From innovation to the creation of educational networks

It was a very intense and very interesting week for the fifteen teachers of Fe y Alegría schools from Guatemala, Colombia and Ecuador who visited Madrid from January 13th until last Sunday along with their 8 Spanish classmates (from Madrid, Barcelona, ​​Seville, Mallorca…). They are participants of the I Edition of the Educational Innovation Course for Learning and Social Transformation. It is a joint initiative of EDUCSI, Fe y Alegría, Alboan and Entreculturas, which seeks to add value to the response of the Society of Jesus to the challenges posed by social transformation through education. It is predominantly an online course, with two in person courses, the first of which is in Spain.

Throughout the week, they had the opportunity to learn from several innovative educational experiences linked to the Society of Jesus and others throughout Madrid.

With the support of Entreculturas, they carried out an activity to present experiences using creative techniques with Lego. Guided by Gustavo Cotrina, the person in charge of innovation for the Jesuit NGO, the teachers spent much of the morning using legos to build their own schools, their school innovation projects, their ideal model of a school network … With the goal of presenting their projects in a creative way and generating new ideas to connect the initiatives and amplify the network’s vision. Thus, they became students for a day and narrated the stories of their centers to their classmates through the constructions they created. In the meantime, they learned to use this technique to enhance collaborative dynamics in the classroom. 

For Jaime Benjumea, from Fe y Alegría Colombia, who has been involved since the start of this course, the most interesting aspect has been to advance in “how to work collaboratively and as a network”, and to see that at this moment of the course, when they have already worked online through the formation of educational leaders and theoretical issues of classroom methodologies “before starting the most pedagogical module, we were able to share experiences, we know what others do, giving us the focus of how we can work together, how we can build a model of innovation that serves each center and that encourages others.” 

This week the teachers continue their visit in Barcelona to discover the educational innovation experiences of the Horitzó 2020, a project of the Society of Jesus, at the hands of Jesüites Educació.