There were countless lessons I learned while in Peru and it was an experience I will never forget. I met inspiring teachers, kind and dedicated students, and communities of people who exude warmth and welcome. I honestly believe that these characteristics are not mutually exclusive but rather a result of each other. The closeness of family and strength of community, I think, naturally leads to teachers who truly care about their students as people and are concerned with their development both academically and socially. I also think the togetherness they share motivates students to be the best they can be and allows them to feel comfortable enough to take chances and grow together by celebrating their victories and learning from mistakes.
The entire time I was in Peru, I was asking about and looking for a Social Emotional Learning curriculum but (at least in the case of the school and community I had the privilege of being a part of) I have come to realize that a lot of the goals and outcomes of SEL are already experienced and taken advantage of due to the natural culture of a people who are family-oriented, community minded, and genuinely warm. I believe our capitalistic, every-man-for-himself, society can take a real lesson from this more community-minded sentiment that seems to pervade this beautiful South American country. It is my goal that during this school year, I implement some of the strategies used at STI for communicating regularly with parents and find a way to build community in my classroom that will hopefully spread through the school and eventually spill out in our larger community. There is still a lot of brainstorming, resource collecting, and professional learning community building to do but I do hope to make this focus on community and well-being a goal of mine for this year.
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Finally the day came during our international field experience where we were able to visit our host schools and all the truly lovely people teaching and learning there!
I have to admit, before this experience I had the bias opinion that education in Peru continued to be the memorization and regurgitation of the past but I learned a lesson in assumptions and witnessed some incredible educational innovation going on in this lovely school. I would venture to say that there are many traditions that still hold strong in the school but these traditions are not necessarily a bad thing. Cass (my teacher partner) and I experienced professional development two-fold in that we hosted a workshop for English teachers from all over the district and also had the pleasure of participating in a weekly teacher meeting of the humanities, arts, and physical education department. The topics discussed were interesting and engaging and without realizing it, or using the same terminology, we were discussing student engagement strategies and critical thinking (the exact opposite of what I expected!), these were really great experiences. Our workshop, though perhaps originally thought of as a chance for English teachers in the area to just listen to and speak with native English-language speakers, I decided to take a step further and share some of my findings and strategies for student engagement and SEL. We planned the workshop to flow in the same progression that my classroom generally does. We began with an SEL "get to know you" activity, followed by a mindful moment and emotional check-in. After these activities we watched a video on student engagement and looked at the conditions for engagement in the classroom. We read some articles using reading protocols and discussed them using a number of creative communicative strategies. I think the most successful piece of this workshop was that after each activity we did, we paused and discussed, as a group, how these activities could be used in everyone's class and how the English teachers might tweak the activities to use them for specific learning opportunities in their classes. There was an overwhelmingly positive response from this workshop and all of us, as professionals, enjoyed collaborating and reflecting on our practice. As with most class periods and visits, the workshop ended with innumerable selfies! As much as I enjoyed presenting a workshop, having the opportunity to participate in a teacher meeting with the incredible teaching staff at STI proved to be a most interesting moment where I learned a great deal about their focus and educational goals. The administrator began the meeting with a quote that truly resonated with me, "Si enseñamos los estudiantes de hoy como los estudiantes de ayer, les estamos robando el futuro." In English this quote means, if we teach today's students as we did in the past, we are robbing them of their future. This quote exemplifies an understanding of our changing world and the improvements we need to make to ensure a bright future for our students and our world. This devotion to professional development is seen in the fact that these teachers have this meeting every week for two hours on Wednesday morning. There is always a topic presented and activities in which they must participate. Teachers were assigned an article to read by Marco Aurelio called "Aprendamos a motivar a nuestros estudiantes" that is, Let's learn to motivate our students. The strategy covered on this day was using an array of mental maps to organize information and motivate students to get involved with their thinking. Groups of teachers were tasked with the challenge of creating mental maps based on articles they read or units they were planning. For example, the arts