Nicaragua’s future development depends on quality teacher training

This specialist in teacher training shares her views on the formation Nicaragua’s teachers should have to improve the country’s educational quality in light of the Ministry of Education’s new initiative.

Josefina Vijil

On March 2, Nicaragua’s Ministry of Education initiated a diploma in continuing education and values for teachers of public and subsidized schools. The program consists of weekly workshops, described by the education vice minister as “days of intensive education to improve the quality of the education, teaching and learning our children receive.” It uses a multiplier design, starting with 230 educators who will then transmit the teaching to 3,000 more, and so on until the entire national teaching roster has ben covered.

What defines a developed country?

To visualize the possible impact of this government initiative on the country’s education system, we first need to think about some other indirectly related issues, including what defines a developed country.

Nicaragua isn’t going to turn into a developed country by finally realizing the dream of a Grand Interoceanic Canal, which has been dogging us for two centuries. Nor will development come instantly if oil is discovered off our Caribbean shore. Nicaragua won’t be a developed country until we take education and teachers seriously, until we can facilitate in the classroom the discovery and development inside each of our children.

Until we become conscious of that complexity and of the key role teachers play in that process, Nicaragua isn’t going to develop, even if we do build an interoceanic canal.

The right to quality education

Another issue we need to bear in mind is that education systems everywhere are in crisis because they haven’t adjusted fast enough to the major changes currently affecting the world. We live in an ever more diverse and inter-communicated world in which knowledge is being constructed very rapidly. Nonetheless, most public schools in the world remain static, governed by obsolete and inadequate norms and curricula. In short, our education systems are increasingly out of sync with today’s requirements.

At the same time, it is now globally recognized that the right to education isn’t limited to children’s access to a seat in school. We’ve moved from that narrow conception to understand that children’s right to education is the right to learn what they need and learn it with quality, in whatever school or other educational arena they are in.

Nicaraguan children aren’t given
the tools to construct knowledge

On top of the international crisis, Nicaragua has a particular problem: a “vicious circle,” rooted in a lack of educational quality, that reproduces poverty and inequality. As anyone can discover, Nicaragua’s students, from preschools all the way through to universities don’t get learning opportunities of the quality they require. We constantly find even university students with serious difficulties comprehending what they read, expressing their ideas in writing, engaging in critical thinking, developing abstract thought, mastering mathematical operations or knowing how to use research methodology, which is such a basic tool for living in the current world. All those demonstrable limitations lead us to argue that Nicaragua is suffering from deficient educational quality.

In today’s world of communication and information, accessing information is no longer a problem. The problem lies in how to transform it into knowledge, given that they are two different things. Knowing is an internal process that each person constructs, making use of learned tools and methods. If the school system doesn’t provide students those tools and methods needed for constructing their knowledge, they will fall into a “copy and paste” routine where they will remain.

Despite their right to quality education, our children and youths aren’t getting it. And at least part of the reason is that those who teach them also suffer from low quality education. Preschool and primary teachers in Nicaragua are trained in centers known as “normal schools,” which are secondary school equivalents. Anyone who aspires to be a secondary teacher is trained at university. The great majority begin their studies with weak training in aspects that are essential to success in the learning process. The normal schools don’t compensate for that prior weakness, since they also suffer from low educational quality. As a result, our educators reproduce deficient education in the school where they end up teaching, thus completing and prolonging the vicious circle.

We need to improve teacher training

In numerous proposals we’ve insisted that it’s possible to start breaking this vicious circle by prioritizing the teachers’ initial preparation but also improving their continued training once they are exercising their profession. Yet, while important, this would only be a first step, because the problem of low educational quality is systemic and is influenced by many other factors: the curriculum, the didactic materials, the classroom conditions, the students’ family and affective problems…

For some years the Nicaraguan government has been developing a curricular reform of our teachers’ initial training. The Education Ministry’s Teacher Training Division, which runs the country’s public normal schools, has been at the head of that effort. We have no idea what that reform consists of, because everything is being kept under wraps. Those of us who have dedicated years to training teachers have asked to see it and the response is that they can’t provide information until the reform has been validated. But once it has been officially validated and approved, what good would our proposals and contributions be?

