about. Bringing quality to the poorest has also been Education Soul’s mission since day one. In Education Soul’s case, the use of EdTech has been paramount to promote a “massive personalization” and build a profitable business case out of it.

Besides the team’s experience with Fé y Alegría, they have been developing programs to foster the entrepreneurship spirit for vulnerable communities of women who sell beauty products through catalogs.

Education Soul has had the privilege to bring fresh ideas about entrepreneurship to more than 4,000 women in 10 cities in Colombia in four years.

In the same direction, the duo have opened new service lines in education to foster digital skills during these coronavirus times: smartphone filmmaking that is addressed to vulnerable young communities to spread the skills of making state-of-the-art videos using smartphones,

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with a team of movie makers who have worked in New York with the Oscar winning Director Spike Lee. And as a natural step of working with EdTech platforms, the organization is currently creating its own, focused on children and teachers to close the gap in Computational Thinking and Digital Literacy, leveraged by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, addressing especially low-income public schools in Latin America.

Education Soul has been on a journey to make social impact while building a sustainable business. EdTech along with entrepreneurship have been the pillars to develop educational projects, where their allies have been crucial to create a sounded development. Moving forward, Education Soul hope to transfer thousands of hours dedicated to educational projects, to bring solutions in other countries in Latin America and also in other international markets.

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BRAZIL

Helping Schools Get On Track With Educational Technology And Keeping Them There Glaucia Rosas, Co-founder, The EduTec Alliance

The EduTec Alliance is a membership-based organization that helps schools across the globe to implement and use of educational technology. She is the former Head of Digital Learning at St. Paul’s School, the prestigious British international school in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She is also the former Education Technology Coordinator at Cognita School. Under her leadership, St. Paul’s designed and implemented its Digital Learning strategy, for which it received the Microsoft Showcase School and Apple Distinguished School awards. Glaucia is a qualified teacher and holds a Business Management and Finance degree. She received her Masters degree from Johns Hopkins School of Education on Digital Age Learning and Educational Technology. During her career, she has specialised in School Management, School Leadership and Financial Management. Glaucia has delivered numerous workshops for teachers and school leaders in schools and spoken at conferences worldwide on leadership, innovation and digital culture for learning institutions.

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C

oming from a family of entrepreneurs, I have always been immersed in business management. My parents had just started a plastic business when I was born, and I remember learning to ride a bike whilst counting the merchandise in the factory’s warehouse. This environment strongly influenced me to choose Business Management and Finance to be my area of study.

As I started my professional life, it didn’t take long for me to notice that my entrepreneurial skills were not meant to be applied in the plastic business, but rather to something much more special. My country, Brazil, which is one of the wealthiest countries in the world in terms of natural resources, had immense difficulties in translating its potential into economic development, and I was determined to find a way to contribute to unravelling that dilemma. As the relationship between quality education and long-term growth has proven to be extremely strong, I decided that if I was to be an entrepreneur, I had to work in the education sector.

Brazil has 48 million k-12 students served by one hundred and eighty thousand private and public schools.

I thought that if I wanted to understand education, I had to be inside one of them to empathise with the issues and challenges that teachers, students, parents and school leaders face. I trained as a teacher and worked in local and international schools in São Paulo for over a decade. As I had a corporate background, I was always advocating for the use of technology to make the school processes

more efficient. Hence, it didn’t take long for me to move from a full-time teaching position to Technology Coordinator and later on, when I specialised in education technology, to Head of Digital Learning.

I am an explorer, which makes me very curious and socially dynamic. During my journey in education, I have visited various public and private schools across the globe and connected with countless educators and leaders in the sector.

It fascinates me to see how different organisations approach education and to learn about the challenges that schools face and how they manage to overcome it.

I can undoubtedly say that integrating technology was hardly at their top priorities list for a long time.

The education sector is massively under-digitalised; according to a report by HolonIQ, only 3% of global education expenditure was spent on technology preCOVID. Whilst other business sectors were debating blockchain and adopting artificial intelligence, most schools I visited hadn’t passed the cloud computing mark yet. Their understanding of educational technology was limited to having sets of computers and tablets in carts, offering robotic lessons and building maker labs. Most schools that invested in educational technology had simply bought devices and hired teacher trainers without a cohesive strategy as to how to use them. More often than not, money was spent, but the benefit was short term. In the worst cases, technology was used poorly and unstructured,

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and student performance dropped, projects failed, and technology users were disgruntled. Few schools had any vision for how educational technology was going to improve their performance.

“When the tide goes out, you see who’s been swimming naked.”

When 191 governments closed down schools in response to the COVID pandemic, 1.6 billion children were affected, and priorities quickly changed. With the need to rapidly adapt to remote working and teaching, schools have had to accelerate their pace of technology adoption, breaking century-old process cycles that may otherwise have taken decades to be transformed.

Schools with a robust install base of educational technology, a shared vision and a solid digital learning strategy in place were able to navigate this crisis. The online tools and environments they used were aligned with the school’s needs, and the community was well trained and prepared to use them. These schools are now able to use their experiences to improve their current strategy and are ready to start taking the next steps in their educational technology journey.

But this was far from the reality of the majority of schools. On average, schools that could afford made a vast investment in online learning platforms, video conferencing tools, and online learning apps and then trained teachers to technically use the tools as quickly as possible to be able to continue their operations.

But the pressure to move to the online environment and the lack of knowledge and careful planning using a systematic instructional design model impacted the quality of online teaching. Hence, emergency remote teaching was mostly based on information transmission and schools trying to reproduce what they had in presential mode. At the end of this cycle, these schools will end up with many disparate systems in place that are not integrated as an ecosystem. This in turn will create high operational costs and a very variable set of digital learning experiences across subjects.

Long term direction and stability for educational technology in the schoo When I was working as Head of Digital Learning at a prestigious British School in São Paulo, I was lucky to be sponsored by a brilliant man named James Wilkinson, a school board member who had spent 35 years travelling the world designing and implementing advanced technology solutions for major corporations.

He had developed a unique methodology for

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such projects, which we adapted to meet the unique characteristics of schools, allowing us to achieve a rapid sequence of project successes. Very quickly, the school was recognised for its digital learning strategy and innovative use of technology in education.

On many occasions, I had shared our project methodology - affectionately known as the ‘Box Model’and lessons learned with other education leaders who wanted to know about our work. But aware of the more significant challenges that the schools were facing in 2020, James and I decided to launch The EduTec Alliance and allow worldwide access to our winning strategies.

The EduTec Alliance is a membership-based organisation for schools around the globe purely focused on educational technology. When “joining the club”, we work with our members to develop an inventory of all of their systems and develop a vision and a strategy for their educational technology. To assess performance and progress we annually benchmark our members across two different but complementary dimensions; CrossIndustry Best Practice and International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Standards.

Because we operate on a membership basis, we also provide a forum where member school leaders

can connect and share experiences and best practices, learning from one another. This is our way of building a community and fostering the development of educational technology amongst our members.

Our membership fees pay for the day to day running of the organisation, allowing us to produce our extensive content and training materials which all schools can access for free at our website www.edutecalliance.com and our YouTube channels. Our members seem to relish the fact that they are helping themselves whilst helping others at the same time.

The Box Model Disclosed On the website, we offer open access to our sample documents and training videos on how to use our project management approach – The Box Model. It is based on structure, rigour and clear communication. It’s simple, sensible and just works.

The model comprised of six horizontal rows, known as ‘Strands’, and the individual boxes, that are called ‘Work Packages’: 1. Strategy Strand: • Vision is about envisioning how your school will look once the project is in place

Figure 1The EduTec Alliance: The Box Model Example for Package Systems Implementation

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• Business Case is about weighing the costs of the project against its benefits • Deployment Strategy is about defining the roadmap for implementation • Performance Measurement is about defining how to measure project success.

2. People Strand • Requirements of the project are defined by the stakeholders and normalised • Organisational Design concerns the changes to the organisation required to accommodate the project • Communication is about communicating a project to stakeholders (involves change management) • Skills and Training is about identifying skills gaps and training and filling them 3. Process Strand • Process Definition is about defining processes to be followed in day to day operations • Service Level and Policy Definition is about defining the rules that will be applied to the processes • Process Implementation is about implementing the proposed processes within the school • Measurement & Improvement is about is defining how to monitor the success of the project and identify improvement opportunities.

4. Technology Strand • Solutions Architecture is about identifying how the technology solution will integrate with the existing environment • Package Architecture is about defining in detail the configuration, customisation and integration of the solution within the school’s existing technology ecosystem • Installation & configuration is about configuring and integrating all the technology • Testing is about testing each component individually to check that it’s working; testing the processes defined to check that the technology supports the operation envisioned; testing the project under load.

5. Data Strand • Source Data is checking the quality and availability of data required from other systems • Data Integration is about connecting the new solution to its data feeds • Static Data is about uploading data to the new system • Legacy Import is about converting data from an existing system 6. Project Management Strand • Project Design is about defining the roles and responsibilities • Project Planning and Tracking is about developing a timeline to help track progress.

• Business Mobilisation is about getting your school ready to accept and adopt the project • Stakeholder Management is about keeping all the relevant people informed.

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URUGUAY

Pedagogy, Technology, and Inclusion: 13 years of Plan Ceibal in Uruguay Irene González, Chief Education Officer, Plan Ceibal

An economist and MBA graduate, Irene has taken advantage of her technical skills to develop ed-tech strategies into Uruguay’s educational system. During her nine years of experience, Irene González has led the design and the implementation of several technology projects to help teachers enhance pedagogical practices and the students to improve learning outcomes. She has contributed to positioning Plan Ceibal as an education innovation agency, being a reference, and inspiring many public organizations in the region and the world.

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P

lan Ceibal is a government agency created in 2007 with the aim of providing technology to enhance Uruguayan education policies. One of the main factors that explain its success is Ceibal´s institutional design and governance: Plan Ceibal works in collaboration with the education system and follows its guidelines and policies, but it is not part of that system.

That has enabled it to be an agile and flexible actor, with high innovative potential and a strong capacity to implement projects.

Thirteen years have passed since its creation. There have been many lessons, hits and misses, and each of these have played an important role in the construction of this public policy that is a source of pride for all Uruguayans.

Layer Over Layer Looking at Plan Ceibal’s history, it is possible to clearly distinguish three stages that reflect the evolution of the institution’s vision and goals.

In the first stage (2007-2011), the foundations of Plan Ceibal as a plan of inclusion and equality of opportunities were laid. The focus was to guarantee access and reduce the existing digital gap in Uruguayan

society. For that purpose, a massive deployment of digital infrastructure took place. Every teacher and every student in the public school system between the ages of 6 and 14, received a device (laptop or tablet) free of charge. Access of connectivity also was a huge milestone. Every school in rural and urban settings obtained internet access. That means more than 500,000 operating devices, 100% of education centers with Wi-Fi connectivity and internet access and, on top of that, 99% of the schools in urban areas with installed video conferencing equipment, leading Uruguay to become the country with the largest video conferencing network in Latin America. At this stage, processes related to equipment replacement and repair systems were designed to guarantee the policy’s sustainability.

At the second stage (2011 – 2014) the potential offered by that technology of improving learning opportunities became evident, and as a result of that availability of resources, teacher development had new needs, and needed revision. It was at that time that Ceibal started creating an ecosystem of resources and platforms that could be used at schools as tools for learning and helped teachers to include technology in their

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practice in a more fruitful way. At that moment, was the beginning of platforms deployment: Crea (Learning Management System), PAM (adaptive mathematics platform), the Digital Library, SEA (online learning assessment platform), the repository of open educational resources, among others. Additionally, massive deployment of robotics kits is defined, allowing each school to have a set of 6 robotics kit, making a total of almost 5000 kits and numerous teacher training workshops. Physical and chemical sensors and 3D printers constitute other examples of educational resources deployment happening at that period.

At the third stage (2014 - present) an interesting shift occurred in terms of teachers´ inquiries about technology. The technical challenges were more frequently replaced with pedagogical challenges. Questions such as “how can I integrate this resource into my planning?”, “How does this platform interact with the curriculum?”, “What are the advantages of technological resources over the traditional

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approach?” increasingly became fundamental in our conversations with teachers.

The consolidation of a robust teacher development offer was a necessary condition for a real impact in teaching and learning processes. In addition to that, new methodologies emerged, blended strategies started to be explored and led to promote new approaches such as new pedagogies for deep learning, computational thinking, design thinking, and project-based learning to solve real problems. The use of technologies within those possible methodologies enabled teachers to think about new learning environments, knocking down the classroom walls and thinking outside the box.

What if…?

Every strategic project developed in these years has a common core: identifying and analyzing an existing problem in the education system and think how technology may solve it. A good example is, “Ceibal en Inglés” an initiative that allows all children from 4th to 6th year of Primary school to learn English, even though the number of local English teachers in Uruguay was not enough. To make it happen, an innovative blended methodology of language teaching

was created, based on the connection through video conference of professors located in different countries around the world, with the students from Uruguayan public schools. Through an alliance with the British Council, professors from the Philippines, United Kingdom, Argentina, and even Uruguay, teach English to Uruguayan kids, making the language teaching program to also become a cultural exchange space.

Other elements such as the use of our LMS and facilitation of the classroom teacher of other learning moments during the week are crucial for this methodology to succeed.

Ceibal followed the same logic when analyzing the families’ lack of economic resources that could not guarantee the students access to required books and textbooks. Technology quickly appeared as an ally: what if we agree with the editorials to acquire all textbooks’ rights and create a digital library for students to have access through their devices?

That crazy idea started to evolve until it became what today everyone knows as “Biblioteca País”: a digital library with more than 8,000 books of free

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access for students, teachers and Uruguayan citizens in general, where you can find from the most specific technical book to the last bestseller displayed in the book stores.

Place Your Bets!

Looking at the future, Plan Ceibal´s strategic plan emphasizes two main projects. These projects have an essential role to play as leverage of educational change.

