Students produce a radio show to improve reading skills

By Nelson Peñaherrera Castillo

 

TAMBOGRANDE, Peru – The Miraflores Alto’s 15220 elementary school is fighting the low reading learning levels through a radio show released via streaming. But the different thing in the Project is that the students research, write, and produce. So, they promote the critic and creative thinking and through the format they have named Capsulitas de Opinión (Opinion Little Capsules).

 

The Project was developed in 2019 and it is one of the 50 best selected across the nation by the Development for the Peruvian Education Fund, or Fondep as in Spanish, as part of its Transforming Ideas call.

 

“The proposal and the strategy of my project responses to perform radio shows that allow the students to make scripts about interesting topics for the people, and generate an opinion trend by developing the critic and creative understanding,” the teacher Freddy Juárez García explains. He is the principal and only teacher of the school, underscoring that the opinions have critic judgement based upon the reality that the students pay attention to.

 

    The show is organized in segments and the name is related to the sanitarian emergency and the need to find and provide verified information, especially into the prevention. Mr Juárez clarifies that the activity is made like a game. Precisely, the segment Capsules Saving Lives looks for educating the people on the biosafety ways they must adopt not to infect with corona-virus.

 

Other segments are addressed to save the community elders’ knowledge, and other one looks for giving scientific perspective to more spread uses and habits at the countryside. Once the scripts are made, they record them on their cellphones, then they look for the highest zone in the village to send via WhatsApp to a kind of newsroom located in Tambogrande City, about 33 miles to the southwest.

 

The clips are post-produced out there, then they are uploaded to an internet radio platform, another one for podcast, and finally they are shared on the school’s fan-page, YouTube, and the school’s blog. The production team distributes the job in assignments, like it happens in any newsroom, but this one meets on video-conference, not in person. The assignments are rotative.  [ Visit the school’s fan-page]

 

   Mr Juárez advises, supervises, and evaluates the contents production, usually framed in health, values, and environment. The teacher underlines that the impact is double because it promotes the self-learning and the formation of critic spirit based upon the understood. “Our educational proposal moves a whole set of competences in the students framed into the national study plan, being the main one – reading diverse types of text in their mother language”.

 

The Project also promotes the oral communication, the productive sense, the personal autonomy, and the expertise in virtual environment via the information and communication technologies, TIC in Spanish, that is used for its slogan and keyword – tic-tac-sol (tic-tac-Sun).

 

The full format is framed into the I Learn At Home strategy launched by Peru’s Ministry of Education to offer a non-presential service due to the sanitarian emergency. The project also involves the parents who have constant communication by phone calls and WhatsApp to accompany the kids’ work adequately.

 

“From my point of view, this proposal adapts to the current situation we are living, because we have identified favorable results that response to the needs aand interests of the students, allowing them to learn for learning, practicing autonomy, being more thinkful when they share their opinions so they achieve critic and creative understanding,” Mr Juárez stated to FACTORTIERRA, adding the shows to be launched here.

 

An integral educational project

The Miraflores Alto’s 15220 school also has pitching on the leadership formation, family dynamics improvement, increase of school achievement, appreciation and practice of artistic activities, and even learning English language: “We are currently the district’s and inter-district’s winners in plastic arts, 2018 and 2019 respectively.”

 

The workshop continues offering by remote education, and the verification of the learning is done by calling at every boy or girl, or staying in touch by Facebook Messenger for not expensing the families with extra charges on their cellphones bills. The evidences are shared on platforms provided by Google. The connectivity is provided by an internet signal powered at the school which is an affiliate of Malingas, Peru-based Fe y Alegría 48 Educational Rural Network.

 

“That’s the way we pretend to overcome the digital crack, what concerns a whole nation today,” Mr Juárez points out. “It remains in us, the teachers, to reinvent the strategies for offering our students a quality education.”