Launch of the book “Curricular innovations in secondary education” – 2024-08-21 17:22:43

Launch of the book “Curricular innovations in secondary education”

• St. Ignatius School, Alonso Ovalle 1452, La Moneda Metro Station.
• Thursday, August 29 – 3:15 p.m..

At a crucial moment for education in Chile, where the Ministry of Education is updating the curricular bases from 1st grade to 2nd year of high school, the book “Curricular Innovations in Secondary Education”, by the Delegate for School Education of the Society of Jesus and President of the REI, Juan Cristóbal García-Huidobro SJ, emerges as a source of inspiration for other educational communities that dare to rethink and transform their curriculum.

García-Huidobro examines how these schools have transformed their educational approach, adapting to a context in which traditional methodologies often prove insufficient. The author argues that true educational innovation emerges when school communities have the freedom and courage to question and reimagine the curriculum, making the most of available resources, such as free time.

In the words of its author, this book takes a different approach to the available literature on curriculum, because it addresses what schools actually do with this ministerial guideline and highlights the need for a change of approach. That is its novelty.

“A big assumption in public discussions about the curriculum is that it is developed as the MINEDUC dictates. With more or less coverage, but according to those official guidelines. With this, it is tacitly suggested that the curriculum is given and teachers have to know and implement it. But my assumption is that there is a very large space for deliberation that is specific to each school community,” he explains.

In his opinion, unfortunately, this space is not used enough. The reasons: the lack of time available in communities to reflect and design collaboratively or even shallow educational philosophies, which do not offer support for thinking about curricular contextualizations associated with the educational project.

“When that is not there, it is very difficult to deliberate, because there are no shared ideas that move you to do something different,” which is what does happen in the three schools she chose for her research. These communities took these spaces seriously, innovating. Of course, they did so in different, even opposite directions: around mastery, which is training students who are more expert in the different disciplines of knowledge; around creativity, which is training in skills for the 21st century; and around community identity, which is transmitting to the student a sense of belonging to a group and a larger tradition.

“I chose them because I wanted to see how these communities of teachers with a clear and ambitious project use the freedom that MINEDUC gives, through the so-called hours of free disposition and other spaces and possibilities to create different things,” he says.

Here, he makes a turning point: “These are innovations that are present throughout the system, but the schools I researched show them fully developed. These are schools armed with these philosophies, not just the efforts of a teacher moved here or there. So, the innovations that reflect each direction shine more brightly.”

What could a school lack to take a decisive path towards innovation?

“There are two dimensions, I think: objective resources, which means that teachers have the hours to do it and the other conditions that are required, but there is also another dimension of training or human capital, if we could call it that. That is, teaching quality and also management quality to generate a culture of development of education in those spaces of the system that are there, but which are rarely taken seriously. There is something in the “flight” of the people who are in the three schools I studied; they reflect great human and professional quality.”

What was the underlying motivation for these schools to “break the mold”?

“Underlying this is an awareness that school as we know it today is collapsing for different reasons… And these different reasons are what make the three innovations different. They see the crisis, but they explain it in different ways and so they innovate in a different direction. One, because school as we know it perpetuates inequality, it does not fulfill the promise of social mobility that is at the heart of modern culture. Another, because there is a lack of integration of what we learn, which is perceived as useless and disconnected from everyday life. The third direction of innovation – community identity – has the diagnosis that school is collapsing because it is no longer a place where children and young people are socialized in the narratives, traditions and rituals that unite us with the past and our immediate local community. At the heart of the project of these three schools is the awareness that we need a new school structure to educate the children and youth of tomorrow.”

Juan Cristóbal is emphatic in stressing the importance of the fact that today we need communities with deep and shared educational projects, and educators with high professional quality to use creatively and with a clear purpose the hours of free disposal, the possibility of creating their own plans and programs, and all the spaces of flexibility that exist to educate as is required today. In this, his vision is conclusive:

“This means families going out to find the educational project they want for their daughters and sons, because there are very different ones. There is no such thing as a universal quality education; what there is is good education depending on the quality that each family seeks, according to their values ​​and worldview, according to how they want their sons or daughters to develop and grow,” she concludes.