The only thing we’ve been able to find out about is the matrices of the reform, an analysis of which shows that they aren’t addressing key problems. For example, the curriculum seems not to be considering compensatory training in the basic skills required by those training to be teachers, especially reading comprehension, logical thinking and writing, widespread obstacles that will require a lot of work and time to surmount. Instead, the curriculum centers on attention to issues more linked to didactics. In my opinion, no one can pass on what they haven’t mastered themselves. If a person doesn’t have good reading comprehension it’s impossible to teach it to someone else. Likewise, if the person hasn’t developed logical thinking skills it’s impossible to promote the construction of logical thinking strategies among students.

Nor do we know if the learning is being contextualized, promoting links between what is being studied and the classroom reality; or if the tutoring system within the teaching practice is being improved and buttressed. Tutoring is so important for those setting out on the professional career that it’s a problem of major priority.

Based on what we know, which admittedly isn’t much, there’s reason to fear that the reform of teachers’ initial training—so incredibly strategic for the country as a whole—will reproduce the vicious circle in the future rather than respond to today’s urgent challenges.

The teacher’s role is to
prepare learning situations

The teachers’ role in the educational process and the competencies they need to perform it well are fundamental; teachers are obviously a decisive strategic factor. Some research argues that the ceiling of a country’s educational quality is the ceiling of its teachers’ quality. As a consequence, the characteristics of both initial teacher education and the upgrading to help teachers play that role once they’re working in the classrooms are equally fundamental.

To get an idea of what teachers’ initial training should look like, given that it’s the centerpiece in breaking the vicious circle of poor quality, let’s look first at what our teachers’ role in the educational process actually is.

The teacher is the one who gives life to the educational process, who is responsible for imagining, creating and preparing the learning situations that students will be put in so they can build knowledge. Education isn’t about filling students with information, but rather helping them to pull out and develop their own talents for building knowledge. Learning isn’t a process in which knowledge is presented as an objective fact outside of us that we only have to get into our heads. In line with pedagogical science, we’ve known for some time that that in order to truly learn we need to appropriate the knowledge, understand it, make sense of it and give it significance based on what we are, what we’ve experienced and where we live. And to do that, we have to link it to something we already know. The teacher’s task is to spark that process by preparing learning situations for the students.

Making sense of knowledge

I want to use the example of my dad, a great educator, always concerned about properly answering the questions we asked him. One time my eight-year-old daughter was getting ready for her first communion, studying the Ten Commandments. The commandments are almost always memorized, repeated over and over until the exam is passed, but they’re soon forgotten if they have no significance, because our memory has a cleaning mechanism, a little broom called forgetfulness. My daughter didn’t understand the Sixth Commandment, “You shall not commit adultery,” so she asked her grandfather, who made a real effort to provide an answer that would have meaning for her. He answered her by building his own knowledge, and did that by combining the Sixth Commandment with the Ninth (“You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife”): “It means you’ll take great care with sex. You won’t abuse that great gift of God. You won’t use other people just to satisfy your own sexual desires. When you fall in love with someone you’ll take that relationship very seriously. You’ll respect your boyfriend or girlfriend and help his or her intellectual and moral development. When you form a couple you’ll make that relationship the most important thing in your life. And you won’t destroy a union between two other people who love each other or do anything that puts it in danger.” That’s how my father understood those two commandments; it’s how they made sense to him; that was his knowledge.

For me that’s a very clear example of how knowledge is built. Constructivist theory teaches us that nobody constructs the same knowledge about a given topic. Each person’s knowledge will be different because each life story is different. Each person has specific previous knowledge, because each individual’s experiences, feelings and likes are unique. That happens in all spheres of knowledge, from multiplication tables to literary figures.