“Red Global de Aprendizajes” is a joint project of Plan Ceibal and the Educational System launched in 2014 to promote a change in the ways of teaching and learning happens at schools, focusing on the development of XXI century skills, in which technology has a central role as an accelerator of the pedagogic results.

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Nowadays, more than 800 schools in the country are part of it, and annually more than 10,000 school leaders take part in the different training workshops designed to develop skills in teachers, principals, and supervisors. Apart from being an internal network that connects teachers and students at all levels, “Red Global de Aprendizajes” is part of the movement “New Pedagogies for Deep Learning” led by the Canadian pedagogue Michael Fullan. Being part of the international network enabled us to engage in powerful conversations and reflections with other countries’ educational systems such as Finland, Australia, the US, Japan, New Zealand, and Holland.

Computational Thinking Program is another flagship we promote in Ceibal. There is a quote from Conrad Wolfram that captures our vision very well,

and says: “How to prepare young people for a hybrid human-machine world? In this new age, it’s not what you know, it’s what you can compute from knowledge”. With such vision in mind, in 2017 we started a remote teaching program through video conference that enabled students of primary school to work in projects that aim at the development of computational thinking and solve complex problems, using programming and robotics as main support.

We have also distributed more than 50,000 micro:bit boards, which are now part of the usual “landscape” in the prototypes of solutions carried out inside and outside the classrooms.

Now what?

The Pandemic has shown Uruguay’s strengths and abilities to face the crisis. On March 16, the government canceled in-person classes, and the same day they announced that all lessons would happen online through the virtual Platform “Crea” of Plan Ceibal. More than 95% of students have used Crea to get connected with teachers and classmates. The other educational platforms (math, digital library, online assessment, among others), as well as the universal access to computers and good fiber-optic internet access all over the country, were crucial elements that enabled continuance of learning at home. These capacities caused the international recognition of Uruguay’s response to the crisis in educational terms.

We are now starting the last term of the academic year, and students are currently attending school in-person. Yet, technology is still present, and it continues to be an essential element of blended education.

However, in spite of the goals achieved, the country has several challenges to face and problems of social inclusion that question us: the connection levels, the learning gaps in different socio economic contexts, the family’s involvement in the educational process, After thirteen years, we look at the future focusing on integrating the strengths, resources, and knowledge acquired, to fulfill the needs and possibilities of an educational system that will face enormous challenges, and to support their ongoing processes of technological innovation. Accompanying the educational system and co-designing the processes of change with authorities, teachers, and students, is a considerable challenge, but the people involved have the professional skills and experience to look at that promissory future with confidence.

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BRAZIL

Remote Learning During The Coronavirus Pandemic in Brazil: TV Content as an Alternative to Reaching More Students Julciane Rocha, Educator, Brazil

Julciane Rocha (known as Julci Rocha) holds a major in Portuguese/French Language and Literature at University of São Paulo, as well as an M.Ed in Curriculum at Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. Specialist in Education Management, Instructional Design and Innovative Education. Member of the Innovation Network for Brazilian Education managed by CIEB (Innovation Center for Brazilian Education). She is one of the authors of the book “Active methodologies for innovative education: a theoretical-practical approach”, by Penso (2018), organized by Lilian Bacich and José Moran. She is the author of textbooks from Editora Moderna. As a Microsoft Educator Fellow, she represented Brazil at two international events (E2 - Education Exchange) for her successful experiences in Brazilian education: in Singapore (2018) and Paris (2019). In 2020, she was hire as management consultant during São Paulo Media Center implementation from March to August 2020 working with the Secretary of Education Rossieli Soares. This public policy involves more than 5.8 million Brazilian students. Julci is the Founder of Redesenho Educacional, institution that supports Brazilian schools, leaders, and teachers to innovate, focused on digital technology, multiliteracy, active learning and curriculum innovation. Nowadays, she´s also university professor in Singularidades Institute (São Paulo/ Brasil) and Senior Consultant at the Lemann Foundation, coordinating the Vamos Aprender TV Project.

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he COVID-19 pandemic has forced schools and education systems around the world to create remote alternatives to continue teaching. According to the World Bank, more than 1.6 million students from around the world were left without face-to-face classes in April 2020 in more than 177 countries. In Brazil, most schools remain closed to this date. Although digital resources and internet have been used in a massive way, there is still part of the population that doesn´t have access to either.

In Brazil, according to the Digital 2020 report, led by We are Social, around 71% of the population has some type of internet access, 12% more than the world average, which is 59%. Although it is a reasonable number, still there’ 25% of the population with no access the vast majority of which from the most disadvantaged social classes or from the rural area.

The Household ICT Survey (2019), in Portuguese, TIC Domicílios, carried out by the Regional Center for Studies for the Development of the Information Society (Centro Regional de Estudos para o Desenvolvimento da Sociedade da Informação - CETIC.br) deepens this data, showing that only 50% of rural areas and households in social classes D and E have access to Internet. The survey also reveals that 58% of the population logs the internet only via mobile phones, which makes using the internet

more instrumental. The survey data show that the Brazilian use of the internet is more focused on communication (Whatsapp and social networks) and entertainment (watching videos and listening to music). Only 40% of the interviewees assert that they carried out some educational action through the internet.

There is a very common modality in Brazil, which is the prepaid cell phone, with unlimited internet access to social networks and the Whatsapp messaging application. Often, internet access for low-income communities is limited to these applications In addition to all the access challenges listed above, there is also the proficiency of teachers towards the efficient digital resource’s usage. According to a survey conducted with public state and municipal networks in Brazil by the National Union of Municipal Education Directors (União Nacional dos Dirigentes Municipais de Educação - UNDIME) and the National Council of Education Secretaries (Conselho Nacional dos Secretários de Educação - CONSED) in partnership with NGOs and UNICEF ​​(2020), 41% of state networks states that one of the challenges faced is the difficulty of teachers with digital technologies, followed by 39% in municipal districts.

With this reality at hand, many education systems in Brazil and in the world have adopted more than one remote teaching strategy, using television as a vehicle to broadcast

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educational content. Although it expands the possibilities of reaching more students by being in more than 80% of the homes of school-age children and adolescents (UNICEF, 2020), in some regions of the world such as Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, less than half of the children have television. The number drops to 10% when we analyze children in conditions of extreme poverty. Social inequality is even more cruel in a pandemic.

According to a survey of 122 countries carried out by UNESCO (2020), cited by United Union Report (2020), TV was widely used to continue remote education, on all continents, as shown in the graph below: In the same survey lead by UNDIME and CONSED, in May 2020, among the 27 Brazilian state networks, 14 of them used the TV as a remote teaching strategy, combined with other strategies. In municipal districts, the number drops to 2%. The reason for the low use of the TV in municipal districts is its high cost of production and broadcasting. Even if the network has a partnership with some public TV to

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broadcast the content, capturing and editing quality content requires investment.

A report from the New York Times in August this year reveals that the Media Center of Amazonas (Brazil) founded in 2007 to address the demand for access to education for students living in remote areas, gave the content of its programming to other states, reaching 4.5 million students.

Some states, such as São Paulo, the richest in the country and one of the largest educational systems in Latin America, decided to create their own Media Center in record time. The author of this text was hired as management consultant during the period of implementation of the SP Media Center from March to August 2020, for her experience with managing large-scale educational innovation projects in Brazilian public networks.

São Paulo has 3.5 million students and 190 thousand teachers. Despite being a diverse and complex system, it was one of the first to take concrete actions towards remote learning. For 41 days, the Center’s implementation

team dedicated itself to defining TV channels partners, hiring teachers, defining the essential skills that would be the subject of classes, producing and delivering printed materials in schools as additional strategy, reorganizing existing contracts to take the pedagogical and audiovisual production of the classes, which involved the creation of four studios in Training Center for Education Professionals (Escola de Formação de Profissionais da Educação EFAPE), in addition to the TV Cultura studio (one of the partner televisions).

The classes at the Media Center are live and, in addition to television, they are broadcasted by the Media Center application, with the possibility of interaction in real time, via chat and through social networks (Youtube and Facebook). An important aspect is the public-private partnership in this process. Due to the ability of the advisors team to mobilize partnership, in particular the Secretary of Education Rossieli Soares, the application for the Media Center SP was donated, as well as one of the television channels and the preparation of printed materials, among other donations, reaching more than 40 million dollars in services and products.

As the São Paulo Media Center also developed content for the early years of elementary school, which are primarily managed by municipal education system, the content served has a potential of 5.8 million students in K-12, including youth and adult education.

One of the actions that supported the massive adoption of the contents of the São Paulo Media Center was communication. For about two months, between April and May, the Secretary of Education and other advisors held live broadcasting almost daily with public professionals (teachers, coordinators, etc.), seeking to collect feedback and suggestions on the actions implemented, to identify problems and the next steps.

The experience of the SP Media Center has become a worldwide case, registered, and published by the OECD. The document, written by Lucia Dellagnelo (Innovation Center for Brazilian Education - CIEB) and Fernando Reimers (Harvard University) points out that the success factors for the experience in the state of São Paulo were: • Strong political will and leadership is key to enable the mobilization of resources and rapid implementation.

• Developing partnerships with companies and non-profit organizations is strategic to avoid delays due to bureaucratic procedures.

• In order to reach the maximum number of students and their families, school districts need to offer multi-modal learning activities.

• Establishing honest and frequent communication with all stakeholders (i.e. teachers, principals, administrators,

students and families) is vital to support the technical and emotional demands of the rapid changes imposed by the pandemic.

During the process, some challenges were identified and continue to be continuously addressed by the teams from the education department.

• Reduction of time for planning classes in order to make important information such as class theme, skills and other pedagogical information available to teachers. In this way, network teachers can plan activities that are more aligned with the contents of the Media Center to be carried out by students after they are broadcast; • Improvement of teachers’ didactics: as the teaching experience on television is very new for teachers and the adaptation time was very short, teachers are developing while they take classes. After a few months of broadcasting, the team began to collect feedback from students at the end of classes, which allowed them to have more information to focus on specific teacher’s development. Hiring pedagogical advisors to review the plans and give feedback to teachers before the class also increased the quality of the content; • Better match between the printed materials and the content of the classes: at the beginning of the process, not all teachers linked the classes to the activities of the printed materials, which left students and teachers confused; • Student engagement over time: although no data on access to classes via television has been released by the state education department, students ‘access to classes at the Media Center has decreased over time, according to the teachers. This is not a specific challenge to the state of São Paulo. Most teachers, including those from private schools, report students’ lack of motivation to continue studying in the pandemic. The team of São Paulo Media Center seeks to constantly innovate, promoting classes with diverse themes and methodologies in addition to actions involving personalities known to students, such as the interview with Brazilian Any Gabrielly from the Now United group, held in June 2020 Recognizing the potential of TV as one of the most democratic strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic, NGOs such as the Lemann Foundation, the Innovation Center for Brazilian Education (CIEB), the Roberto Marinho Foundation and UNESCO have joined with UNDIME and (CONSED) to developed a program called Vamos Aprender TV (in English, Let´s Learn TV). Vamos Aprender has more than 180 hours, divided into 320 programs, organized by teaching stages (from kindergarten to high school), aligned with the Common National Curriculum. The contents are playful and include very accessible language to different age groups. This dynamism is enhanced by the audiovisual content provided by more than 30 institutions with extensive

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Recognizing the potential of TV as one of the most democratic strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic, NGOs such as the Lemann Foundation, the Innovation Center for Brazilian Education (CIEB), the Roberto Marinho Foundation and UNESCO have joined with UNDIME and (CONSED) to developed a program called Vamos Aprender TV (in English, Let´s Learn TV)

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experience in producing educational audiovisual content and which are incorporated into the programs.

Vamos Aprender was born from the desire to support municipal and state networks that do not have the resources to produce high-quality television content or need additional content to be broadcast on TVs. If the state or municipal district is interested in the content, the education departments signs a term of use and receives the 320 programs for free. Currently, more than 80 education departments (state and municipal districts) have signed a partnership to receive and broadcast the programs. In October 2020, Vamos Aprender was also broadcast nationally due to a partnership with a television channel (REDEVIDA Educação), which reaches more than 395 cities in all Brazilian states.

Currently, the author of this text is the coordinator of this program and provides pedagogical support for the education networks interested in the partnership.

Our expectation is that education actions involving television can continue even after the COVID-19 pandemic, as is already a reality in many countries around the world, even in Brazil.

As we demonstrated in this study, television is a democratic vehicle and, combined with other resources, such as applications and printed materials, can enhance students’ learning and engagement.

It is not a matter of replacing teachers, on the contrary, developing diverse content that can support the teacher to use his time with students to develop skills and abilities, not to lecture classes. São Paulo educational department already confirms the São Paulo Media Center as a long-term public policy and we hope that other states and municipalities will follow this example.

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CHILE

Non-Formal Education From The Field Of Philanthropy Leonor Merín, Innovation & Content Director, Fundación Mustakis (Chile)

Leonor has worked for over 10 years developing philanthropic projects in the areas of education, culture, heritage, urbanism, innovation and entrepreneurship. An Art History graduate and an Architecture and Heritage Master, she has a broad perspective in understanding historical processes from aesthetics, humanity through greatness, strategy and beauty. In 2014 she started planning Fundación Mustakis´ to create a space where children could engage in learning experiences in the areas of mind, body and soul. A year later, she drove the rehabilitation of the old national glass factory and created and directed KAOS Creative Learning Centre for children and families, in Santiago de Chile. An active member of the Senior Leader´s Program for Non-Profit Management of Columbia University, Leonor defines herself as a “philanthropic broker”, considered as an agent that materializes risky ideas, articulating different protagonists whose purposes are social impact, always under experimental methods and high standards.

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ducation is undoubtedly the tool for social transformation and citizen construction, and it is intimately connected to each country’s progress.

