This past week I sat down with Elvia Marisol Coyoc Kamal, the director of the service projects at UABIC. The projects for the semester began last week and I was also able to visit the school on Saturday and observe. Could you tell me about the beginning of the communitarian projects? Yes of course, we are currently doing 6 projects, each one of them is aligned with a specific area, its 3 areas we work with, agro-ecological, social and health, those 3. On the agro-ecological we have a project called “Hands to dirt”, this project has the purpose of promoting the creation of planting fields, making compost, in this project each student from the academic of the academic unit is in for a year, because it helps him/her as an antecedent so when he/she is coursing third, fourth, fifth and sixth grade he/she can already implement a project of his/hers creation. So in “Hands to dirt” students learn the importance of planting fields productions but with organic processes, ecological processes, without pesticides or chemicals, friendly with the environmental and they learn at the same time, the process of raising tilapias, making compost which is also organic, that is one of the projects. How was this teaching method initiated? In the academic unit, since its creation, has the purpose that academic units have to be dependencies oriented to improve social conditions of the community where they are incorporated into, so when thinking about the unit as a dependency on its creation 7 years ago, the south area of Merida was considered precisely due to its social, economic situation. There are another 5 more projects, “Hands to Dirt”, “3 R’s squad” R stands for reuse, reduce and recycle, the kids learn work process, precisely in this moment we are linking so that the students make recipients and beds for pets of the area, so they are using a variety of materials that can be of use, such as tires, fabrics and through this they will elaborate recipients and some spaces for the animals of the area, that is “3 R’s squad” which is also in the agro-ecological line. In the health line we have a program called “Linking and Education about Small Species”, in this program we take care to promote the responsible ownership of pets, a problem in our area because most people due to customs leave their pets out. So there are many risks, both for the pet and health risks, because they defecate in the open fields, some of them are not neutered/spayed so there is a massive reproduction and sometimes the animals are also abandoned, get scabies, get sick and that can also be a risk factor for the residents of the area, so we are looking to promote awareness about responsible ownership, neutering, taking care, vaccines, feed them and above all not to abuse them. We have a project called “Socialize”, which is oriented to work also with themes related to social situations, we have worked with violence, abuse, prevention of such factors and in this case, for this year we are going to work with the support for senior people, our students will take care of generating activities of recreation and to implement them in a retirement house nearby, to help the emotional strengthening and formation of the senior people. We have 2 more programs of a social nature and in which we work with children, there is one called “Communitarian Little School”, our students are in charge of tutoring children in elementary school with math and Spanish subjects, in many cases these children come to us because at home they don’t have anyone to help them, because mostly their parents didn’t finish elementary school, or sometimes they are not literate so it’s very hard for the children to do their homework because they lack this support, so our students act as direct advisers for this group of children. We have another one group called “Learning and Playing” we also work with children but these ones are in pre-scholar, between 4 and 6 years old and with them we work on the development of fine motor skills, and they are taught how to color, to identify shapes, textures, colors, flavors. When each of the projects was created we made a diagnoses with characteristics of the area and from those necessities we identified what our students could do to contribute, because it also has to do a lot with the development of competences, maybe there are other kind of needs, but as an educative context we could not take care of them, for example they say “there are problems with street lighting, or pavement the roads” but in those situations we would not have the possibility, the feasibility to intervene, so with those problems that we identify are possible, to work with. We look that the needs or problems in the community match the possibilities of attention and the competences that our students would develop. Can you tell me more about the programs and the connection to the academic plan? Yes, there is a direct linking between what a student works with in the classroom and with what he does on the practical part. For example they, in their classroom work, the schooled part, they have 6 subjects, which are distributed in each one of the semesters that conform the study plan, they for example see university social responsibility, this is the first encounter they have regarding social responsibility, they identify characteristics, how from our perspective as an educative community can we add to contribute to social responsibility, that is what they see in first semester. In second semester they address strategies for communitarian dialogue, how we approach the community, it’s important to click with them, to have a feeling, because sometimes we look to impose our ideas and that is not the right thing, in communitarian work we should always listen to the community’s needs, that the community itself gets involved to solve its problems, so the kids learn strategies for the approach to the community, for example, the otherness approach, the importance that the other has in relation to a situation. They learn gender perspective, equity, sustainable development, general system theory or systemic approach which are important characteristics that are insert in the community. In third semester they take a communitarian participative diagnoses, they make a diagnoses process to identify a need, it’s not what they think, but rather what the community is telling them it needs and how can we contribute to develop a program. In fourth semester, based on the design, they develop a project, they generate a project and in fifth semester, they, that project that they generated, they implement it and in sixth semester they make an evaluation, a process of valuation on how effective the project was. That is all the work process that is done. All of our subjects are oriented precisely to those analysis processes, reflective ones, of what happens with the community. In first place we put the example of ourselves, as a group, as a school we are a small educative community and about what is happening, which needs there are, which problems and somehow that sets an example to them, to take a look and watch what is happening within their communities. All that is worked in the community, it’s discussed in the classroom, to further enrich this learning work. Do you think the activities are successful? From our perspective yes, I think that it has added up a lot on the integral formation part, that is an important characteristic because when our students graduate, they not only graduate with knowledge and abilities but also with different attitude, they realize they are already agents of change, they can do a lot of things for their community, they become sensitive towards the needs, the situations, they become more empathetic, more proactive, in many times this work situation with the students is hard because they come from hard contexts as well. We are used to violence situations in the area, but through this interaction process with the community they realize they can improve many of the conditions, so the perspective of the student is changing, from the moment they enter and notice there are situations of need to the moment they finalize and they look and realized that in some ways they contributed to the improvement of their community in the implementation of their projects. The perspective changes, the approach is different for them since they start to when they graduate. And we also see it, for example, we have kids here in the unit that had inserted in faculties, also from the UADY and many of the colleagues, teachers, had told us that the students stand out because of that, their leadership skills, making choices, problem solving, empathy, sensibility and those are kids, who many of them, for example even when they graduated from high school are still taking part in projects to improve the community. Have you seen changes in the community? Yes, we have been working with these specific groups, “Little Communitarian School” for example, we have been determined that the work with the children has been very effective, where we are working hard and it’s a slow process is on the “Linking and Education About Small Species”, because it implies that community becomes responsible for their pets, but that takes a little bit longer to be done, but yes, there had been very positive changes. In general, which are the responses of the community, the parents? How is the community response? Very positive, it’s natural that at the beginning there is a lot of resistance, as it happens in any work process, sometimes there is not a solid response but as the time goes by they see that the projects are helping to the development process of the community. They get involved, little by little, but yes, especially the parents agree that their children participate in these communitarian projects, they make it easy, give their consent, because the students are minors and sometimes it also means to extend permission on the parent’s side, because sometimes they go out on the work field. So parents are very committed with this approach of the academic unit. The participation in this program, did it change your perspective on learning, teaching, and the community? Mine, a lot, I graduated in education, so my formation was to work as a high school teacher, so when I was studying the career I always visualized myself teaching Spanish or literature or something in the social sciences area, but always in a classroom. When I got to the academic unit I was given the chance to participate in the communitarian interaction area, for me it has been constant learning, specially about this process of becoming sensitive and to realize that an educator, a teacher, must not only to focus on internal issues or needs but that there are many things that we can do, we are a role model for the students, when they realize we participate, we collaborate, we are also proactive, then they follow this model that we teach them that we show to them. So for me, I learn new things every day when I go to work with the community, when I link with other dependencies, I think it’s a constant learning, development of knowledge, skills, in this field not only the students learn but us as teachers learn as well. |
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