Once my daughter was asked in an exam what had happened in 1789 in Paris and she answered: “The taking of the aspirin.” The correct answer was “the taking of the Bastille,” but she thought Bastille meant pill (pastilla in Spanish) and the pill she knew best was aspirin. At that moment she didn’t have enough knowledge to link that word with a French prison. I don’t think the teacher should have given her a bad grade, because her answer showed that something was going on in her head, that she was actively giving meaning to something based on the knowledge she had to learn with at that time, and that’s comprehension.

Constructing their own knowledge

The right to quality education means that all children, adolescents and adults should enjoy the opportunity to construct their own knowledge, to “have their own word,” as Paulo Freire taught us. “Having one’s own word” means building one’s own knowledge, giving things meaning, imagining things, using that new knowledge we have constructed in daily life, taking positions based on it. That’s where Freire’s popular education coincides with the constructivist current.

Teachers can’t build their students’ knowledge for them. Their task is to create the conditions, conflicts and learning situations and to offer them resources and readings that allow them to do so themselves, to have their own word.

Teachers must use whatever
small space they have

Teachers can push, and a lot, but not everything depends on their effort. They will face many obstacles along the way, including the structure and regulations of the educational institution, the rigid organization of time and the bell interrupting the learning processes, ordering the students to move from one class to the next. Meanwhile, the academic curriculum itself is full of contents that aren’t linked together in any way and are often also irrelevant, compartmentalizing knowledge.

Despite these obstacles, good teachers can do a lot using the space they have, however small it may be. Or as Freire said, they can use their “square meter of power,” not allowing it to be taken away, defending it and working to expand it, gaining another square meter, then another and yet another. But each teacher may have only one square meter in the classroom, so we need to train them how to use it. Without adequate initial preparation they won’t know how to do that; how to liven up the learning setting.

How does the Ministry of Education think?

For the past four years I’ve been working with groups of teachers on “didactic planning,” which is the process in which teachers think in advance about the ways they can construct learning situations, preparing their classes ahead of time. Such planning is very difficult when the Ministry of Education itself has a completely different way of thinking, when it doesn’t propose learning as the goal of education.

Just how does the Ministry think? It basically conceives of education as programming to develop specific contents that the teacher must “teach” in very brief time periods, classes normally of 45 to 90 minutes, in which the students barely have time to copy or transcribe or respond to a few questions, usually for memorization purposes. Then they move on to other contents of other subjects and thus successively throughout the school period.

Is it possible to construct knowledge that way? What can be learned in such short periods? Above all, where’s the importance in students memorizing each block of contents, in which more often than not they find no sense? Why load the curriculum up with a diversity of topics lacking any focal points linking them together and usually not focusing on the basic learning a person must construct to get a quality education?

“Sit down, be quiet and copy”

In 1998 the Estelí office of the Institute of Human Promotion (INPRHU) did a systematization of eight years training the urban and rural teaching staff in that municipality, thoroughly documenting the pedagogical practices found in the classrooms. That exercise resulted in a book titled Siéntese, cállese y copie (Sit down, be quiet and copy), reflecting the practices they found day after day.

Regrettably, that reality wasn’t limited to Estelí, and even more regrettably it’s still the modus operandi in Nicaragua even today, a latent reality 15 years later, despite multiple teacher training efforts and educational improvement projects. When children get to school they’re expected to sit down, keep quiet and copy what the teacher says or writes on the board. But that’s precisely the opposite of what we need to do if we want to learn. Doing things differently requires teachers prepared to create learning situations ahead of time, to do good didactic planning so they can encourage, guide and take advantage of situations created in the classroom, then evaluate the results obtained in the children’s learning and use that to improve their work.

If teaching were only about transmitting knowledge, it would be a snap. But teaching means facilitating the learning processes inside the heads of children, adolescents, and adults, and to do that the teacher must be adequately prepared. We have to provide that preparation and we’re not doing it. That has very serious consequences today and will have even more serious ones down the road.

The consequences of teachers who haven’t been adequately trained to facilitate learning processes can’t be compared to errors in other spheres. Someone who plants sugar cane poorly can do it right in the next planting cycle and the only damage is a temporary drop in income. In the case of education, poor teacher training can cost Nicaragua 40 years of backwardness, affecting several generations of students. Preparing a teacher well is a strategic investment.