For a while, education has been on the agenda´s main concerns becoming a worldwide trending topic. Global conversations, discussion, and reflection upon education quality, coverage, and results have been an ongoing process for quite a time now. There is a restless concern from different actors to achieve significant and positive changes in education.

In this context, Fundación Gabriel & Mary Mustakis in Chile has been contributing to people’s development for over 20 years, by promoting self-generated and thirdparty initiatives that drive transformative experiences and give opportunities to discover and develop talents.

Thus, we are constantly searching to support education and culture in society by empowering leading edge initiatives that enrich integral education, enhancing personal development that allows children to face challenges with creativity and knowledge.

When we talk about future skills we tend to talk about present needs. Nowadays, we have to think on a global change context. Our student´s working skills should not be focused only in technical learning but in value-based cornerstones that will mark their life development: • Personal growth and internal development.

• Growth mindset • Constant capacity to learn and unlearn • Flexibility • Building relationships • Ethics These six mainstays are what we at Fundación Gabriel & Mary Mustakis value the most in every project that we support. On one occasion we heard Ger Graus saying “nobody can dream of being what they have not met or known”. This is where we work, opening illumination doors for each of our students to enter new paths and build new dreams in an infinite world of possibilities.

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ZIM We designed ZIM (Mustakis Interactive Zone) so that people have the opportunity to experiment immersive art, being able to integrate a sensorial, analog and technological experience. ZIM offers the possibility to embrace a practical appreciation of artists, being able to see, touch, taste, listen and feel the art. Currently there are 7 Mustakis interactive zones throughout Chile, located in different museums and cultural spaces, bringing people closer to art.

This is what ignites us. We believe in the enormous potential of people. We are convinced that they can become the best version of themselves and be a contribution to society. How do we do it?

We design, create and implement innovative, non-formal learning experiences in the areas of science and technology, art and culture, body and expression and nature:

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Story Telling We encourage people´s imagination by sharing our storytelling methodology, which includes body and voice expression. In our storytelling program participants create their own handcrafted PUP (stands out for Little Portable Universe) and “Whisperers�, which surrounds all curious people into an art-based concept where they can imagine all types of stories.

Frutillar Circus We believe that equilibrium is in the essence of the being. Our program is located in Frutillar, a

southern city of Chile, recognized as a Creative City by UNESCO in 2017. We deliver the opportunity for children to develop an integral discipline, experience body and arts through our circus program. We articulate the work with the community, which seeks integration and a local cultural identity through the arts.

KAOS Creative Learning Center We created an innovative learning space that seeks to motivate young people to discover the exciting world of knowledge and creation through explorations in the field of science, technology, kinesthesia and art. In 2019, we started “Artists in Residence” in collaboration with Sugar Hill Children´s Museum of Storytelling and Art based in NYC, USA. Artists from Chile and the USA have exchanged learning residences between both countries, allowing people from each community to engage with the process of creating art and amplify their vision towards art. Every year, almost 10,000 students come to KAOS learning center to experience hands-on learning activities in a specially conceived space that awakens curiosity, imagination and opens up to new areas of interest, in tune with the demands of contemporary society.

Science & Technology We drive people to imagine and build the future.

We do this by creating STEAM programs where teenagers can explore their technological and artistic capabilities combined by developing fully and strengthening collaborative work, perseverance, communication and leadership. In the pursuit of integrating technology and art we have formed the “Lighting art” workshop for teenagers with Chilean artists. And the “Musical Makers” workshop in a joint collaboration with MIT, where teenagers have built their own musical instrument, understanding aesthetics, functionality, science and harmony.

A Change of View In the last months, we have unlearned and adapted. We are currently transitioning into global change. Together we have sailed uncertainty, which is lived and felt uniquely by each one. We have stood beside each other, listened to each other and are learning and deconstructing constantly in search of what is essential.

Our student´s working skills should not be focused only in technical learning but in valuebased cornerstones that will mark their life development

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In contemporary society, it is imperative to support and collaborate within the public and private world as an active member of civil society. In this sense, we must incorporate the effective impact variable as an unavoidable paradigm.

Social change starts when people question their status quo and change their habits. It begins when you start being conscious of certain behaviors and actions that are merely based in traditional patterns and you evaluate whether they are still useful in the actual reality. Unlearning is necessary to evolve.

During this period, we have questioned our limits, we have changed our way of working where collaboration is an indissoluble condition. We launched www.mustakisencasa.org, an online website with free educational resources for families, children

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and teachers from Spanish speaking countries. On the other hand, we´ve had internal conversations and have discussed relevant and urgent matters with our associates, creating the Mustakis XP summits, a space to dialogue amongst multidisciplinary people.

Our challenges are both the associativity of the Mustakis community and how to scale what we do and accomplish the sustainable equilibrium of our purpose. We have continued to build ourselves as creative beings of nature and feel that we are becoming whole creatures. We have talked and lived with courage, trust, intuition, compassion, risk, vulnerability, love and deep connection with the sense of common wellbeing.

There is no doubt that today more than ever, we are learning the essentials together.

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PERU

Crack the Code!

MariĚ a del Mar VeĚ lez, Founder, Crack The Code

Maria studied Economics and Business at New York University and minored in French.

During her studies, she worked at Peruvian Development Group, a NY-based Perufocused private equity fund, in the acquisition of a microfinance company in Puno, Peru. After graduating from college, she worked for 6 years as an Analyst and an Associate at JP Morgan in the Asset Management & Alternative Investment groups. Maria then moved to Lima, Peru, and founded Crack The Code, a Computer Science school for kids and teenagers. Since then, the firm has had over 4,000 students in the in-person and online formats from all of the Latin American region.

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rack The Code was born with hopes of having a more competitive Latin American region, one with human capital that will enable growth, productivity and innovation, and hence, more prosperity for its population. Crack The Code is a computer science online academy for kids and teenagers in Latin America. I founded it after having spent six years working in Finance at JP Morgan in New York. 5 years prior to that, I worked as an intern at a fund that acquired a microfinance company in Puno, Peru, which is when I realized that someday I wanted to have a business that had the potential of having social and economic impact. Founding an Edtech firm in Latin America has definitely been one of the biggest challenges of my life; I have grown to understand our culture at a different level, our areas of opportunity and our immense potential. Crack The Code has the power to educate a young generation that will in turn make our region grow at a faster pace. We teach boys and girls, but we have a special focus on girls because we want to make sure they know that STEM careers are an alternative for them. That female representation in technology is extremely important. It has been 3 years since we started working towards this and we

can confidently say that we have already started to achieve our objectives.

Latin America has huge contrasts in terms of access to basic services like healthcare, education, and internet, even within a same country or city. After a lot of research, something that stood out as a need that hardly anyone had access to was digital education for younger generations. Even though we are living in a digital-dependant world, it is surprising to see that there is hardly any focus on K-12 education to computer science or programming courses. Being a completely new field of study for kids, schools in the region have not undergone the exercise of re-evaluating the traditional “computers” or “IT” course and integrating important hard and soft skills that are indispensable nowadays like: computational and critical thinking skills, problem solving, teamwork and creativity. After much research, I started working on Crack the Code’s business model and in December 2017 we officially launched Crack The Code, a computer science academy for students aged 5 through 18 focused on developing student’s digital skills. Our goal is for students to become technology creators, innovators, instead of only being technology consumers. We want

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through 18 in PerĂş. We achieved a lot during our first two years: +3000 students enrolled in our courses, + 15 courses developed, YoY growth of +110%, +8 partners schools, partnerships with important firms like Scotiabank, Lenovo, Samsung and Microsoft. We were able to fund our non-forprofit activities with the income from our for-profit classes: we truly achieved being a profitable, fastgrowing start-up that has as its core objective having a positive social impact. Six months ago, on March 13th, 2020, our firm had to adapt to the new COVID reality, this meant changing all of our classes to a 100% virtual format. Parents who had been against virtual learning, all of a

students to develop key skills that will allow them to be more competitive worldwide, to innovate and create products and services that will improve our quality of life.

When we launched Crack The Code, we thought that it was going to be relatively simple to get students subscribed in our courses, but the reality was that it was our biggest challenge. Coding for kids in Latin America is still a new concept, parents and even educators don’t really understand what it is or why it is important. There has also been a stigma towards students learning online and the amount of time on screen that they should have. With Crack The Code we want to show parents and students that technology can be used productively, that they can use it as a tool to create whatever they imagine and to develop key skills for their futures. In order to educate parents and educators, we organized public events for parents and their kids, corporate events for employees and their families, school fairs on what coding is and what you can create with it, and even teacher professional development programs so that they learn about how technology can be used productively. We were, and currently are, opening a completely new market in Latam-ex Brazil. We are tearing down stigmas, changing parents’ points of view, demonstrating them that their kids are able to have a positive impact with tech in spite of their young age.

Crack The Code started off being an 100% in-person solution for students aged 5

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sudden embraced this alternative. Crack The Code became an online computer science academy that provides live classes to Spanish speaking students, and now we were able to reach every single country in Latin America.

Six months later, we have had over 500 students enrolled in our classes from more than 15 different countries. We have launched a scholarship program in Colombia, a partnership with Google Latam on Digital Citizenship, a six-month program with Samsung for state school students in Lima. We have managed to grow our team to over 20 full-time and part-time members who are located in different countries of Latin America and are truly passionate about our mission. This pandemic has given us the ability to have a stronger, faster, impact across our region. We are able to scale faster, reach more students, and change lives at a faster pace. Our students are developing their own videogames, web pages, cell phone apps. They are having fun while they are learning, they are realizing that they are not too young to create, that knowing how to code is a secret weapon for them.

Another one of our core objectives has always been to increase female representation in STEM fields. Latin America has a strong stigma towards girls

in technology. For some reason, society tends to link STEM fields to boys and men: we are on a mission to change this. Approximately 27% of our students are girls, while the other 73% are boys. On a daily basis we try to tear down this stigma: we speak with parents who think “their daughter would never enjoy coding”, or all-girl school teachers who say “girls should learn ballet and be in art classes, not tinkering with computers”. It has not been an easy task, and from our experience, the main culprits are the societal expectations and pressures in place for boys and girls, women and men. We have dedicated a lot of our efforts to creating computer science programs tailored for girls hoping to get them to like the field and to realize that it is an alternative for them and their futures. We still have a long way to go on this front, but we can confidently say we are on the right track.

Crack The Code is here to stay, we will not stop until Latin America’s younger generations are prepared to gear our region to growth, innovation and productivity. We are excited about the positive milestones we have achieved but we are even more excited by what is to come. Programming is the language that we should all be learning, and with our strong work, we will make sure Latins realize this and start working on getting there.

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PERU

“In Finland, lifelong learning is rooted in children’s right to play”. A Vision from A Finnish Educator Living in Perú.

Maria Ruuskanen, Adviser at the Finnish Embassy in Lima

Maria Ruuskanen has worked as an Adviser for Political, Economic and Commercial Affairs at the Finnish Embassy in Lima since 2012.

Currently, she promotes the Finnish approach to education as a university lecturer at the Faculty of Education of a Peruvian top university UPC. Maria is a Finnish political scientist with more than 10 years of professional experience in the emerging markets of Latin America, where she has studied topics related to social conflicts, human development and public policy. Her current research interests include Media Literacy and the Critical Applied Research of Digitalization in Education. As a political scientist specializing in development policy and educational leadership, she sees evidence-based education policy as the key element to reduce poverty, inequality, corruption and violent crime in Latin America.

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he Finnish education system has been widely recognized worldwide ever since the emergence of the Program for International Student Assessment (better known as PISA) in 2000. In this OECD-sponsored test, Finnish students’ competences usually rank among the best in the world. Finland also ranks high in terms of productivity, innovation, political stability, peace, security, social and economic equality, gender equality, digitalization, media literacy and – last but not least – happiness.

Consequently, Finnish Embassies around the world are often required to answer the question: What is the secret to Finnish educational success?

Better Beginnings For All To understand Finnish educational success, we need to start at the beginning. That is, in the early years.

In Finland, high-quality early childhood and care (ECEC) is considered of vital importance both for the individual and for society. Children develop a wide range of skills and competences during the early years. By constantly exploring and interacting with their environment, children are adopting new knowledge, abilities, attitudes and ways of interacting in society.

As FinlandWay International Preschools, a Finnish ECE franchise present in several countries in Latin America, explains: “Perception of oneself as a learner is adopted in early childhood and it will have a significant effect on learning during later years.

Learning-to-learn skills and meta-cognitive abilities will not automatically emerge when a child enters school but requires support and practice during the early years. Similarly, positive attitudes towards learning and belief in one’s capabilities are built already during the early years.”

Consequently, all Finnish families are offered ECEC services that combine education, teaching and care in a systematic and goal-oriented manner. The goal of ECEC is to promote children’s development, health and wellbeing as well as to improve children’s opportunities for learning. Local authorities, i.e. municipalities, are responsible for providing ECEC for children under school age. A client fee is charged, which is determined based on the family’s income and size, as well as the number of hours that the child spends in ECEC. Finally, in Finland, the early years are valued as a unique stage in human life that does not need to be hurried. Kindergarten teachers graduate from the university after

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completing a Master’s degree, which includes studies in pedagogy and educational psychology.

A rigorous academic program guarantees that all teachers are true professionals, equipped to understand the children’s perspective and trained to support children’s holistic development.

Let The Children Play!

One of the cornerstones of the Finnish educational approach has been playbased learning. Pasi Sahlberg, one of Finland’s most renowned education experts and co-author of ‘Let the Children Play: How more play will save our schools and help children thrive’, has stated the following: “Play is how children explore, discover, fail, succeed, socialize, and flourish. It is a fundamental element of

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Phenomenal Learning From Finland There are many challenges for education in a globalized world moving quickly towards digitalization and automatization. According to Finnish experts, such as Professor Kirsti Lonka, author of ‘Phenomenal Learning from Finland’, schools and teacher education need to be reformed so that children are adequately equipped to face the challenges of a new globalized era.

