When I first accepted the invitation from the teacher Mireya Espitia, from the Jose Maria Cordoba School in Tauramena (Casanare) to give a series of conferences to her students, I never imagined the dimension that this encounter would have. I really began to understand the meaning of a quote from Gabriel Fielding: “For me, writing is a journey, an odyssey, a new discovery because I never know what I am going to find”, after the experience in that school.
The beginning
For several months now, I have been writing some articles for the online magazine www.solkes.com, some of them are pretty lies and stories that I create and some others are a reaction to the permanent invitation I got from Laura Viera Abadía – the magazine’s editor and director in Germany-. I have been permanently enjoying the writing process of my short stories with all the different sights that I pour on them, imaginary and authentic yet possible lives.
The experience of working with the flowering and pearl new generation that was represented in the pubescent faces let me understand how pedagogy and teaching practices are deeply involved with technologies and text analysis.
Each road is an opportunity to learn and to live, and thousands and hundreds of different moments, silences and phrases frame every election we make.
Thus, with the teacher’s guidance and advice the students delight their selves with the different kinds of stories that they study and then they submerge themselves into the details and reasons for the stories creation.
Perhaps they have found journeying hand to hand with their teacher. In those readings “every step transforms us, every person we meet leaves us or takes us something, each book and each instant made us become a different person, stronger or wiser for sure and that tomorrow definitely we will be a different person too, until our death.”
The good example
Mireya Espitia has given them a wonderful example. She really displays her noble profession, the profession of those true teachers who are more masters and teachers. She is one of those people who truly decide to take the generous road of forming others. Knowing well in advance that this job would not make them wealthy, nor they would have the gratitude from a society that doesn’t value their importance and their great labor.
It is just a name, as many others that maybe fade from her students memories. Mireya is a great example of those workers that are sowing a future and that sadly are less recognized than the politicians; they are really fundamental for the mental and people’s critic formation.
Thanks to that valuable job and to people like her I could visit a future and hope factory. A place where you can meet people like Camila Sanabria, Daniela Amaya, Leydi Martín, Dayana Landázuri, Anderson Fajardo, Cesar Romero, Yeris Garzón, Karen Melissa Quintero, Leydy Leguízamo, Neilder Ramírez, among other students who motivated by reading want to have more and more practice in the wonderful world of transforming a blank sheet of paper using as a tool the letters from the alphabet and knit a whole world of experiences and feelings while writing.
Thank you, Solkes, in your first of many birthdays for making this magazine a real social responsible and sustainable project.
Some years ago I had the opportunity to meet a real master in letters and in writing: Fernando Soto Aparicio a renowned Colombian novelist and poet who is a great pride to our homeland.
It was a great experience for me since he has been illuminating my road since I as a kid started to read his texts and literary work.
Throughout time, I learned from him many valuable lessons, for example “that you cannot say that books have 140 pages of length but instead, they have 140 different wings and that like thought butterflies, they flight to enlighten the world”.
I am pretty sure that the reading seed has been planted in the minds of these youngsters. In some others, dragons fly of writing curiosity and consequently, with time we would be able if it’s possible that the imagination and the butterfly dreams dance in the imagination of those anonymous readers. Go further, young people! In your intellectual growth is the real future.
Solkes: a pedagogical strategy
The invitation to the Jose Maria Cordoba School in Tauramena (Casanare) had a special meaning. From the chats and the spaces I shared with the students it specially called my attention to find out that Solkes website, www.solkes.com, is a pedagogical tool for them and the way they have turned the ICT´S into a learning tool.
It is true, that unit turns fundamental in the education sector, but why? The real engine of the true change it´s about to learn and to develop researching tools as a pedagogical strategy in science, technology and innovation.
We definitely need an education oriented towards human talent training in research; it is also very important to increase and stimulate reading habits through infant and youth population and to create technological and scientific abilities and competences among the different content areas. We want innovative students who are willing to create research seed projects that are connected to the science innovation and technology agendas and curriculums. We also want a truly swapping of knowledge and it’s easier through a proper use and appropriation of those new technologies, and technology infrastructure which should result as an improving of the population’s life quality.
That’s the real importance of a proper learning environment, the developing of good learning practices, the appropriation of strategies that lets us transform and improve the educational quality and most of all, the training for developing citizen skills and also literacy and writing skills.
The exercise in mention is a perfect example of teaching leadership and how is it possible to increase the belonging sense to a teaching institute and to other students through exercises that enhance the literacy and writing programs that undoubtedly belong to the most complex contents developments related to the ICT´S (Information and Communication technologies). This is done through the application of their own strategies that allow launching programs and projects in science, technology and innovation to reinforce the use, access and massive appropriation of new knowledge.
Changing the way we teach
If we want efficiency we should change the way students learn by memory and they discover how to think. Our task is to create a science and reason based culture that uses the new ICT´S tools and the mass media and that also incorporates the families to the children’s learning process. Furthermore, that it higlights the importance of the reading process as an important tool to teach and to build a strong learning and thinking critic skill where experience and innovation are clue and strong focuses.
Andreas Schleicher, Pisa test coordinator said it: “The challenge is to reinforce the thinking skills”.
The real public policy in these matters come to reality when it develops a participative system in which all the government with all its support, the academy with its critical system and knowledge, the educational community willing to promote a real change in the student’s mindset and a successful linking with the private sector with correspondent social responsibility actions and of course, all these with the proper guidelines from the ICT´S government secretary and Colciencias.
That is the reason why we need more and more teachers, every day more. We need them in order to take advantage and make the most of the ICT’S tools that are aimed to build effective spaces that are able to achieve successful results with a high educational and teaching quality. Tools that help us search and find competitive and qualified students. It is important to note the importance of the quantitative measure tools to ponder how we can improve and not to be satisfied with the results that seeing by different angles will always be debatable. The solution could be found in the problems core: Culture must fight against social inequalities through education.