Teaching is one of the most complex,
sensitive and important professions

Throughout their professional life, teachers “touch the life” of some 1,200 children and adolescents, leaving a lasting mark on them for better or for worse. It’s difficult to find a profession in which one has such an impact on the life of so many people for such a long time. Have we given enough thought to the significance of this responsibility?

There are those who say that children learn despite all the things we don’t do or do poorly, and that’s true; we human beings are wired to learn. Learning is a survival mechanism. We learn throughout our lives, starting when we’re still in the womb. No one can live without learning and no one can live without resisting learning. Obviously lots of boys and girls learn despite having bad teachers, but the purpose of the Education Sciences is for everyone to learn, not just some through sheer chance or their own brilliance. Because not learning, failing classes, dropping out of school or repeating years all have a serious impact on children, their families, society and the country’s development. A child’s self-esteem will be affected for a long time if he or she is obliged to repeat a grade. Both extremes—repetition or automatic promotion to the next grade without the needed individual support—are equally negative.

What factors are needed?

Successful learning requires ensuring a set of factors in the school, social and family contexts. And we need teachers with certain characteristics. First of all, though it may seem so obvious it doesn’t need mentioning, teachers must be experts in what they teach. Primary teachers must be excellent readers, must have mastered everything they’re going to teach, just as preschool teachers need to know what fundamental skills children of that age range can and need to learn. And their competence must cover both the conceptual and procedural aspects.

Curiosity, enjoyment of research and reading are characteristics of a good educator. When teachers don’t bring these requisites to the classroom, they have to try to teach students to read without being able to read with any real comprehension themselves or to resolve mathematical problems without understanding them, trying to hide their own deficiencies with complex and incomprehensible mumbo jumbo.

Another characteristic teachers must have is the ability to construct knowledge, to know what happens in children’s heads when they learn, because if they know that process they’ll be able to organize learning situations.

And that means also knowing how knowledge is built in the different disciplines, because it doesn’t happen the same way in math as in the social sciences. There are fixed rules in math that can be proven whereas in the social sciences there is already a whole ideological set of references in students’ heads. For example, many teachers run up against difficulties teaching the Big Bang theory to young people who find that it contradicts what they’ve been taught in the Bible. Teachers need to know how to take advantage of that contradiction and construct a stimulating learning situation.

They also need to be experts in the use of methodological teaching strategies and have new reference points at their fingertips to innovate methodologies. How are they going to innovate if they were rigidly trained a given way, if it has always been done like that, if that’s how the other school does it, if they don’t know other experiences…?

Designing a learning situation

Above all, teachers have to be experts in designing learning situations. Let me give an example. There are various ways to teach children the concept of “scale,” which is indispensable for understanding maps and all kinds of graphic representation. Traditionally in Nicaragua,, the teacher will write the definition of the word on the board for the students to copy, memorize and repeat on exam day. Full stop. Another way would be to do it more experientially, requiring children’s physical and intellectual activity. In this case, there’s no need to even mention the word “scale.” The children can be asked to draw the road between their house and the school, or draw the classroom. Then in a conversation with them, the teacher can ask why they used such a short line to represent such a long road? Why did they draw the classroom door, which is so tall, like a little rectangle? As they talk about what they did and answer these questions about their own drawings, they’ll start thinking and realize they had to make such large things small because that was all the space they had; that they did it “to scale.” And, voilà, they have learned, truly learned, that notion. What I’m talking about here is creating a learning situation: creating conditions to build knowledge that later will be fundamental to understanding other realities. This second way naturally requires more time and each class has its set time, so there’s never time for that.

That shows how the reigning curriculum and norms in schools become obstacles to creating learning situations. Although these norms were created to facilitate the learning process, they actually hamper it, so they need to be changed. And we need people—the teachers—to constantly change them.

