The Ministry launched the Bicentennial project the blue-haired girl has been working on for a while now. She is in charge of the whole gigantic project and has done an awsome job so far. Thursday there was a 1 hour TV show about the project on almost every channel. All thanks to her! The project is amazing. I love it. How could I not when it started with a few drawings on my living room window and now the woman I love is leading it!
Here's what it is about, in a nutshell <--Translated from Colombia Aprende-->:
[The project aims for students] write and learn histories...
- that develop scientific thinking and competencies in social studies, language, citizenship...
- in which they are, along with their teachers, the protagonists of the research process and the project...
- in which, acting as historians, they follow all the steps of research in the social sciences...
- in which they describe processes, instead of focusing exclusively on dates, people and memorization of contents...
- that bring history, as it is produced in academic research, to the history taught in schools...
- that makes boys and girls identify with and appropriate their past...
- that don't stay in classrooms and books, but remain in different kinds of places of memory...
- that are coherent with new paradigms in pedagogy and historiography...
- that are democratic, diverse, created from multiple experiences and from diverse points of view...
The project will run until 2010, the Bicentennial celebration:
Stage 1: Students Ask
- Students from all over the country will send questions (via web and snail mail) in all official languages --(that's about 68, last I heard in my linguist days ;-)-- about the period between 1774 and 1830 (the Independence). University students and experts will pick the best 200 and publish them: so, we'll have "200 years and 200 questions".
Stage 2: Constructing Answers
- Students (1-12) from all around the country will try to answer the questions, initially, using only history and social studies textbooks from today and the past made available online. They will learn to what extent the knowledge that schools have traditionally provided, can answer their generation's questions. Meanwhile, university students will research and digitize primary and secondary source from around the country to enrich the upcoming research.
- Students research using primary and secondary sources made available through public libraries, school libraries and online, and will submit answers to the 200 questions. They will send them via web and snail mail for the expert commitee to choose the best and publish them.
Stage 3: Local histories, Diverse Memory
- Students (1-12) research about the histories of their towns and regions in the Independence, using the skills and competencies they have developed during the project.
- Studentes read the local histories written by other students in other regions and create a diptic monument (a poem, song, mutlimedia, movie, dance, sculpture...) in their town to celebrate the history of an OTHER, hopefully from a town that has traditionally been considered an opposite or rival.
I will post a video about the project as soon as it is available online...
Outr school will, of course, be a part of this project. I hope one of our students comes up with a wonderful question that gets selected and answered by thousands of other students around the country. We will approach it as a Knowledge Building project, using Knowledge Forum for all the research.