The latest reform of the Finnish schooling system began in 2016, starting with preschools and comprehensive schools (ages 7 to 15). It emphasizes 21st-century competencies and interdisciplinary projects, often in the form of phenomenon-based learning. When applying this methodology, students study a topic or concept in a holistic approach instead of a subject-based approach, to promote creativity and higher-order thinking skills.

This does not mean that Finland is giving up subjectmatter teaching, but instead, putting the knowledge into an increasingly meaningful context to ensure that all citizens have the 21st-century skills that they will require in the future.

the human condition. It is the key to giving schoolchildren skills they need to succeed – skills like creativity, innovation, teamwork, focus, resilience, expressiveness, empathy, concentration, and executive function. Expert organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Centers for Disease Control agree that play and physical activity are critical foundations of childhood, academics, and future skills. Yet, politicians are destroying play in childhood education and replacing it with standardization, stress, and forcible physical restraint, which are damaging to learning and corrosive to society.”

The benefits of regular play are many and they are well documented in research. Pediatricians affirm that play improves children’s language skills, early math skills, peer relations, social and physical development and learning-to-learn skills. On the other hand, anxiety and toxic stress caused by a lack of play can harm the healthy development of social behaviours. When children play together, the positive effects of play become even more powerful. Experts say social play can help children develop skills in cooperation, communication, negotiation, conflict resolution and empathy. The lifelong benefits children gain from play, such as creativity and empathy, are reflected in Finnish society and its creative industries.

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The Future of Work Requires More Girls in STEM STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) is inherently designed to prepare both girls and boys for a future where most jobs will require a basic understanding of math and science, and where advanced skills will be critical. In other words, STEM education is considered to provide the core set of tools students will need to have if they want to succeed in the workplace of the future. A workplace, where the ability to solve problems of all kinds, make sense of information, knowhow to gather and evaluate evidence, and be able to use that evidence to make critical decisions will be more important than ever.

Solving the biggest global challenges from climate change and lack of renewable energy to drought and pandemics requires a combination of hard and soft skills. These are among the most meaningful, relevant, and creative challenges people can dedicate their lives to working on. As such, talented people, both girls and boys, from a variety of backgrounds, are needed to work with and ultimately solve these problems.

According to UNESCO’s global report ‘Crack the code’, only 35% of STEM students in higher education are women and only 3% of women in higher education choose information and communication technologies (ICT) studies. Although 45 % of scientific researchers in Latin America are women, surpassing all other regions, in STEM fields the number drops to 36 %.

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According to Kide Science, a Finnish company dedicated to offering playful STEM education to small children (from age three), it is important to try to keep girls’ innate curiosity towards natural phenomena alive throughout their childhood. The company, founded by a researcher from the University of Helsinki, promotes engaging, hands-on activities for kids, based on the latest research on STEM education. In Kide Science workshops, offered live or online, children take on the role of a scientist who engages in fascinating problemsolving by stepping in an imaginary science scenario - the fantasy world called ‘Supraland’. To help their friends in Supraland, children engage in hands-on experiments that focus on learning science process skills and building scientific vocabulary. Mastering how to think and act scientifically has a profound effect on a child’s ability to learn in the future.

“Kide Science answers the call for pedagogies that utilize children’s most natural activity - play - to learn science. Our innovation is in our pedagogical design, which uses stories and playful props to create an imaginary science world in which children can take on the role of a real scientist,” says the founder of Kide Science, PhD Jenni Vartiainen.

Kide Science has recently expanded their activities to South America with a cooperation agreement with Sankt Henrik School in Chile, which offers fully online education for Latin American countries, such as Peru, Colombia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador, among others.

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BRAZIL

Building Socioemotional Skills Through Experiential Learning And Global Engagement During the COVID-19 Pandemic Mariana Resende Fernandes, Educator, Brazil

Mariana has a Master degree in Applied Linguistics at UFPR and graduate degree in Education at USP. She works as a coordinator at Aubrick Escola Bilingue Multicultural in SĂŁo Paulo, Brazil. Also, she is the Round Square representative at Aubrick, being responsible for the socioemotional development throughout the school curriculum.

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his year, the world has faced an unprecedented challenge and schools had to step up and find solutions to provide distance learning that would guarantee quality education and students’ well-being. And although we live in a time of connectedness and increased circulation of information due to digital technologies, we have seen the great impact of school closure and wondered what would be the cost of it in the long run.

In 2005, schools were closed in Pakistan for 14 weeks due to an Earthquake. Research has shown 1.5 years of learning difference four years later between affected students and those in neighboring unaffected regions and a prediction of 15% loss in lifetime earnings. So, although we may not know the numbers of the Covid-19 impact, we are sure that we must improve remote and hybrid learning so students don’t end up significantly behind.

What does it take to guarantee the efficiency of remote or even hybrid learning? We may have all the digital tools and state of the art methodologies. But it takes a lot more to keep students engaged and active in their learning journey. Among all the things we’ve learned since schools were closed, one that all different realities agree is that students’ can’t learn without feeling safe and that they had to keep going, to persist on learning from home, finding new ways to do it, to connect to school, teachers and pairs in a totally new situation. Facing this huge challenge, they were forced to develop new abilities, what demanded courage, self awareness and sense of responsibility. It has not been easy and

we can’t still measure the impact of the pandemic in education. There is an urge to respond and to come up with possible solutions.

If we can’t know for sure, as we’ve been griefing to process all the changes we’ve been through and feeling anxious about the “new normal”, the OECD Learning Compass 2030 might help us to find the way, as it points to students future well-being through co-agency with peers, teachers, parents and communities. It shows us that for students to thrive they need knowledge, skills, attitudes and values.

In 2019 a research was published in which Dr. Christina Hinton and a team of researchers from Research Schools International (RSI) and Harvard Graduate School of Education collected data from 147 Round Square schools to find out which learning activities are likely to result in global competence outcomes. With the participation of 147 schools, more than 11,000 students and 1,903 teachers, they found out that volunteering services to help people in the wider community, participation in events celebrating cultural diversity, learning about different cultural perspectives, participating in classroom discussions about world events and learning how to solve conflicts were likely to promote the development of global competences, the ones that are also related to the Future of Education and Skills 2030 project and the PISA global competencies.

Since the pandemic began, Latin American Round Square schools decided to unite themselves.

We felt we could learn from each other,

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Fundraising Festa Junina Bingo at Aubrick Escola Bilíngue Multicultural

collaborate and support our students. We decided to get our teachers and students together in virtual meetings to promote discussions, to make them learn from different perspectives and also to engage them globally.

At Aubrick Escola Bilíngue Multicultural in São Paulo (Brazil), a group of students from 11 to 14 years old participated in some students’ meetings and experienced the transforming power of taking action. They discussed well-being, the concept of internationalism, leadership and equity in education; they could also learn from other students how each country decided to face the pandemic and the effects of the leaders’ choices in our daily lives.

From that experience, this group decided they had to do more, to help others. The Service Club at Aubrick Escola Bilíngue Multicultural was created by a group of students who wanted to work in different fundraising projects to support NGOs and vulnerable people who were suffering with economical difficulties brought by the Covid-19.

From the fundraising events the Service Club decided to reach for other students as well. And to do so they accepted the challenge of hosting a virtual conference to Latin America students from Round Square schools.

For the conference, we decided to talk about our Festa Junina, a very traditional party in Brazil that expresses a lot of the diversity of brazilian culture. Students were divided into the Baraza groups for different workshops.

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They were able to share a little bit of their own brazilian culture, to promote collaboration among students and a sense of internationalism.

By observing the students it was very easy to see how much they changed from the beginning of the pandemic to the moment when they were responsible for leading a variety of projects. They understood that they were all in this together and they could choose to take action, to face it with courage and tenacity to move forward, to keep learning and connected to their school community.

As teachers, to see the growth of this group and to know that through these activities they were able to find support in each other and reach out for those in need was rewarding. There was so much learning going on throughout the process.

Educators and researchers may not know the impacts of COVID-19 to education and we certainly do not know all the answers to this unprecedented challenge we face in Brazil. But we have learned, as part of the Round Square community, that if we aim at our students abilities to engage globally, if we decide to learn from different perspectives and with the purpose of guarantee a better future, one that is full of compassion, courage, tenacity, diversity and respect, we might end up finding the way to make sure that although schools are closed, learning has never stopped.

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MEXICO

The Joy of Learning Through Curiosity and Experiential Learning: Afterschool Programs in Latin America To Provide A Better Start for Children in Vulnerable Communities Marlene Gras, Educator, Mexico

Marlene Gras is an international consultant in education, public policy and youth development. She has broad experience in the design and review of education programs for formal and nonformal education in several countries. Marlene specializes in the areas of active learning pedagogies, social and emotional learning, learning climate, teacher training, the links of workforce development and education, and STEM. She previously worked as a policy analyst for the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills and has collaborated in projects and publications with several NGOs and research centres such as UNICEF, PIPE-CIDE, CCE, OECD, among others. Marlene has accompanied the Techint Group as education advisor for global programs since 2012. She holds a master’s degree in International Education from the IIE at Stockholm University in Sweden and a bachelor degree in Education and Development form Anåhuac University in Mexico.

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tudies show that children from lower-income families are more likely to achieve lower educational outcomes and drop out of school earlier than those from better-off families, as it has been broadly illustrated by the OECD. Furthermore, education is fundamental in determining a child’s adult life: indeed, education is not only associated with higher income, but also with better health and even longer life for individuals. The root is multidimensional, for instance, family context, beliefs about education, aspirations, the quality of education they have access to, the pedagogical approaches actually delivered in the classroom, the relevance of the curricula, the opportunities to connect learning with real-life, among other factors. To produce effective results, the timing of the intervention plays a central role. According to Heckman (2010), motivation and non-cognitive skills such as self-regulation and social and emotional skills, developed from an early age, are predictors of success in adult life, both for economic and personal outcomes.

Thus, the sooner the development of these skills is addressed, the better the results and the less the cost to society. On the other hand, earlier exposure to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), is also key for career choice and completion, according to Tai and Maltese.

To ensure children’s good performance at school, it neither is enough only to address the academic offer nor to only strengthen their social and emotional development.

The development of healthy children and youth, sufficiently skilled to build their own wellbeing and that of their societies requires an integral approach, especially when very few opportunities of enrichment are at hand. The idea that providing extra hours of mathematics and language, “more of the same” is enough, has been long proven wrong but is surprisingly still very common to see that it is looked after as a solution to leverage education results, needless to say, without success and sometimes with negative unintended side effects, like frustration and reducing the motivation to learn. The development

Zalau, Romania

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Montevideo, Uruguay

of healthy and skilled individuals, broadly explained by DarlingHammond and Cook-Harvey, requires a “whole child” approach to understand children and their development as a whole, and therefore targets social, emotional, cognitive, academic, psychological, ethical and physical development. Along with access to opportunities in their societies, a task beyond the scope of education.

Interventions in the school context reduce the possibility of children and youth to become involved in risky behaviours, such as crime and adolescent pregnancy, as explained by McCombs, Sloan, Whitaker, and Yoo, in addition to encouraging aspirations and a productive work path. Afterschool programs have the potential of preventing social risks and improving the development of skills to ensure better academic outcomes, such as an increase in school attendance, better attitudes towards school and learning, positive habits and the opportunity to discover new knowledge and skills in more ludic ways, without the pressure of notes, just to mention some. These programs are better suited for at-risk students in lowincome communities.

Several publications from The Wallace Foundation, RAND and American Institutes of Research, show that the access, sustained participation in the program, staff quality, program quality, including adult support, youth development, opportunities for enrichment, and SAFE activity design (sequential, active, focused and explicit), along with links to other institutions where children learn, such as school, their families and community are key to the success of expanded learning opportunities such as afterschool programs.

The Techint Group’s AfterSchool/ExtraClase Program: A Unique Non-Formal Education Experience in Latin America With Focus on STEM The design and implementation of the “AfterSchool/ExtraClase Program” are privately funded by the Techint Group. It is a network

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Campana, Argentina

of school-based afterschools, in marginalized urban or semi-urban contexts, serving at-risk students from 6 to 12 years of age, four days a week for 3.5 hours, after the regular school day. Providing free high-quality nonformal education focused on STEM, which also integrates Arts, Math, Language, Recreational activities through play, and the opportunity to solve real-world problems through project-based learning. The program pays strong attention to creating a secure and positive climate and culture that promote youth development and social and emotional learning.

The program served more than 1500 children with high regular attendance in 2019. It is implemented in nine communities, seven of them in Latin America: Campana and Ramallo (Argentina), Pindamonhangaba (Brazil), Cartagena (Colombia), Veracruz and Monterrey (Mexico)

and Montevideo (Uruguay), and also in Zalau (Romania) and Blytheville (USA).

Implemented as a pilot in 2013 in Mexico and Argentina, the Program is set to serve low-income students, with little opportunities for significant development outside the school and exposed to social risks. The main objective was to reinforce their motivation to learn and increase their aspirations for their future. Today, two more objectives are intentionally pursued: improvement of mathematical and language literacies, and knowledge sharing of good and innovative practices implemented in the program, like program climate, positive discipline and project-based learning.

From the XXIst Century challenges point of view, the demands of the workforce and industrial development and the need for innovation in the region, the interest and

The development of healthy children and youth, sufficiently skilled to build their own wellbeing and that of their societies requires a whole child approach

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enrollment of youth in STEM careers and the development of STEM competencies are paramount. However, this interest needs to be encouraged in childhood. Furthermore, STEM must be addressed interestingly and engagingly, building ideas progressively into a coherent picture of how the world works and strong STEM disciplinary knowledge and skills combined with boundary crossing pedagogies since elementary education, as explained

by Leung and Harlen. For these reasons, STEM was established as the focal point of the Afterschool Program.