Philippe Perrenaud, a Swiss pedagogue, tells us that “teaching is acting in urgency and deciding in uncertainty.” I’ve never found another sentence that more accurately communicates the complexity of the act of teaching. Teachers have to program learning situations, prepare themselves and study, yet always be alert to respond to uncertainty, as they can’t be sure what’s going to happen in the classroom or what mood the children will be in each day. They have to be ready to innovate and take advantage of what Freire called “the educative vein,” to modify or scrap their plans in the face of the unexpected in order to create better learning situations.

If teachers need all these characteristics, a teacher training program must help them develop them.

Being a teacher is very hard

A teacher’s work is very valuable but at the same time very hard. There are variables the teachers can do nothing to fix, so they must rely on their creativity to grapple with them. To appreciate and understand their reality one would have to be in their shoes, to spend all day every day in a classroom.

A few years ago I worked with an initiative called Educational Bridges, developed by some coffee growers on their haciendas to avoid child labor during the coffee harvest. The program consisted of creating educational spaces where boys and girls of all ages could meet. One teacher complained that she found it impossible to work with one illiterate 11-year-old girl who didn’t want to do her homework. Together we analyzed her reality to try to find pedagogical alternatives. The daughter of migrant farm laborers, at her young age she was looking after her two little brothers, cooking, doing the washing amd living in a storage room with no electric light and no table to study at. We suggested that the teacher not perceive these circumstances as a problem, given that she had no way to solve them, but rather as the context in which that girl was obliged to undertake the learning process. Her responsibility as an educator was thus to seek differentiated educational alternatives that would allow the girl to learn, without requiring her to do homework like the other students who had somewhat better living conditions.

We shouldn’t judge teachers lightly. In fact our obligation isn’t to judge them at all, but to support them and insist that they become a national priority.

Teachers need decent salaries

If teaching is one of the most strategic professions for our country, a lot of things ought to be changed. Nicaragua now has a Teaching Career Law, but the career isn’t effective in practice. For starters, the salary increase for classroom teachers is too small, so many have left the profession.

According to the existing salary scale, the base monthly salary is 5,000 córdobas (just over US$200) for public school primary teachers and 5,257.50 córdobas (about $215) for secondary teachers, although these amounts can increase somewhat for years worked, the area they work in, or degrees and titles acquired. They also receive what is called a “solidarity bonus” equivalent to $35 a month, which the current government gives all low-income state employees. Community preschool teachers earn barely 500 córdobas a month (a little more than $20), and are often paid three or four months late. In private schools with a state-subsidized payroll, teachers earn a little less than those in the public sector, while non-subsidized private schools establish their own salaries, which are invariably better than those in the public sector.

Can a teacher feel stimulated or even appreciated with such low salaries? They often can’t cover the cost of basic subsistence products and are forced to work double shifts and even weekends, a situation that further affects their self-esteem, not to mention their health.

A country’s national budget is the clearest, most objective and verifiable indicator of the country’s priorities. Looking at the amount earmarked for the educational system and teachers’ salaries, we can see that education isn’t a priority to the State. It isn’t assigned the resources needed. The education budget—including state and state-subsidized universities—doesn’t exceed 5% of the national gross domestic product.

Most studies claim that we need 7% at the very minimum to make a real dent in the current urgent problems, and even that percentage falls short of the amount needed to do the job properly.

Individualized education…

Following up on each student’s learning process is also very important. Learning rhythms are very different from one child to the next, so it is necessary to give them differentiated attention, above all in the multi-grade schools, which bring together children of different ages. Each child matters.

…but collective decision-making

Teamwork among the teachers and their active participation in school administration are also fundamental. Their opinions should be taken into account in the schools’ decision-making, as should the opinions of students and parents. What we’re observing today, however, is a growing tendency toward rigid centralism. Many decisions are made in the upper levels of the educational system’s bureaucracy and the local agents are having ever less impact.

The elements a teacher
training program must provide

When we worked with Fe y Alegría (Faith and Joy), the Center for Social Educational Research and Action (CIASES) and the Central American University (UCA) to validate an initial training program for rural teachers, we established various basic references. First, we identified the fundamental knowledge teachers must have: what they must know and know how to do. That was the starting point in the program design. We also took into account the training teachers have when they enter the normal school.