department presented a poster about using technology and digital languages to learn and resources that already exist that could be used in the class or adapted for use in classes. The Physical Education teachers presented a map organizing the different domains of education one could use to create an interdisciplinary unit using the World Cup (history of countries participating, music- anthems, social studies- races, languages, etc). The other striking portion of this extremely professional development-focused curriculum meeting was the video and discussion of critical thinking. After learning about the Shining Path and how traditional teaching of memorization and regurgitation was a driving factor for its' success, it was great to see that there is a new and strategic focus on critical thinking. This is a significant change for these educators. We talked about the benefits of encouraging critical thinking as well as some key steps for teacher to take to encourage it in their classroom. The argument was made that critical thinking thwarts prejudice, increases creativity, refuses discrimination, and defends justice. The talk also reinforced the practices of the teacher being like the instigator of the class instead of an all-knowing being and that creating a space for open debate results in greater cognitive gains for students. This meeting was one I won't soon forget and I hope that our curriculum meetings can be as cooperative and enlightening as these in the year to come. Aside from the inspiring week I spent in a school in San Pedro de Lloc, the most memorable experience in Peru may have been visiting the Fulbright Commission. Laura Balbuena, a respected professor, wrote a dissertation about a terrorist group in Peru called the Shining Path. While I imagined the trauma suffered by the country as a result of this group took place many years in the past, we were all shocked to learn that the Shining Path conflict is a relatively recent dark period in Peruvian history, characterized by nearly 20 years of internal armed conflict, that ended in 1996. In the country itself, it is often not talked about- or at least wasn't until recently-and outside of the country is barely known.
The conflict begins with it's leader, Abimael Guzman (aka Shampú...because of his brainwashing techniques), who began as a university professor and evolved into something of a demi-god. He began this political cult by targeting marginalized peoples in the country and rallying them to join his violent revolution. There is a history of racism and centralism in the country which Shampú took advantage of. Similar to the United States and many nations across the globe, lighter/european skin tones were more valued and the indigenous peoples of the Andes were (and continue to be, in many cases) the least valued. Not surprisingly, women of any color, find themselves at the bottom of the hierarchy in general. Guzman had a hybrid approach in his principles, incorporating Marxist, Leninist, and Maoist ideals into his to his belief system. We were told that he met with success for a couple of reasons. His targeting of marginalized populations was one but possibly the most effective groundwork for his success was by no fault of his own, but rather due to the country's historic approach to education. Though things have changed drastically (by the measure according the yardstick of education) in recent years, Peru's educational past was characterized by a focus on memorization and regurgitation rather than critical and higher-order thinking skills. When you raise a population of students not to question the information they are taught, you risk creating a generation of people who cannot weigh options and foresee possible outcomes to their and others' actions. This mentality of not questioning a seeming authority and using peoples' feelings of anger and frustration as motivation made this movement possible. Sometimes as teachers we forget just how important our jobs are and we don't strive to forever be improving our practice and advocating for change in our profession. This is an extreme situation but it illustrates this importance in a very real way. While I don't imagine that we in Massachusetts will experience a violent uprising like this, I do wonder if we are not doing enough in some aspect of our teaching that is negatively affecting our students. The most outstanding example of this, for me, is the overwhelming number of violent acts in schools in recent years. There is a reason why students act out violently and much of it is a lack of belongingness to their school and school community. I think this is a huge reason why SEL has become so important to me and hope our changes to curriculum, like those that have taken place in Peru, will eventually make a real impact on the number of incidents of school violence. Our lectures about education revealed some truly interesting information. In Massachusetts we often complain about the DESE because they never answer email, the phone, etc and the only way to get your questions answered is by showing up in person and demanding answers. I have thought, on a number of occasions while in Peru, that perhaps it is even more difficult to have your voice heard or questions answered because the entire educational system for the country is controlled by the Ministry of Education. I now wonder if perhaps things are more streamlined and people know what to expect because expectations trickle down from one place or if that centralized control is stifling to progress. After speaking with my host teacher, I believe it to be more of latter... more on that later.