The Students as The Protagonists of Their Learning and Development The “AfterSchool Program� is grounded in constructivism, promoting positive youth development, through inquiry

Cartagena, Colombia

and experiential learning, integrating hands-on learning, problem-solving and project-based learning to equip students with agency and make the content more relevant, connecting it to real-world challenges. All the experience is embedded with positive discipline. The offer is different from that of schools, in the didactic and dynamic, allowing more time for inquiry, curiosity, reflection and play.

Children are organized in teams of 18, by developmental phases: Phase I (1st and 2nd grades), Phase II (3rd and 4th grades) and Phase III (5th and 6th grades). The staff consists of coordinators (site directors), STEM leaders and recreation and art facilitators, all carefully selected in accordance with defined profiles that are appropriate for each activity, to ensure authentic learning. Through systematic training with internationally recognized experts, the conceptual and practical bases of the program are aligned across teams. Continuous development

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and permanent feedback take place regularly through classroom observation tools, self-assessment, and global and local training. One full day per week, and part of the winter and summer breaks, where children do not attend the program, are devoted to praxis reflection, planning for continuous improvement and training.

Evaluation Challenges and Outcomes Since the very first year, monitoring and intermediate outcomes evaluations were put in place, and efforts were made in order to have some indicators of impact. The challenges have been numerous: evaluation design, which accounts for some complexities related to implementing in many different countries, the comparability of the data, the validity of assessments, the different languages and the availability of control groups in each community. One indicator of success has been the increase in enrolment in the schools since the moment when the program was implemented. This is the case in one of the sites in Veracruz (Mexico), the site located in Pindamonhangaba (Brazil) and one in Ramallo (Argentina), where there is a waiting list since the program is at full capacity. Also, in Cartagena, three extra classrooms had to be built to serve all the children wanting to attend.

Another indicator is the high attendance rate to the program which is voluntary: 78% of students with high attendance to the Program in 2019.

Results in Math: STEM Academia in collaboration with PREST conducted an experimental evaluation in 1.083 students in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay after a year of implementing the math curriculum, children improved in average the equivalent of 1 additional year of education.

In 2019, data collection with the Common Instrument Suite (CIS) took place in all programs, except for United States, Romania and Monterrey (Mexico) Permission to use the Common Instrument Suite (CIS) was obtained from The PEAR Institute at Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital.

The Common Instrument Suite (CIS) is a self-report survey that measures a variety of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)-related attitudes, including STEM engagement, STEM career knowledge, and STEM identity. It was specifically developed with informal, afterschool, outside-of-school time (OST) STEM programs in mind. The purpose of the survey is to better understand how informal STEM programming impacts students’ perceptions/ attitudes towards STEM. (PEAR, 2020) The survey was answered by 301 children out of 326 from 5th grade (Brazil and Colombia), 6th grade (Argentina and Uruguay) and 4th, 5th and 6th grades (Veracruz - Mexico).

Regarding their interest in STEM: 66% of the children surveyed answered that their interest in Science had increased, 75% in Technology, 55% in Engineering and 53% in Math.

When asked about their career choices, more than 48% answered that they wanted a STEM job in the future more or much more. 24% of the same and 28% less or much less.

Overall, students reported statistically significant gains in subscales measuring stem career interest, stem career knowledge, stem engagement, stem enjoyment, and stem identity, and reported a significant overall decrease in engagement with stem activities (p<0.05).

Students from all sites surveyed reported significant overall gains in all 21st Century subscales: critical thinking, perseverance, relationship with adults and relationship with peers (p<0.05).

There were positive correlations between gains in science interest and the gains in all four 21st century/socioemotional power skills: critical thinking, perseverance, and adult relationships and peer relationships.

According to PEAR, “these relationships have implications for addressing 21st century/SEL skills in informal STEM programs. Plausibly, positive informal science experiences influence peer and adult relationships (teamwork/collaboration) as well as critical thinking and perseverance (flexible thought, logic, and grit)” The hypothesis is that “quality programs enhance 21st Century Skills through engagement with science learning – and this experience better prepares

Veracruz, Mexico

students to cope with increasingly complex life and work environments”.

COVID-19 And The Commitment Remains There remains a commitment on behalf of the AfterSchool/ ExtraClase Program Network during times of COVID-19.

The program is placing three priorities at the centre: maintaining supportive relationships with children and their families through phone calls, and some virtual classrooms in the communities where there are devices and internet accessibility, maintaining the interest in learning and focusing on the development of key learning objectives with optimism.

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COLOMBIA

Educating Girls and Teenagers in Latin America: A Path to Prosperity in The Post-Pandemic World Martha Cecilia Gรณmez, Co-founder, Education Soul

With more than 20 years of professional experience in structuring and developing academic and corporate projects, with special emphasis on entrepreneurship and business skills development for women, Martha has a solid experience in the design, creation and management of educational public policy projects, based on adaptive learning with the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning for populations in vulnerable conditions. Expert in Design Thinking and Instructional Design (Certified by the IDB). A serial entrepreneur, she serves as HundrED Ambassador for Colombia, a finnish global community that brings positive change to K-12 education and identifies innovations to helping them spread.

Economist and MBA from the National University of Colombia, Master in Innovation from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

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olombia has achieved significant progress in terms of reducing the gender gap when compared to its neighbors in Latin America, holding the thirteenth place among 180 countries worldwide, according to the OECDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s latest report on gender equality (2020).

However, this effort is found to be too small if we consider that, according to the figures of the International Monetary Fund it will take us 59 years in Latin America, and 100 at a global scale, to close these gaps.

Many organizations worldwide recognize the direct relation between quality education and improvements in family living conditions, gender role conceptualization and healthy cohabitation as individuals in general. Nevertheless, when we place ourselves in high vulnerability urban or rural areas anywhere in Latin America, this assertion does not appear to be all that evident. Furthermore, if we examine educational institutions in our countries a little closely, it becomes apparent that while having children and youths attending school with the purpose of learning should be the rule, it is actually the exception.

Working on the basis of the importance of quality education in reducing gender gaps, it is certain that the educational system plays a fundamental role in building better social environments for girls and female adolescents. Unfortunately, our educational systems are subject to constant criticism on account of their poor response capacity to changes in global trends, curricular structures tied to old paradigms and an outdated way of developing learning, and as a social reflection, through the socalled â&#x20AC;&#x153;hidden curriculaâ&#x20AC;?, they promote a space that preserves and reproduces inequalities bound to gender stereotypes, inequitable distribution of paid and unpaid work, and even decisions on remaining in the classroom and access to higher education for women.

This is not a minor problem at a social and economic level if we take into consideration that according to the ECLAC (2016), 55% of homes include the presence of girls and female teenagers, and thus tending to their needs affects the majority of the population.

Additionally, the significance of this issue is evident in light of the opportunity this sector of the population represents as an engine for

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return to the educational system, and their lives will change forever”, and the decision is not theirs, taking into account that for 48% of Latin American youth, the migration to virtual education imposed by the Covid-19 crisis is simply not possible, due to the lack of a computer or internet connection in their homes.

This reality confronts our response capacity, and this is when we must be more creative with solutions: We cannot, as a region, limit ourselves to mere criticism of the educational model and the crisis in our society, we must concentrate efforts and promote actions that yield good results. It is time to take advantage of emerging educational methods such as adaptive learning and personalization, problem and challenge-based learning, and the use of the convergence between technology and education as a tool for enhancing learning and experiences for closing gaps.

Like any crisis, the current one is also a moment of rebirth of planetary consciousness, where it is imperative to take advantage of the impulse of the new generations less motivated by economic profit, and more by the solution of their real problems: Young people genuinely care about issues like depression, suicide, protecting the environment, among many

growth: According to the McKinsey Global Institute: “If women had the same participation as men in the economy, the potential boost in Latin America could be US $ 2.6 trillion, or 34% of annual regional GDP”.

A not inconsiderable figure if we consider the current crisis in our economies exacerbated thanks to Covid-19, which in the words of the outgoing IDB president, Luis Alberto Moreno, puts Latin America at the gates of another lost decade in terms of economic growth and social welfare.

The Covid-19 situation has also brought a significant setback on all fronts in terms of gender equality, as indicated by countless reports from the UN, UNESCO, and various regional government bodies: “the crisis has affected girls the most”, because by staying at home they are exposed to situations of abuse or because they are simply relegated to housework. The most dramatic aspect of this situation is that premature pregnancies have increased and, in some countries, so have forced marriages.” Most of these girls will not

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others. It is the only historical moment where there is a real social incentive for more women to start leading, and this will increase support for social impact companies that focus on womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s empowerment and gender equality.

Never before have we had in Latin America so many and such varied programs to support the education of girls and young women. The digital revolution also favors us, bringing an unprecedented rise of organizations and initiatives in favor of better education on key issues such as reproductive health, prevention of gender-based violence, literacy, fostering steam vocations and digital citizenship.

There is still uncertainty about how far this new generation known as â&#x20AC;&#x153;Zâ&#x20AC;? will be able to take the world; what is clear is that it is a generation committed to social causes and seeking authentic experiences only with causes that align with their interests. And it is there where the programs oriented to educate in gender equity acquire all the relevance and will maximize their effect. We cannot ignore the enormous possibilities for change that these new generations of girls and young women bring, with the new paradigms of being the first generations incubated in the 4.0 revolution, accustomed to information overload, to greater freedom to express their opinions in social networks and with fewer limiting beliefs. In contrast, we must also recognize their lower attention span, which means that for any educational process, we have greater possibilities of arriving with unconventional educational tools and with the wonderful challenge, for all those who develop programs, of motivating them through channels and more complex interactions.

Additionally, today we have more and better measurement instruments, we can carry out simulations at the government level on issues that were not previously questioned, such as domestic work and unpaid care at the home and community level, which allows us to make visible and describe a closer panorama to the reality of our young people, and that allows us to improve the channels for support and attention.

For us, the key to change is flexible education: education has new access routes as opposed to traditional ones. Artificial intelligence, on the one hand, helps us with personalized widespread growth and even when we have infrastructure problems, it is possible to bring programs of this type to young people through schools.

If we can take advantage of the potential of these new technologies to break down beliefs entrenched in microsexism (for example, in that certain tasks are meant

Artificial intelligence, on the one hand, helps us with personalized widespread growth and even when we have infrastructure problems, it is possible to bring programs of this type to young people through schools

for girls or that there are areas of knowledge inaccessible for a particular gender), strengthen positive masculinities and empower girls; In combination with collaborative and face-to-face methodologies, we will achieve significant progress in terms of gender education and its dissemination to traditionally unreachable sectors.

In this sense, it is necessary to highlight the role that the increasingly numerous edtech startups have been fulfilling as an agent of support for state policies on education for equity: spreading messages, generating learning and enhancing the capacities of girls and young people oriented to encourage steam areas and the development of digital entrepreneurial vocations among girls and young people; with the firm objective of developing a critical mass of young women who are capable of multiplying the efforts of public policy initiatives. Although we are far from reaching the goal, we must see the crisis as an opportunity to redouble our efforts and reduce the persistent inequality in our region, understanding that girls and women in our countries have much to contribute in any post-pandemic scenario.

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ARGENTINA

Diversity and Technology: A Challenge for Education Melina Masnatta, Co-founder Chicas en Tecnología & Julieta La Casa, Content and Journalism at Chicas en Tecnología

Julieta La Casa Julieta La Casa has a degree in Cs. of Social

Melina Masnatta

Communication and journalist. She writes on topics related to the gender gap in science and technology, education, culture and the rights of children and adolescents. Journalism and content at Chicas en Tecnología.

Melina Masnatta is a social entrepreneur in Education and Technology issues with a gender perspective (Ashoka Fellow). Graduated in Educational Sciences, she has a Masters in Educational Technology. She is also a National Art Teacher, Professor and Researcher.

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n a world in which technology was already centre stage, it stepped forward to the forefront even in those sectors of the population and activities were, for different reasons, they still looked askance at it. The novel COVID-19 pandemic sped up the implementation of technological solutions in different areas and, thus, also exposed the existing gaps around the digital ecosystem.

At present, there are various pressing issues in terms of inequality. Technology seems boundless but it does not reach all sectors of the population in the same way and, assuming that universal access to connectivity and devices were guaranteed, there would still be training and skill debts to be able to integrate all people into the digital universe. But the approach cannot be limited solely to the use of technology, but instead, it is important to delve into the conditions in which that technology is thought-out, designed and created and how that impacts the people who engage with it. In this regard, it is impossible to avoid the gender gap.

In Argentina, STEAM field university system data reveal that, between 2010 and 2016, only 33% of women and 67% of men were enrolled as students, both in public and private universities. And if programming-related

courses undergo a specific cutback, between 2010 and 2015 only 16.02% of enrolments correspond to women admissions and 83.98% to men. These numbers reveal that the lack of presence of women in technology development-related courses results in lower participation in job opportunities of the sector and leadership and decision-making positions.

As with other minorities, women are not part of the creation of technology that encompasses new productive, labour, educational and cultural activities and roles day by day. The characteristics and particularities of these groups are not taken into account when considering the users of technological solutions because they do not take part in the work teams that develop solutions, which causes their needs and interests to lack representation.

Technology in Command?

Reducing the technological gender gap requires solving the challenges that impact both girls and adolescents in the present and future. In this, the educational field has a key role in a twofold context: on the one hand, it is essential to encourage the vocation for technology and STEAM disciplines in girls from

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an early age and to put an end to gender stereotypes in the educational system that distance the girls from these areas; and, on the other hand, it is important for education to offer training that includes the necessary skills so that new generations can become people with diverse and inclusive leadership qualities.

So, technology in command? Far from affirming that outlook that would facilitate the current and future context, it is necessary to insist that this does not just concern devices and screens, but also reflecting and reconfiguring the pedagogical proposal that accompanies and shapes the coming generations that will create technology. And in this approach, shaping educators is also a vital factor because they are the ones who have to develop strategies to implement technology and the skills it implies in educational systems. These individuals play a key role in transforming education to innovate and integrate knowledge and experiences.