Reading comprehension: When I began to give pedagogy classes in that program I found the students didn’t understand what they were reading. Given that, how could they be expected to analyze the different currents that have helped build the education sciences? I decided to shelve the class for two months while we did a reading comprehension workshop. Any training program designed for educators must consider the characteristics the trainees bring with them. In Nicaragua the weaknesses of middle education must be taken into account because many students graduate from high school without having such basic knowledge as reading comprehension, which is fundamental for thinking about and communicating their ideas.

Enhancing cultural capital: Another aspect to consider in a training program is the “cultural capital” of those who come for training. Pierre Bourdieu coined this concept to refer to all knowledge of different kinds that each person accumulates based on family surroundings and the milieu in which he or she has developed. It includes, for example, enjoyment of music, sensitivity to differences and the emotional nature with which we establish relations, among many other variables. Very often young people who enroll in the normal school have little cultural capital. The institution must thus help compensate for that, incorporating aspects into the program such as reading; personal growth; affection; and visits to museums, art exhibitions and movie theaters. Education in civic values must also occupy an important place. The initial teacher training is strategically important to this profession and thus must be assumed in all its complexity.

Classroom accompaniment for in-service training: After that initial training, teachers must also receive in-service training, which brings them up to date throughout the exercising of their profession in the classroom. In addition to compensating for either absent or deficient initial training and the gaps in the education they had when coming out of high school, this training must provide classroom accompaniment to help them learn more about the daily problems that come up and support them in the search for solutions.

The majority of in-service training models examined in Nicaragua don’t include that classroom accompaniment aspect. We always leave the teachers alone to cope with what happens every day in the classroom. That fundamental missing ingredient means that neither the initial training nor the updating help improve the educational quality. We can’t just keep training teachers with programs that aren’t contextualized in the classroom. The effectiveness of an in-service training or updating program depends on its accompaniment component, in which the trainers sit down with the teacher to analyze concrete problems and explore solutions.

TEPCE: The existing
in-service training approach

The Ministry of Education is currently offering Nicaragua’s teachers an in-service training model through Educational Evaluation, Programming and Training Workshops (TEPCE) offered once a month on Fridays. In my view, their dynamic and contents don’t respond to the urgent problems that need to be resolved to improve educational quality in our country.

The teachers meet in these workshops by levels to “program” what they will teach the following month, selecting contents from among those established by the curriculum. They also evaluate what was taught the previous month. In general, the teachers say things like “I fulfilled the program x percent” in which they fill in the blank: 70, 80 all the way up to 100%. One teacher confessed to me that these percentages are the bottom line of “fulfillment.” “I fulfill and I lie,” she admitted.

That dynamic is totally contrary to everything we’ve learned about modern pedagogy from the active school of the late 19th century and the teachings of Pestalozzi, Montessori, Decroly, Freinet, Freire... It’s well known that not all children learn the same, at the same speed or the same time. To assume they do is a pedagogical error, but in Nicaragua our teachers fear a sanction if they don’t demonstrate “fulfillment.”

Although this error has been the historical ill of schools, it’s the theory promoted through the TEPCEs, an initiative that responds to a concept of school tossed out by modern pedagogy. How could two groups possibly learn the same thing at the same time? How could their learning processes be identical? How can they not take advantage of the “educational veins,” the learning opportunities that come up in the classroom? How is it possible to teach the same thing without taking into account that each classroom has a different context, and thus different needs and opportunities? How can they still think like that when we already know that multiple intelligences exist, recognize the right of each boy and girl’s personal learning curve to be respected and no longer consider differences as problems but as richness?

I’ve observed a great many teachers giving classes using the TEPCE “programming” as didactic planning, even though it’s nothing more than a list of contents to teach in a given lapse of time. They come to class to dictate and the students to copy. Result: no one learns anything.

