In Bolivia, there is only one way to become a public school teacher: by graduating from the state-run public universities for teachers, collectively known as the “Normal”. This year we began working with both students and professors from the two Normal campuses in Beni and the three in Tarija. Both groups are learning to use […]
I get uncomfortable talking about impacts that can’t be measured objectively. It feels like the old western traveling salesmen who would sell miracle potions – all talk and no proof – except I’m selling social/educational impact instead of magic cures. But in this case, because it’s a blog and not an evaluation, I’ll allow myself […]
I remember years ago, sitting and waiting for hours just to speak with an educational administrator of an isolated province. In fact, I can recall various plastic chairs where I parked myself, intent on getting a meeting with someone who never heard of Alma and at the moment had better things to do. Therefore, it’s […]
In both Bolivia and Peru, the school year is starting. This is always a busy time where we finalize plans with state authorities and implement the projects we began planning in December of last year. But one part of the new school year struck me this year: much of our staff, who have been working […]
I remember, years ago, sitting in a small room in Sucre, Bolivia with the heads of the Education Comittee of the Quechua Nation. Bolivia’s constitution considers the country a nation of nations, with each indigenous nation having a certain level of autonomy. Whether this structure is true in practice is a separate debate. The point […]
We use a variety of measurements to evaluate the impact of our projects, and I particularly enjoy mining the data to contextualize them. For example, the data from our Peruvian ecourse specialization in Innovative Pedagogy shows that there is no correlation between passing grades and teachers in rural or urban schools, internet connectivity, or time […]
In September I wrote a blog about the Ministries of Education in Peru and Bolivia taking up our Alma teaching methodology and including it in state-run training programs. Recently, in late November, we had a meeting with UNEFCO, the branch of the Bolivian Ministry of Education that is responsible for training Bolivia’s 150,000 teachers and […]
Over the last month I had the opportunity to speak with students in two classrooms in Canada: Dr. Carmen Rodriguez de France’s Indigenous Education at the University of Victoria and Dr. Dustin Ciufo’s Playful Pedagogy at Trent University. Both courses had very different focuses and goals, but a common theme that always threads through education […]
Over the past two years, over 30,000 Peruvian and Bolivian public school teachers participated in Alma’s training programs. And though that is a big number, only a percentage of them were able to receive year-long accompaniment in our focus groups, because we simply don’t have enough staff to work on a daily basis with 30,000 […]
From 2019 to 2021, Alma grew its reach by a factor of 1000. That’s right! We went from training 30 public school teachers working with 525 students, to 31,050 teachers working with 499,656 students! Though those numbers are exciting and evidence of buy-in from teachers and educational authorities in Peru and Bolivia, they also represent […]
Due to the large demand for our training program on Innovative Pedagogy and our limited budget, we created an ecourse to allow us to accompany as many teachers a we can in our program with limited staff. In the Region of Cusco, we set a goal of getting 300 preschool and primary school teachers signed […]
The new school year began in both Peru and Bolivia, and after months of planning, coordinating, signing and resigning contracts, etc. we are finally back in the classroom with teachers and administrators training them to use Alma’s teaching methodology to bridge the gap between state mandated curriculum and classroom implementation. 2022 can also be considered […]
When Alma teachers are in the classroom, students are on a journey: making decisions, investigating further, re-evaluating and improving their work based on new information, justifying responses, etc. Everything is a part of a process, and that process is practical, interactive, and useful in the daily lives of the students. Therefore, when we run our […]
This year we decided to carry out an activity requested by our local partner, the Beni Department of Education. The activity consisted of a contest of pedagogical proposals prepared and applied by teachers in their classrooms, we launched the call expecting low participation, because in similar events called at the national level, no more than […]
After many months of remote work, we had the opportunity to meet in person with Prof. Elías Perez, a specialist from UGELParuro, to plan and coordinate the activities to be carried out with the assigned teachers. This specialist is always willing to cooperate with Alma Children’s Education, giving us the scope of information that helps […]
Now that Alma expanded to work at large regional levels in Peru and Bolivia, the amount of indigenous cultures/languages we adapt our teaching methodology around increased. In Cusco, Peru, we work with Quechua-speaking peoples. In the Chaco region of Tarija, Bolivia are the Guaraní. In Beni, Bolivia we work with the Mojeño (both San Ignaciano […]
Around the world administrators, teachers, parents, and students are beginning to step back into the classroom. Many are excited to “get back to normal” and forget about online learning. In most schools in Peru and Bolivia, due to isolated locations and lack of access to hardware, online learning was never an option to begin with. […]
I love talking to teachers. And lucky for me, I get to speak with teachers from different countries with different backgrounds and different obstacles. Hearing their enthusiasm and compassion for the students is inspiring, but one topic that always seems to deflate teachers’ energy is when we talk about the paperwork behind lesson planning, […]
Within the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2021 we persevered with strength and collaborated with the UGELs of the Cusco region to offer educational proposals that “promote complex thinking through authentic activities and social-emotional well-being”. Through remote work, we interact to develop the different scheduled activities. With the experience of last year, many […]
Alma Foundation: Improving Indigenous Education in a Culturally-Responsive Manner Garfield Gini-Newman, Ian McGroarty, Alan Harman, Laura Gini-Newman Abstract: Rural Indigenous communities face significant hurdles in balancing educating children to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world while preserving their cultural values and traditional ways of life. In this chapter, the authors share […]