Sustainable Change Chicas en TecnologĂ­a, the Argentine non-profit civil society organization that, since 2015, has been seeking to reduce the technological gender gap, works to

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generate a systemic change that involves the educational and technology-based entrepreneurship field, public and private sector, that allows creating an environment in which young women can grow in STEAM disciplines and be industry leaders.

The organization has open and free programs and initiatives, which have already reached more than 5000 young women from Argentina and the region, who are the centre of the experience and learn about the technology-based entrepreneurship ecosystem through immersive proposals and exchanges with industry models. Chicas en Tecnología seeks that participants become creators of technology with a social impact and of solutions that address the problems and needs of their local contexts. Through articulated work with public and private sector leaders, young women between ages 13 and 21 have created more than 600 technological solutions to solve problems within their communities.

The organization’s programs also reach vulnerable areas, where there are usually greater inequalities and people have less access to devices and connectivity, so that young women can become part of the world of Technology and strengthen the positive impact that technology has on their communities. For the

implementation of its programs, Chicas en Tecnología counts on a network of more than 200 references and mentors who are educators and professionals from the tech environment and who support and accompany the girls throughout the programs. During the first years, the organization has received acknowledgements from entities such as the Argentine Ministry of Education, governmental organizations such as the Legislature of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, and national and international foundations such as Equals and Ashoka which allowed a greater reach of their Programs.

Education is one of the major axes on which Chicas en Tecnología works — together with gender, technology and entrepreneurship — with part of its initiatives being focused on shaping educators in technology-based entrepreneurship world skills so that they can bring together this knowledge with the knowledge gained in school. This is how educators of different levels and disciplines learn about computational thinking, agile methodologies, creation of technological solutions with a social impact, communication and leadership to empower and enrich the pedagogical resources they already have and include the gender perspective to promote inclusion- and diversity-based training.

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To specify the local transformations that can have an impact on the decisions and choices made by girls and young women, Chicas en Tecnología create solutions together with different social, cultural and economic leaders. We are, therefore, able to create an ecosystem in which the young women in the region find and choose possibilities for personal, academic and professional growth in STEAM disciplines and so they can become creators of technology. The projects created by young women who are part of the Community of Chicas en Tecnologia demonstrate that they can generate social impact here and now, and that they need a supportive and motivating environment.

With each new participant in Chicas en Tecnologia´s programs new stories arise. For instance, S.A.C (alternative Communication System), an app created by a group of adolescents aimed at people who have communication problems, the app allows them to establish a dialogue in which their ideas can be better understood through pictograms. This app was recognized with an invitation to participate in the National Congress of Phonoaudiology 2019 and in the International Conference of Phonoaudiology 2019, where the girls were the youngest exhibitors.

The curricula created by Chicas en Tecnología is not limited to showing a specific programming language to the participants or teaching them how to use a technological tool, but rather the organization’s programs encourage training based on a dynamic and contextualized curriculum that combines technical, technological, soft and impact skills. To grow as women leaders in the technology sector, young women need communication skills, to work in diverse teams and to be able to adapt to the change that will allow them to be at the forefront in constantly changing scenarios. These programs are created together with leading companies in the technology-based entrepreneurship field that are committed to generating inclusive environments in which women can fulfil leadership and innovation roles.

Reducing the gender gap in the field of technology requires that the entire society be involved in this problem since it encompasses multiple dimensions. Therefore, it is essential to identify its importance and

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make sure that it is placed on the agenda of public policies and development objectives of the private sector. With this in mind, Chicas en Tecnología carries out research projects to generate local and updated information on the gender gap in STEAM disciplines and to promote actions that contribute to reducing that gap. Additionally, these surveys allow for an informed and context-driven discussion to improve both present and future programs and actions and generate gender-based policies that consider current gaps.

The organization reaches +4 million people through its social media, where they share open and free access data, which they also share in national and international media to reflect on the gender gap in technology.

Chicas en Tecnología began in 2015 with a faceto-face program in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and after a long journey in which it gained importance and impact, achieving national coverage, amid the pandemic, it launched its first online regional, open and free proposal just like all the others, which involves young women from 6 countries (Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina). At a time when technology is a key component in local, national and global life, more young women need to get involved to come up with inclusive and innovative responses to current and emerging issues. The proposal for all of them is: “Wherever you are, transform the world with your technology.” And the commitment is to work so that increasingly more girls can achieve it.

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SPAIN

Generation COVID: Our Responsibility to the Future of Latin America and the Caribbean Mercedes Mateo, Lead Education Specialist, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)

Mercedes heads a broad initiative at the IDB Group to rethink education and strengthen the learning ecosystems to equip citizens with 21st-century skills. She also coordinates the research, design, and execution of innovative education projects. Her work covers different areas of international development and social policy, with a strong emphasis on inequality. She has contributions in the areas of institutional reform, female labour force participation, early childhood, socio-emotional and digital skills, and social cohesion. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Louvain. In 2004, she was a postdoctoral research fellow of the Belgian Scientific Research Foundation (FNRS) and honorary researcher until 2007. From 2002-2004, she was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Robert Schumann Center of the European University Institute.

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here are around 300 million throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Most of them are part of Generation Z or post-millennials, but from now on, they will also be known as Generation COVID. They are girls, boys, and youngsters who found themselves trapped by the pandemic, either starting, in the middle of, or finishing their studies. More than a third of these boys and girls live in poverty, and their households´ circumstances have been aggravated by COVID, in a region where the wealthiest 1% account for 21% of the income of the entire economy.

In a context of low social mobility, investment in human capital through school is the main alternative for low-income children and youth to climb up the social ladder. Traditionally, they have been offered segmented social services: middle and high-income children do not study in the same centres as low-income children, do not have the same teachers, and do not see the same doctors when they are sick. With such unequal starting points, COVID has come to worsen

an already existing inequality trap. How can the region take advantage of this generationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s untapped talent and avoid yet another lost decade?

The Legacy for Generation COVID Since March, many countries closed schools due to the coronavirus pandemic, leaving millions of children and youth without any access to remote learning. What are the academic implications for Generation COVID? Many students lost schooling for half a year -and unfortunately, the clock is still ticking for many of them. It also means that many students will not return to school because they lost motivation to continue studying or have been forced to work for economic reasons to help their families in distress.

An Ecuadorian teacher working in an urban area serving rural and migrant populations shared on Twitter some of the messages sent to him by his students and their families (see framed box below): In a context where only about 60% of low-income students attend secondary education, IDB estimates indicate that

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September 12 Fifteen days of classes have passed. I work as a state teacher in a school located in an urban area, but rural and migrant. I will make a thread with sentences that I have heard from my students and their parents these days.

I’m sorry for calling you so late (11:10 pm). It is when my dad comes home from work, and I can use his cell phone to do my homework.

Teacher, we only have one cell phone for my brothers and me. Let me submit my homework later.

(Student with a single telephone and three more siblings studying in two different educational institutions).

Householder: Please, teacher, wait for our homework until the weekend. We are going to buy a computer and get an internet connection so they can study.

(How many things will they have to sacrifice to do that?)

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Teacher, I’m not going to study anymore.

(High school junior student who is going to migrate illegally to the US) Teacher, I’m sorry if I haven’t submitted my assignment yet. I don’t have internet nor even a data connection, so I can´t get the homework sent. I’ll try to connect at the weekend. If you can, tell my other teachers.

Teacher, can you wait for my homework? They just bought me a computer, and I don’t know how to use it.

Teacher, I am writing to you to help me. I am just going to send you my homework. I won´t be able to connect to virtual classes because I am working.

Teacher, I bought a phone, and I’m working to pay for the instalments. Please, help me by waiting for my homework.

Teacher, I have to see my son, and I can only do my homework at night because my mom works.

Please be patient with me.

(Teenage mother)

about one million students in the region will drop out of school due to the pandemic. In academic terms, this implies that we are facing significant learning losses that will translate into increased socio-economic inequalities, given that high-income students have continued their learning journey while education stopped for low-income students.

We could be facing a two- years difference in learning between poor and rich kids. The learning loss accumulated during this period could also be associated with a potential individual income loss of around 6%, and some studies estimate about a $10 trillion loss of lifetime earnings for the future generation.

How do we change the fate of Generation COVID? Today, Latin America and the Caribbean must face the historical challenge of reversing this legacy. We cannot postpone it any longer. The solution requires offering real educational and economic opportunities to this generation that will otherwise live worse than their parents.

Start to Seriously Invest in Human Capital We must rethink how to generate training and learning opportunities that break the existing segmentation. Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s educational systems are not equalizers, and they should be. New proposals are coming from outside the formal systems, and

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despite operating from the for-profit private sector, they are contributing to providing real opportunities for young people who enrol in their programs. Why? Because they offer a combination of relevant knowledge and practical skills that are aligned with the labour market needs. They also provide financing opportunities that democratize access (i.e., students do not pay for their education until they find their first job). From a State perspective, it will be increasingly challenging to explain why certain private companies could be better at generating opportunities for the most vulnerable than services directly funded with public resources.

Offer Students The Skills And Competencies They Need For The Jobs of The Future Real education opportunities come hand in hand with economic opportunities. The real test for

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In a context where only about 60% of low-income students attend secondary education, IDB estimates indicate that about one million students in the region will drop out of school due to the pandemic

how well a student did is not only the final score she gets on a test, but how useful is what she learned to get a quality job, start a successful business, or have a prosperous life. Our estimates indicate an increase of more than 12% in unemployment in the region due to COVID. We still have a large skills mismatch between what training systems produce and what the labour market demands: many young students are trained in traditional sectors, and not enough are prepared to work in those new sectors that the economy is generating. Furthermore, we still have too many jobs requiring low-skilled workers and adding little value to the final product.

It is not easy to innovate and compete in a digitized world if you do not have the human capital to sustain it. We know innovation is a critical driver of growth and prosperity because behind it, we are capturing things like productivity, R&D spending, technology company density, manufacturing value-added, and patent activity.

Seriously And Responsibly Incorporate Technology Into The Education And Learning Processes, Starting With Connectivity Miguel Brechner, one of the architects of Plan CEIBAL in Uruguay, was one of the first persons in the region to speak of connectivity as a right.

Since then, and in the context of the pandemic, a kind of consensus has arisen around this idea.

Today it is more evident that the “disconnected household” has not been able to study, work, do paperwork or even get information about what was happening. But access to educational and economic opportunities through technology goes beyond connectivity. It involves giving young people the tools to handle personal and social

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opportunities enabled by technology. Yet, educational systems still lack a determined inclusion of the skills necessary to manage today’s world (see the #skills21 illustration). These skills are now more important to students than ever before because digital transformation is much more about people and talent than technology.

Students urgently need those skills to navigate a digital world and make sure they can continue learning throughout life.

Strengthen The Ecosystem Through Partnerships With The Private Sector Formal education systems need to look and learn from what is happening in the entire ecosystem and generate alliances with the private sector and civil society organizations to transform education. This is a historical responsibility with the COVID Generation. The pandemic has starkly exposed the drama of inequality.

Latin America and the Caribbean already had a lost decade: it cannot take on now a lost generation.

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Speaking to this idea, in October 2019, a regional Coalition for the development of 21st-century skills in Latin America and the Caribbean was created in Panama. It is a call for action. Our responsibility today is to prepare children and young people to succeed in an uncertain future.

The Coalition is an alliance with 34 public and private high-calibre actors such as Google, Amazon Web Services, Ashoka, HundrED, CLOO, D2L, FORGE, Fundación Scholas Ocurrentes, ISTE, GRAMMY, Holberton, Minerva, KERIS, SKTelecom, Think Equal, TUMO, Fundación Barcelona, Laboratoria, Trilema Foundation, Santillana Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation, French Development Agency, REDUCA, Plan Ceibal, among many others. The Coalition is led by the IDB with a firm commitment that, each partner within the scope of its activities will contribute to create training and employment opportunities and provide people with the necessary skills for economic inclusion.

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MEXICO

Authentic Learning Across Latin America Nicholas J. Martino, Founder, Authentic Learning Lab and NJM Global Consulting, Mexico

Nicholas is an impact-driven educational consultant and curriculum architect. After teaching anthropology and leading global learning expeditions for a decade, Nick now works to implement higher-level educational change as founder of the Authentic Learning Lab and NJM Global Consulting. Nick has worked to design the Changemaker Curriculum at THINK Global School & BIT School (Mexico City) while consulting with various global schools and nonprofit organizations. In 2009, he was awarded the title of Claes Nobel Educator of Distinction and in 2011, he was recognized as Washington Post Teacher of the Year and Virginiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Stafford County Teacher of the Year.

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ore than a decade ago, I began exploring the Latin American landscape as a young, idealist Anthropology teacher with the wild notion that education can change the world (I still hold this belief and will let you decide if I’m still an idealist). My experiences across Latin America spanned from the gastronomic to the extreme, and all shared the common characteristics of Interdisciplinary and Authentic Learning. The majority of schools today focus on traditionally defined subject silos measured by standardized tests, which only access the basic levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and, in some cases, downright ignore Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. This is exacerbated by the current global pandemic, with untrained teachers (who are courageously making the leap to digital learning) trying to remake the physical learning in virtual classrooms.

These expectations accumulate under time constraints and with large-scale equity issues. A massive gap in the current Industrial model of schooling is the development and the authentic application of skills in the real-world, which almost always require a range of interdisciplinary skills.

At our digital school, Authentic Learning Lab, we utilize blended learning (digital and face-to face) to enhance 21st-century skills, the lives, and holistic development of our learners.

Our programs focus on personal wellbeing, digital skills, and new-age methodologies for career and life development, along with providing an Authentic Educator Certification for teachers committed to utilizing a more impactful and personalized approach to learning.