The importance of
continuity and expertise

In addition to the TEPCEs, the Ministry of Education this year is providing a diploma course in Continuing Education and Values for teachers to improve the quality of education. Participation is voluntary in some municipalities and obligatory in others. Prior to this initiative a group of Cuban experts did an assessment of the Nicaraguan education system. In the summary we were able to see, their observations coincide with what we already know: infrastructure problems in the schools, teacher training problems, problems in the quality of teaching...

Cuba’s educational experience has been studied a lot because Cuba is the only Latin American country that ranks up with the developed countries in the international standardized tests done to measure educational quality. Although Cuban education has admittedly been criticized for its rigidity, its success is undeniable in two aspects that we must take into account in Nicaragua. First, Cuban teachers are experts in what they teach and, second, there has been continuity in the public education policy for a number of decades. Both factors promote quality.

In Nicaragua the teachers aren’t experts and our history is plagued by ruptures. Each party that takes power acts as if education began with it and all previous efforts in the education field were failures, so it proposes starting over from zero. The previous experiences aren’t even evaluated objectively to discern what should be tossed, kept or improved.

What does Nicaragua’s diploma course offer?

The diploma course in continuing education and values was initiated following the Cuban experts’ assessment. It consists of three modules: “public policies in Nicaragua,” “Education in values for prosperity and the common good,” and “Pedagogy and didactics for improving teaching.”

The goal of the first module is for “teachers, students and families to learn together and increase our knowledge and capacities to value and take on leadership in the advances of all progress and pending challenges in the national development plans that are encouraging just and sustainable development of our Nicaragua in Christianity, Socialism and Solidarity.” It includes various topics, including general guidelines of the National Development Plan; a participatory management model; the national early childhood policy; care and preservation of our Mother Earth…

The methodology employed in the course consists of a 45-minute talk by a presenter, or provided by video in the municipalities; the study of a document based on that talk and two practical exercises based on work guides, one to be done as a group and the other independently outside of class. There are 20 class sessions of this type, always with the same methodology.

What’s right and what’s
wrong with this picture

In my judgment the most positive aspect of the course is that the teachers who finish it will receive a small salary increase. But it strikes me as a model publicizing what the governing party is doing. The purpose of the “Education in values” module, for example, is to get teachers to “work on their personal dimension, reflecting and appropriating the basic concepts for good living.”

As for the educational conception and methodology, I have various observations. First, it doesn’t provide accompaniment to the teachers in the classroom so won’t have a significant impact in this crucial arena. Nor does it contain elements to make it sustainable, promoting lasting learning that translates into a change or innovation in teaching practice. Moreover, it includes concepts that current pedagogy considers outdated. In my view, the most serious is that it replaces the concept of “learning” with that of “instruction,” defined as “the student’s cognitive activity.”

It is also worrying that the course is centered on teaching and not on learning, as that paradigm was abandoned years ago. For example, with regard to planning the document presenting the course states that “the objectives will respond to the question we want to teach.” The correct objective shouldn’t be what we want to teach but what the students need to learn. This isn’t just a semantic change that can be resolved by changing a few words. Thinking about what students need to learn leads us to imagining the kind of learning situations we must create for them to construct that learning. The goal should never be the teacher’s teaching, but the students’ learning.

The course is centered on instruction, teaching and the teacher. The characteristics of the students’ learning process are described as being developed “under the direction of the teacher,” when we know how important it is for a person to take the lead in his or her own learning if it is to be successful. The pedagogical module on the characteristics of didactic communication goes so far as to say that such communication is “hierarchical,” and states that “it is the teacher alone, not all of the actors of the teaching-learning process, who has command of the objects and intention of communication.” The lack of linkage among the topics proposed, the reduced nature of the didactic materials offered and the traditional character of its methodology are also worrying.