Daniel Alfaro is the Minister of Education and is seems the main goal of any minister is to survive and avoid teacher strikes. Like in the US, there is often demonstrations by unions about teacher pay, but in Peru there is an added complication. There are multiple teacher unions in singular regions who are fighting for different causes, there is also a history of distrust of some teachers (more on that later as well) due to historical trauma, and now there is confusion between teachers who are dangerous terrorists or, rather, just positive leftists. While driving in our bus in Lima, we witnessed a number of teacher protests in the few short days we were there. Another issued faced is reading education. There is a huge population of literate peoples but there are many indigenous tribes unaccounted for in statistics. When focusing on mainly the south of the country, things are very optimistic. Going further with literacy, the Ministry announced an initiative saying that the entire country would be bilingual by 2021, but did not release a plan of action for attaining this goal. This goal becomes increasing more difficult based on the fact that there is a lack of teacher in general. Some educators shared with us that in their schools qualified teachers would be pulled to teach subjects they are not qualified for- for example, a Communications teacher (Language Arts) might be pulled to teach English even if they are not fluent English speakers themselves. There is, however, an interest among teachers to be trained in different subject areas and specifically in English language. My guiding question for this experience focused on Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and whether there was a concerted effort to focus on feelings of belonging, intrinsic motivation, and engagement in learning and community. At this point in our trip, I did not hear of or see any evidence of these things but I did see some need. One of our lecturers shared with us that schools traditionally reinforce "traditional" gender roles and that there has been no training for teachers to move away from this sentiment. In 2015 there was finally some movement toward changing books and resources to a more gender-neutral message. The importance of this change in sentiment is striking due to the overwhelming statistics of gender-based violence. Another marginalized group in education is students with special needs. A nervous, but understanding, chuckle and the response, "we're working on it," was the answer to a fellow's question regarding this topic. Steps are being taken to mimic US models for inclusive education in some regions. Major takeaways:
After nearly 12 hours of travel and a good night's sleep, we woke to an impressive breakfast spread at our hotel in Lima. We are staying in the neighborhood of Miraflores, a very safe and lively area of this capital city. Along with 14 TGC fellows, our fearless leader-Max, and Maxine (of the State Department), we are extremely lucky to have our in-country consultant, Karina, to guide and share in this incredible experience with us. This morning Karina gave an engaging and informative presentation on Peruvian culture. We looked at the history of this land, now named Peru, and how the pre-Incan and Inca civilizations played an important role in building a foundation for the now incredibly diverse identity of this rich country.
Following Karina's presentation, we began our tour of Lima proper. Our first stop was el Parque del amor. Unlike LOVE Park in Philadelphia, the statue in this park is a bit "racey" (see above). The park's surrounding wall was created in a similar style to Parque Guell in Barcelona. It has a very curvy, organic shape, and is covered in mosaic tile mimicking that of artist and architect Antoni Gaudí. After this stop we headed to Main Square where the Presidential Palace is located as well as a beautiful cathedral where Francisco Pizarro is buried. Finally we headed to the Cathedral of Lima and el Museo Convento San Francisco y Catacumbas. In the underground catacombs is an impressive and intriguing archaeological site filled with the remains of over 25,000 bodies. To close the evening, we headed to Huaca Pucllana-an impressive adobe and clay pyramid built from seven staggered platforms. Huacas are monuments that represent something revered, and were often used as sights for ceremonies. There is a lovely restaurant adjacent with a view of the whole place. We dined and enjoyed great company and an amazing view. I feel so lucky to be here and learn about this beautiful country first hand. My biggest takeaways today:
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AuthorSrta. Newell is a Spanish teacher from Massachusetts. She has the privilege of working at West Middle School in Andover. This blog is a record of her experiences on the Teachers for Global Classrooms field experience in Peru. ArchivesCategories |