I began teaching marginalized populations and collaborated with Americorps programs to link academics with service-learning. Since leaving the US, I have traveled the world leading place and projectbased global lessons to dynamic global students. While on the road, I finished my M. Ed degree in Curriculum Design in Digital Teaching and Learning and have since applied my range of educational experiences by improving and innovating education globally.

Designing and delivering authentic learning projects across Latin America range from biology studies in the lush jungles of Costa Rica to the tango-filled milongas of Buenos Aires and spans the last decade of my life. Here is a peak into a few of these incredible experiences.

My hope is that my work can pay homage to the rich cultural, geographic, and spiritual mosaic of Latin America. As you read through the following, consider the skills being developed and the real-world accomplishments of our learners.

Ciudad de México, México Earlier last year we were writing the curriculum for a place-based learning school in the heart of México City. Focused on business, intelligence, and

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technology, BIT School, will be launching in 2021. I have had the honor of participating in a workshop at the Universidad del Medioambiente (UMA), an incredible 100% eco-campus and university in the heart of Valle de Bravo, Mexico. Currently, Authentic Learning Lab has two fellows from México, one of which is designing a post-pandemic Amazing Race through México City’s cultural sights and museums, and another deep diving into understanding Asperger’s syndrome to best assist a neighbor in need.

El Progreso, Honduras

which now, in turn, make their own annual service trips to El Progreso.

It was in Honduras I watched a jungle evolve into a community, and a single school expand to become a network of 50+ schools. Change can happen at an evolutionary or revolutionary pace, at THINK Global School we certainly were operating at the ‘revolutionaries’ pace. We were trying to create something new and dynamic. As educators we were given freedom to network, develop contacts, and design collaborative projects.

Traveling the world with global inquisitive teenagers as a global studies and anthropology teacher was incredible, but I truly earned my 10,000 hours circumnavigating the world three times in a single year as a curriculum designer for the place & project based learning Changemaker curriculum.

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Photo by Nicholas J. Martino My earliest adventures in Latin America were with my lifelong friend and now CNN Hero, Shin Fujiyama, who has been working to shift the education landscape across El Progreso, Honduras, and in turn the world. The work of Students Helping Honduras has literally changed generations of my students, with our annual service trips serving from everything learning construction by building schools hand in hand with local masons, to life lessons in perspective-taking or as one student put “a needed respite from the digital, material, capitalist world we inhabit.”

Students identified and designed a range of fundraisers to pay for the project supplies including their meal and hostel overhead. These turned out to be life changing and longterm connections for many students who went on to start their own chapters in a range of American universities

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Photo by Lindsay Clark In my first posting with THINK Global School, I lived in the posh Recoleta district of Buenos Aires, Argentina where my students and I learned in the cafe which once graced the likes of Jorge Luis Borges, while devouring his magical realism. We sat in parks on the weekends drinking the ever-present matecito, and on weekdays investigated the dark history of the Military juntas and learned from the despair of Los Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. Our students were part of arranging a rare and emotionally difficult meeting between former military officers and the families of los desaparecidos.

Monteverde, Costa Rica

Photo by Ayesha Kazim Pura Vida Mae, as a waterman, I have often been drawn back to the paradise of pura vida, Costa Rica. On one trip, we utilized a learning-by-doing approach to living sustainably at Punta Mona, an off-the grid, permaculture farm, eco-lodge, and environmental education centre run by the incredible Stephen Brooks & his team. Stephen and Punta Mona were recently highlighted

by Zac Efron in his Netflix special Down to Earth. On another adventure this time on the Pacific Coast of Nosara, learners participated in an 8-week module to The majority of schools today focus learn the science of surfing, while on traditionally defined subject silos also undertaking the physical training to become professional surfers. measured by standardized tests, In Monteverde, our teams spent months on the University of Georgia which only access the basic levels campus directly assisting local of Bloomâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Taxonomy and, in some Ticos with University biodiversity investigations as part of developing cases, downright ignore Maslowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s our understanding of human wildlife conflict and globalization.

Hierarchy of Needs

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Quito, Ecuador

Photo by Nicholas J. Martino Landing in Quito, Ecuador on March 7, 2020 and being greeted by doctors in hazmat suits checking temperatures and distributing hand sanitizers was quite a shock arrival to the Andes. These were the earliest days of our global pandemic. In the week before COVID-19, cubrebocas (facemasks), and living in a pandemic became normal, my team and I were hard at work with the inspiring professors from the University of the Americas, both inaugurating their Center for Teaching and Learning and delivering a 21st century pedagogy workshop. With the assistance of the power duo of Francisco Morejón & Jose Martinod, we were able to re-expose UDLA professors to Quito’s cultural & colonial sites, such as the Compañia de Jesús Jesuit church, this time using a city/campus-aslab model to inspire the design of interdisciplinary and place-based projects.

Since our timely departure out of Quito, Ecuador, literally the day before airports globally began suspending flights, the professors have been adapting their new project-based pedagogy to work in the digital space.

The pandemic has brought about enormous changes for education, and we are witnessing an unseen opportunity to adapt the future education landscape for a more just and sustainable future.

Puerto Vallarta, México

Photo by Maria Ruvalcaba

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Currently back in México, we have approximately 30 million students undertaking remote learning, orale! As a means to overcoming a lack of internet access (56%) and a general lack of technology, the Mexican government has made deals with television providers to record and reach all grade levels of Mexicans, where 93% of the population will have access. Educators and students across México are painstakingly adjusting the remote learning process and protocols. One opportunity that is presenting itself here (and elsewhere) is that the Ministry of Education has devalued exams, which opens the door for agile educators to pivot from ‘educating’ their students towards providing opportunities for ‘meaningful learning.’ Across the world, we have evidence of students, parents, and teachers all finding ways to make learning happen in a variety of environments.

My hope is that here in México, and abroad, as we reevaluate our priorities and values as school leaders, we will add more weight to developing the whole-child and link their learning to authentic real-world tasks. Ideally, this new approach using authentic learning will inspire intrinsic motivation in learners and take aim at fixing local and global problems with innovative solutions. This, in the end, is how we continue to use education to change the world.

Currently I live in Puerto Vallarta and am honored to be promoting education as a National Geographic Certified Educator and serve as the Country Lead of the Finnish Education non-profit HundrED, that aims to identify and promote innovations in education. I work daily with innovative education projects across Mexico. This September, educators across Mexico began having monthly meetings, as ambassadors of HundrED, aiming to highlight innovation, create deep networks, and share best practices.

I have had the pleasure of living and teaching the culture and geographic mosaic that is Latin America over the past decade. I have devoured the words of Borges, Paz, and Marquez. I set into Latin America as a cultural traveler, and now a decade later with a wife and life in México, I am moved to reflect on my experiences through the lens of authentic learning. Maybe there is something deeper between my passion for authentic learning and my passion for living in Latin America, perhaps it is that they both, in essence, thrive with passion, deep connection, and grit.

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BRAZIL

How to Prevent Artificial Intelligence Subjugating The Natural Intelligence of Teachers And Students In The New Normal?

Raquel de Oliveira-Hinton, Educator, Brazil

With 24 years of experience in education and media, Raquel was born in Bangu, one of the poorest and most violent areas of Rio de Janeiro. She has held multiple responsibilities in various social communication and educational organisations. She was also associated with the PUC-RIO, UERJ, Instituto Singularidades and Fundação Getúlio Vargas as a Professor and Researcher. She worked as an English teacher for 20 years both in the public and private sector in Brazil. In 2012, she got the IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG Scholarship. She was a Pearson Fellow, within the Masters of Public Policy (MPP) program at The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, working with early childhood in daycare centres in South Africa. Raquel assumed the VP of Education and Public Policies of the British Startup Gigalime amid the COVID-19 crisis to rethink possible futures and spaces for digital transformation so that educational systems are redesigned to be in tune with the growing needs of contemporary societies, with covid19, and future, as a result of what we are now experiencing. The question is how to renew education systems and models around lifelong learning, which will be an increasingly necessary and inevitable requirement in the future of work and education.

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A

rtificial intelligence (AI) continues to grow in its applications and influence over our lives and education is right in the path of this seemingly unstoppable juggernaut.

But if a misdirected advert on social media is at worst a little annoying to the recipient and wasted spend for the advertiser, when we apply it to a child’s education and make decisions that will impact the entire adult life of the student then we need to take much more care.

I will use the concept of systemic change, from Michael Fullan, to guide my ideas on this article you are reading now.

So, if you do not know him, let me share some of his thoughts on leading in a culture of change with you.

‘Leading in a culture of change means creating a culture (not just a structure) of change. It does not mean adopting innovations, one after another; it does mean producing the capacity to seek, critically assess, and selectively incorporate new ideas and practices – all the time, inside the organization as well as outside it.’

We need to have a proper process for validating AI tools and maintaining the quality and effectiveness of the outputs in this culture of change. Quality management (QM) is a broad discipline but at its heart is improving processes

aimed at achieving an organization’s goals. To be effective we must know and understand the goals and understand how we are going to measure how close we are to achieving them. Here I explore the nature of QM and how it can be applied to the validation and use of AI tools in education.

Quality Management and Industry 4.0 QM is a mature discipline, having its roots in 1950s manufacturing and beyond. But even today one will find many different definitions of QM including zero defects to fitness for purpose. Two simple and relatively easy to understand terms but hardly relevant to teaching and maximising the potential of all students equitably and inclusively. Instead, I propose that we define quality in terms of meeting the goals set by stakeholders in education which includes the state, society, teachers and students. We can break QM into three distinct components and use those to monitor and improve the outcomes in education.

Quality control, seen as measuring the result at the end of the process and then trying to address any shortcomings.

In education, this is essentially the exam system at key stages in the students’ development. This is rather like the so-called industry 2.0 of a rigid and controlled process. And it reflects most of our so-called

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scale and complexity of education and to allow personalisation of student learning.

AI tools are in some ways like new drugs to treat diseases, they come with claims of efficacy and safety. These claims need to be demonstrated with volunteers and pilot studies in a controlled environment.

summative assessment tools poorly aligned with the goals and expected outcomes of the instruction. The important thing here is the product.

Quality assurance is the process and tools used to maximise the probability that the outputs of quality control are met. This includes teacher training and development, good tools and equipment in the classrooms, good social welfare for students and classroom sizes.

I would compare it to the use of tools that identify misconceptions, struggles, and learning gaps along the way and assess how to close those gaps for all the school community. As (Trumbull and Lash, 2013) say, it includes effective tools for helping to shape learning, and can even bolster students’ abilities to take ownership of their learning when they understand that the goal is to improve learning, not apply final marks Total quality management is an overarching concept of continuous improvement and instilling an organisation-wide culture of quality. This is in line with the concepts of industry 4.0 and the full use of automation and data to improve outcomes and enable unique ‘customer’ experiences. It is where the need for AI comes to the fore to manage the

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Managing Diverse Goals QM is all well and good but cannot operate in a vacuum. We need to understand the goals of education. Education is. of course, no longer one size fits all production line. We recognise the need to personalise education as much as possible to the individual, but within the capacity of those providing education and within the goals of a broader society. This leads to the challenge of defining goals within this complexity that can be used to establish and guide quality management systems in AI and data-driven education. Goals will come from the state, these will be driven by a top-down need to create a skilled workforce for the economy in the most cost-efficient way; from the broader society, and covering areas such as equity and inclusion; from schools, concerning teacher welfare and development; and from students individual preferences and ambitions.

And I make use of ambition for Education as it is explained in the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) of Agenda 2030 which aims to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” by 2030.

This is a complex set of potentially conflicting goals and will require an ongoing agile debate.

The Need for AI in Education The need to manage the complexity of goals at scale flexibly and measurably points to the value of AI tools that can deal with such a diverse system. At scale, it could help governments to understand how learners across a country are keeping up with the curricula. Such technology may be a particularly powerful approach for remedial or supplementary learning, to help the weakest and most disadvantaged learners keep up with the curriculum. But such an approach still requires the intervention of a teacher, to ensure that students are actually learning instead of just passing badly designed routine tests.

Policymakers will need to ensure that such technology serves the learner as a whole, based on a comprehensive curriculum. And learning must give students conditions to be citizens in an equitable future that we are still trying to preview with “old glasses”.

Martin Ford has seen this future in his book The rise of the robots, and it doesn’t work if we keep on with the same model of school we have today.

“One of the obvious implications of a potential intelligence explosion is that there would be an overwhelming first-mover

advantage. In other words, whoever gets there first will be effectively uncatchable.”

But there is good news: technology can power the next surge in creativity and collaboration.

The question is: how can we make this disruption happen?

Which kind of control do you have over it?

AI and Teachers When it comes to using AI in the classroom there are several models of interaction between AI and teachers. In the first case, AI could be used to replace some or all functions of a teacher. If it replaces administrative work and frees teacher time to spend with students this may be beneficial, but threatening teachers job security will be detrimental to wellbeing and harmony in the school.

The value of AI is often greatest when it is used to enhance rather than replace human experts. This can be by increasing capacity or throughput or by improving the quality of the outputs. This is an exciting prospect if AI can enable true personalisation while maintaining core adherence to the curricula. This would also support moving towards a new model of the curriculum based upon principles of industry 4.0.

Supporting Future Curricula AI will allow the evolution of teachers from knowledge banks to mentors and moderators of individual learning. A combination of academic learning, social and emotional awareness, and self-regulation of learning will put citizenship at the heart of learning and be the basis of the future curriculum where these characteristics overlap.

Our challenge is viewing the curricula as a collaborative construction which has to be flexible to the societal changes. And to the idea that we have possible futures. Yes, in the plural.

And so are our learning curves.

Many teachers, teachers-in-training, and even psychology and education undergraduates miss the foundation that they need to understand and reflect upon not the ‘how’s’, but rather the ‘why’s’ of what good teaching is according to Kirschener & Hendrick (2020).