The most harmful part is that the children will lose learning time since their teachers will be absent from the classroom two days each month, one to participate in the TEPCEs and the other for this course. Nicaragua’s General Education Law establishes 200 days of class per year, which is already very little. Subtracting these two days a month leaves 180. Then there are the double and triple holidays depending on the day the real holiday falls [for example, if it falls on a Thursday, the Friday is often given as well to make a long weekend] and the days the children are taken out of class to go see international league soccer games. And if we factor into all of that the late arrivals, early departures and eternal recesses, how many real learning days do the students have?

Procrustes’ bed

There is also another very distressing element in the diploma course, the TEPCEs and in fact the whole model: a deeply rooted tendency to encourage, impose or reinforce uniformity in very distinct ways. In fact, this is something found not only in the educational system but in all of society.

The Greek myth of Procrustes’ bed is very often studied in pedagogy. It tells of a man who had an inn with only one bed, which he offered to pilgrims who passed along the road. Procrustes was hospitable, but he got annoyed when the person who used his only bed wasn’t the right size. So if the pilgrim was short he would stretch him on a rack until he fit the whole bed and if he was tall he would cut off his feet. The reason this myth is studied in pedagogy is to help us reflect on the school system’s tendency to think of an “average child”—who doesn’t exist in reality, only in statistics—and get everyone to adjust to the norm, the curriculum and the single learning speed...

From a Procrustean perspective, education is conceived as a conveyor belt production process. That idea, seriously challenged since the mid-19th century, is being reinforced in Nicaragua today with the TEPCE model, whose objective is for all teachers to teach the same thing at the same time, as illustrated in this paragraph from page 2 of the presentation of the “Christian, Socialist and Solidary Model” in the diploma course: “Always within this process and within the model of shared responsibility, you, brother educators, have the noble task of facilitating the learning of the students bringing them together in a single space, time, vision, content, methodology, discipline and pedagogy.” What rings worrying bells is the emphasis on the concept of “single.”

Positive things are happening
outside of the state sphere

In my opinion, the best thing about the current policy is the efforts being promoted in early childhood education, for children from 0 to 3 years old. New approaches can been seen in that area, whose consolidation is very important because neuroscience has shown how crucial education is at that stage, the period of greatest plasticity in the human brain.

There are also positive experiences of education at other levels—barrios, districts and municipalities—being developed by Books for Children, CAPRI, Fe y Alegría, CECESMA and many other NGOs. But less and less innovation is being seen in the public schools as a result of increasing control and centralization, which has also reduced the spaces for any impact by NGOs.

The possibilities of introducing successful experiences are greatest in the subsidized private schools, such as those of Fe y Alegría or of the Vicariate of Bluefields. One example is Fe y Alegría’s teacher training program, which has been underway for over 10 years. Fundación UNO’s mathematics programs have had significant results, as reflected in the increased number of youths of the department of Rivas who pass the Engineering University’s entry exam and thus access new educational opportunities. Fundación Pantaleón in Chinandega has also developed interesting experiences in teacher training and improving educational quality.

We need to do what we can

Regrettably, few of these experiences make it into the public education provided by the State. Nonetheless, their continuation is essential and very correct, because as Eduardo Galeano is quoted as saying, “many small people doing small things in small places can change the world.”

And as Freire suggested, we must make use of the square meter of power we have. We can’t change the national educational policy, but we can use our space. And many people in Nicaragua are using their “square meter” well, doing relevant things. Change is urgent, particularly in teacher training, while opening other paths to improve the quality of education, because, to repeat, education an indispensable condition for Nicaragua’s future development.

I want to end with a still very pertinent warning by Rosa María Torres, an Ecuadoran specialist in basic education: “As long as the signal continues to be given that being a teacher is an undervalued and underpaid profession of the poor, that it is simple and requires minimal skills, limited to selecting from a repertoire of techniques and following instructions, it will be impossible to recover the teaching task, and hence the school.

“Insofar as teaching continues to be perceived as a transitory and second-choice option, teacher training will continue to be an extension and a duplication of the bad school, a useless investment and a never-ending task, given the significant staff exodus and turnover that characterizes teaching in many countries today.”

Josefina Vijil has a doctorate in pedagogy, has been a classroom teacher for many years and is a teacher training specialist.

Print text

Send text