The Future of Education
Educational Tranformation in Manizales
Santiago Isaza, Fundación Luker (Colombia)
Abstract
The educational transformation of a city can only be achieved with the joint of efforts of all actors of the society, from the above, the project is developed in partnership with public, private and academic actors, such explained in the previous item. The public actors are responsible for giving legitimacy to the project, resources and sustainability. Privates contribute with resources, administration and management. Academics actors have the expertise and knowledge to improve the quality and coverage of education from preschool to higher education.
The Project have several components:
1) Social, Civic and Emotional Skills: Children and adolescents need a balanced set of cognitive, social and emotional skills in order to succeed in modern life. Some of the important social and emotional skills are malleable during childhood and adolescence (Andreas Schleicher OECD 2015). The school must not only deal with traditional cognitive issues, but also to create learning environments and development of social, civic and emotional skills. Therefore the alliance is a model for active teaching that public schools was adopted, where social and emotional skills in was living in the day, through teachers training and support strategies, providing teaching materials and monitoring;
2) Strengthening of Language and Mathematics: It’s necessary that children have a solid foundation of language and mathematics. Therefore they are doing different interventions with experimental methods of defining the best cost/benefit;
3) Access to Higher Education: Education K - 11 is critical to the development of people, but the best job opportunities are opened when there is a vocational training on it. The alliance developed a program that significantly increased the access to professional technical careers for the students;
4) Consolidation of Manizales as an University and Educational City: The partnership has defined that some intervention must be framed in a model of development based on knowledge. Our city must transcend the agrarian vocation to a vocation of knowledge. Therefore, it is working on consolidating Manizales as an university city.