Learning is a result of processing that which you experience. The goal of good learning and instruction is to optimise this information processing by creating learning opportunities visible to the learner. And this holistic view of the learning process is needed.

This diagram was created by David Peck and Ivan Siqueira as part of the article Brazil Education after Covid-19 translated by me during the COVID Pandemic and to be published by Getulio Vargas Foundation.

A Protocol for Testing AI Tools AI tools are in some ways like new drugs to treat diseases, they come with claims of efficacy and safety. These claims need to be demonstrated with volunteers and pilot studies in a controlled environment. A badly tested drug can lead to patient suffering and even death. Bad AI tools can lead to teachers and students suffering and for students’ lifelong prospects to be adversely affected.

A protocol for testing AI claims in education needs to be developed so that the tools can be evaluated safely in controlled studies with a small set of schools and can be scaled up and rolled out reliably. It is important not to allow the development and adoption of AI in education to be a new wild west frontier without regulation.

What’s Next?

We are moving from an ethos in which teachers tell students what to do to one in which teachers and students work collaboratively to try to navigate in a world of uncertainty.

We need to calibrate our compass, our curricula, and AI can make the difference.

But none of the above will happen if we do not change our mindsets.

How to have agency collaboratively?

How to be a bridge between the most experienced and less experienced learners?

If we can discuss these questions, avoiding the trap of polarisation, chances are we will learn how to learn benefiting from artificial intelligence without subjugating our natural intelligence.

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INNOVATIVE EDTECH SOLUTION PROVIDER OF 2020- BRAZIL

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TRÍADE

EDUCACIONAL

T

ríade Educacional is an educational consulting company that has the objective to promote innovation in education through teacher training, content production, and transforming projects management.

The team comprises teachers specialized in Active Methodologies, STEAM, curricula elaboration and educational projects management and the functions are divided into three pillars: (i) continued teachers’ education; (ii) personalized consulting in educational projects; (iii) content production for helping the public educational system, the third sector and public policies elaboration.

Helping Schools in Innovation Projects Since its foundation, Tríade Educacional has already collaborated with hundreds of institutions, from basic learning schools to universities.

Tríade’s projects are personalized according to the needs of the institution we work with, involving teachers’ continuing professional development.

Among the institutions Tríade has worked with in the city of São Paulo, is Colégio São Luís, a school that remodeled its space and curriculum. Triade helped in developing training for the school’s management and teachers, and consultancy in the elaboration of the new curriculum Changes Brought by the Pandemic The urgency of bringing quality education to Brazilian students, mainly at this challenging moment of social distancing, moves committed

professionals to search for learning alternatives.

At Tríade Educacional, this need culminated in a learning environment system (LMS) that started its development in October of 2019 and was launched in August this year containing 5 courses. At AVA, there are didactic learning sequences directed to online professional educators’ learning in this country, carefully built by Leandro Holanda and Dr. Lilian Bacich.

A Project for Public Schools Being between realities of a public and a private school is challenging, even more than usual during social distancing times. On the one hand, there is the absence of equipment and the difficulty in keeping up with the students’ progress. On the other hand, there are the demands of some parents who do not comprehend the need of a school year to be adapted to remote learning. However, the educator Juliana Lima Albuquerque does not give up; she keeps pursuing equity for her Middle School at two schools she works at in Fortaleza, Ceará.

The choice for the course “Blended Learning: Introduction,” has a special reason. After having watched one of Dr. Lilian Bacich’s lectures, Juliana was amazed by the theme. “I wanted to learn more, in detail, how this new form of making education retirar works,” says the Science teacher. She has already worked with Flipped Classroom, and the course inspired her to create a a Station Rotation project that she wishes to put into practice very soon.

“I believe that the Station Rotation works well in public schools because it springs up

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youth protagonism, which is so important nowadays. There [public schools], we suffer so much from the lack of resources, low self-esteem, lack of incentive from students’ families … Showing the students a new way of teaching brings up their skills and their best qualities, all of which is very important.”

According to Juliana, the Active Learning are essential in the new educational model that will rise in the post-pandemic world. “These are techniques that came to stay and will have more and more space in classrooms. It is so important for the teacher to appropriate this knowledge. Tríade is a big help for me.”

Public School Projects Lesson Study is a method of teacher’s professional development that has been applied for over 100 years in schools in Japan, and it shows to be capable of perfecting

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educators’ practice and students’ development in all curricula. In partnership with Formar, in 2019, Tríade Educacional implemented the proposal of Lesson Study (in Portuguese, Pesquisa de Aula) in two big States in Brazil: Francisco Morato, in São Paulo State, and Ponta

Grossa, in Paraná, involving teachers, coordinators and technicians from the States’ boards of education.

Blended Learning as a Support in the Presential Classes Return Along with the help of partners, the third sector and private initiative, Tríade welcomed teachers from the Public Educational System to an online course.

The course began in October 2020 with more than 300 teachers from the Public Educational System of different cities in Brazil who are experimenting a didactic sequence of learning focused on developing proposals of implementation to the transition between remote learning and blended learning, as a way of giving support to the slow paced return to presential classes. Tríade is looking forward to keeping up with these schools and to being able to evaluate how learning will be able to help teachers and administrators in a very delicate moment for schools in Brazil and the world.

Tríade knows that the future will be challenging, but believes that a continuous and supervised teacher professional development is one of the pillars for us to develop an education of quality for all students in our country. With the support of its partners and employee effort, Tríade Educacional is sure that it is moving towards the right path.

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COLOMBIA

Escuela Nueva Vicky Colbert, Founder & Director, Fundación Escuela Nueva

Laureate of the first edition of the Yidan Prize for Education Development (2017) and 2013 WISE Prize for Education Laureate, Vicky is a Sociologist from Javeriana University in Colombia. She pursued her graduate studies in Sociology of Education at Stanford University in the United States. In 2015, the American University of Nigeria distinguished her with an Honoris Causa Doctorate in Philosophy. She is coauthor of the worldwide renowned Escuela Nueva model and was its first National Coordinator. Colbert has pioneered, expanded and sustained this educational innovation from many organizational spheres: as Vice Minister of Education of Colombia, UNICEF´s Education Adviser for LAC and now from Fundación Escuela Nueva (FEN), an NGO she founded to ensure its quality, sustainability and innovation.

She has been recognized with several awards and distinctions in the fields of leadership and social entrepreneurship, such as the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, the Clinton Global Citizenship Award and the Kravis Prize. She has also been recognized as Outstanding Social Entrepreneur by the Schwab Foundation, Ashoka and the World Technology Network.

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E

scuela Nueva is an educational innovation that has been implemented in Colombia since 1975 and has influenced educational policy in several countries around the world in the last 40 years. It is one of the longest bottom-up innovations of the developing world that has been sustained. It promotes active, child-centred, participatory, cooperative, and personalized learning and a new role of the teacher as mentor and facilitator.

Children finish academic units at their own pace.

Escuela Nueva was created when Colombian rural schools, like the rest of Latin American countries, did not offer complete primary education. Most rural schools did not offer complete primary education and more than half of rural children between the ages of 7 to 9 years never attended school. Rural children who were in school experienced high levels of grade repetition and dropouts.

Children in sparsely populated rural areas generally attended multigrade schools where one teacher had to attend children of different ages and grades in the same classroom. However, teachers received little or no preparation in handling this situation.

These schools required an innovative approach to meet the needs of these small multigrade schools, which represented the majority of schools in Colombia´s rural areas.

Daily exposure of children to violence also demanded an educational approach

that would instil peaceful values and behaviours in students.

To address these critical needs of the multigrade schools, UNESCO piloted a multigrade model named Unitary School, where teachers had to develop individualized and personalized learning cards to facilitate different learning rhythms. This worked at a small scale, however, in the attempt to scale it up, it demanded a considerable amount of time from the teachers. Thus, the model was not scalable at the time and it was not viable technically, or politically, or financially. It was not cost-effective.

Building on that pilot experience Escuela Nueva sought, from the outset, to impact national policy and to respond to the needs of rural children in the entire country.

With the support of USAID, the innovative project of Escuela Nueva was initiated. The idea was to go beyond the concept of multigrade and emphasize a new form of childcentred learning and a new role of the teacher; in other words, to have a conceptual and practical emphasis on a pedagogical renovation. We named it Escuela Nueva, which means New School in English, to highlight a new way of learning and a new type of school.

Escuela Nueva´s new approach to schooling shifted the learning process from the teacher to the student, encouraging active, child-centred, participatory, flexible approaches so students could finish academic units at their own pace; and personalized support from the teacher who was assuming a new role as mentor, facilitator and guide instead of

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the traditional approach of the teacher as the source of information. This learning process was supported by a system of curriculum learning guides for students, resources like classroom libraries, and rich learning corners with low-cost community materials to facilitate student-centred inquiry and a set of activities, instruments and to promote student autonomy on leadership skills as well as stronger relationships with parents. The learning guides are self-directed materials that facilitate both autonomous and cooperative learning. They also serve as planning tools for the teachers. Thus, â&#x20AC;&#x153;the basic idea was to transform the conventional teacher-centred schooling practices into a learner-centred model that would integrate curriculum, teacher training, community involvement, and administrative strategies systemically and costeffectively. The expectation was that the new approach to rural education would guarantee access and quality improvement for all school childrenâ&#x20AC;?.

Although the principles of Escuela Nueva are not new in the philosophy of education, the innovation consisted of transforming these principles into operational strategies and applying them to rural children from underserved localities. Some of these ideas came to Colombia to some

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of the elite private schools not so to the public school and less so in rural areas.

The model was also meant to expand access to education in rural areas, improve student achievement, minimize rates of repetition, and improve self-esteem, civic engagement, and creativity of children. Escuela Nueva teachers used learning guides to facilitate student-centred classroom environments thru a holistic collaborative approach. Just as important were authentic student government elected and ran by students to ensure they could participate in ways that contribute to building citizenry and interpersonal skills among students.

When in 1985 Escuela Nueva became officially a public policy the model enjoyed quick success and expansion growing from the pilot to nearly 25,000 schools by 1990. It became the national strategy to universalize basic primary education in the country.

Due to the selection of Escuela Nueva by the World Bank as one of the 3 experiences worldwide that had successfully impacted national policy, the Colombian experience was visited by many countries and many Colombian teachers went abroad to initiate the project in several LAC countries. It also inspired several educational

reforms worldwide. Vietnam is a very relevant example of this adoption because the government implemented Escuela Nueva in the entire country with very positive results according to a World Bank recent impact evaluation.

Much of this growth and success was due to a series of positive evaluations of Escuela Nueva´s impact on student achievement and other important outcomes such as selfesteem. In 1997 UNESCO´s Latin America Laboratory for the Assessment of Quality in Education across 13 countries in the LAC region found that Colombia was the only country in which rural students outperformed urban students in both math and language, except in the megacities.

After decades of evaluations, there is a strong body of evidence demonstrating positive results in academic achievement, self-esteem, and non-cognitive skills such as responsibility, leadership, and the ability to relate well with peers. It has demonstrated significant results in the formation of democratic behaviour and peaceful social interaction of children in comparison to conventional schools. The probability of parents perceiving the impact of the school

on home practices grows as the level of implementation of Escuela Nueva increases. Children become change agents also in their families and communities.

Recognizing that innovations are very vulnerable to political and administrative changes several leaders of the Escuela Nueva initiative decided to ensure that this innovation could be preserved and enhanced. As a result, several ex-ministers of education, and the original team that initiated Escuela Nueva founded in 1987 the Escuela Nueva Foundation, a Colombian NGO with the mission to continue ensuring quality in the implementation of Escuela Nueva and also to adapt it to new contexts and

populations. Fundación Escuela Nueva (FEN) was the first to adapt it to urban marginal areas with support from the Interamerican Foundation, calling the new program Escuela Activa Urbana. In urban adaptation and implementation, the evaluations also demonstrated positive results in academic achievement and self-esteem and socio-emotional skills.

A new development of the application of Escuela Nueva in urban areas was undertaken in 2001. In effect, with financial support from USAID FEN designed and piloted the Escuela Nueva Learning Circles for displaced and migrant children. The model was adapted to meet the distinctive needs of vulnerable, out-of-school children building on the principles of child-centred, active, personalized, and cooperative learning. The Learning Circles are learning spaces where groups of

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around 15 students work together with the aid of a tutor from the community, who facilitates learning and provides personalized attention until they are to transition into the formal official school. The personalized and extra socioaffective attention restores and strengthens children´s selfesteem, develops social and life skills as well as a joyful learning experience.

They operate off-site from mainstream formal schools but are officially linked to them through shared academic calendars, grading systems, and extracurricular activities.

Children are officially enrolled in school but study in learning circles that can be set up in communal spaces. It is an effective strategy to accelerate action on getting out of school children into school. In the urban adaptation and implementation, the evaluations also demonstrated positive results in academic achievement such as in language and math and self-esteem.

The most recent development of FEN was the adaptation of the model to homeschooling as a result of the health emergency created by Covid-19. The instruments of the

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model facilitated this adaptation which is already receiving attention from some of the international development organizations. The adaptation included existing and new instruments to facilitate parents and other adults to support the students, guidance for teachers to work in a mode of distance teaching and learning, and a platform with a virtual campus. This campus called Renueva is an online community of practice and virtual campus for teachers that facilitates spaces for conversations, tutorials, and resources and learning guides teachers can download.

This short article illustrates how Escuela Nueva was born and how Fundaciรณn Escuela Nueva has adapted the innovation to new populations and new settings to respond to diverse needs and circumstances. These efforts intend to reach the underserved populations in Colombia and around the world bringing to them the best educational opportunities available ensuring that they are technically, politically, and financially viable. This is also an effort, validated by multiple evaluations, to show that it is possible to help children, families, and communities improve their socio-economic conditions through educations. Finally, these efforts also validate our conviction that necessity is the mother of innovation.

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