EDCT – A Global Educational Ecosystem

By Nelson Peñaherrera Castillo

“The teachers  must remember they’re educating for life,” Proffessor María Elena Gracia underlines. She is a specialist in training, study plan design, and educational management with the Technological University of Chile’s INACAP. “And educating for life means to teach our students to solve practical problems and prepare them for continuing to learn,” she explains.

The master-ddegree proffessor and graduated teacher on Castilian Language at reputated universities in the South-American country speaks firmly on her conceptions but tender on her directions, an attitude that catches the attention of her colleagues instantaneously.

Mrs Gracia was in Sullana, Peru, holding a conference in November 18^th and workshops in Piura, Peru, between November 20^th to 23^rd mainly addressed to teachers and Education students with the purpose of exploring the benefits of critic and creative thinking in the classroom. “Our challenge as teachers is teaching our students to think, for they not to fear finding different ways to solve problems, and we can’t say which way is better or worst but to integrate all those ways to build learning,” the professor comments as she gets ready for addressing her colleagues.

The visit of María Elena Gracia is one of the training activities organized by EducatecNorte (EDCT), a Sullana-based little company which purpose is to promote the occupational formation and the continuous professional improvement, focused on powering and updating the skills of people in their jobs.

Established in 2017, EDCT has been focused initially on teaching sector, and it projects to enlarge its products and services to other proffessions and occupations in the mid-term, under the aegis of the transformating education. “It’s about to acquire new learnings for your life into the environment where you are developing it, even the adequate conditions get provided,” its manager David Piedra Córdova defines.

Transformating Education

The reason why EDCT has started to train and update teachers is because Piedra, as well as his partner  Araceli Montero Carcelén, are teachers too and specialists in training, and they found one day that the educational trends globally needed to step forward, or beside at least, from the advances of knowledge and technology worldwide.

Then, they conceived their work model as a kind of mycro-universe, and they are developing the conception of global educational ecosystem now. “We say it’s an ecosystem because each component in our learning process interacts each one another, meaning you don’t learn monothematically, but sometimes one only event can generate different lessons,” Piedra explains.

“And when you set up those learnings into an educational experience that works into your nearest as well as around-the-world environment, then we tag it as functional and global,” Montero adds.

Both teachers are convinced not only about the power of in-person formative activities but they also believe in the power of new technologies to spread the message that can develop or discover inside a room, what became them to implement a virtual classroom available on its website, www.educatecnorte.org

“When we started, we addressed first to our colleagues in Sullana or piura, but awhen we entered the Internet, participants from other parts where we never were presentially began to appear, such as Arequipa, Cajamarca, or outside Peru, still,” Piedra comments.

Expansion to other proffessional fields

Recently, EDCT has offered intense update workshops for teachers who were to pass the upgrade or undeffinitive contract evaluation inside the Teaching Public Career, the Peruvian system for economic promotions to the ones efforting to perfectionate beyond their first diploma. “These are exhausting journeys,” Montero points out. “But the results are satisfactory and many colleagues get very thankful because of the job we have done.” Also, they are sharing constantly news regarding the educational agenda on their Facebook fanpage.

Now, they are beginning to seek other professional areas as the public health or the business management to find updating demands their workers have and make activities resulting them attractive and advantageous. Inclusive, they have begun to build partnerships with other organizations to enlarge its impact and certify the achievement of the people trained in their ecosystem.

In fact, the workshops they didwith teachers are endorsed by the Piura’s Regional Bureau of Education, and based upon that successful work, they hope to ally with other professional academies and government bureaus, or colleges for making possible their dream, keeping the same work charisma – hard learning, affective processes.

Learn to think, caring the environment

The other EDCT accent is promoting the critic and creative thinking through all its activities, beginning from teaching/learning processes in the classroom. So, it is guarantee it has born from the criteria diversity put to talk respectfully, constructively, instead than a rigid conception to be learned literally, and addressing to efficience and innovation as the most adequate state-of-the-art. “Largerly, newly is how we are going to evolve as nearby and global society,” Araceli Montero speaks.

But EDCT also feels to have a very strong commitment with the real environment where the learning processes are built, so in that sense it wants to give a very special emphases to environmental education, not only inside the classroom but at the level of the community we see face-to-face and that another one we contact on the social media. “It’s about offering the new generations the choice to enjoy healthy environments still, where they can continue the generation of knowledge,” David Piedra sustains.

“The education, as every human knowledge field, if it doesn’t have a sustainability criterion, it shall not find new spaces where continuing to grow, improve, and generate welfare for the whole humankind,” Montero closures.

The good is EDCT has already nursed a seed in the first target it serves, the teachers, and now, many Piedra-&-Montero’s colleagues are constantly asking for upcoming events, or which new training they are designing. That motivates them to grow and prove that, even at the educational level, it is possible to build entrepreneurships with much mystic and global projection. And the first blossoms of that seed, despite Little, are breaking out strong.