Hello again you wonderful Alma supporters! Thank you for your patience and after thousands of emails, calls, and in-person demands, we proudly present our Alma Update newsletter hot off the press and in your inbox!
In our last newsletter from March of this year, I mentioned how 2024 is the first year that Alma can complete its three step project cycle in Peru: the first being our Innovative Pedagogy course, the second being our Teachers’ Best Practices course, and the third being our Champions Teacher work group. I’m happy to report that all three programs are going strong, with impressive buy-in from teachers, administrators, and communities. These last few months have been dedicated mainly to on-site in-classroom visits by Alma staff and our Champion Teachers. Through these visits, we can measure the impact of our courses and programs, take advantage of opportunities for one on one training, and make adjustments where needed.
In Bolivia, in both Beni and Tarija, our training programs to prepare students for their on-site practice teaching has been more successful than we imagined. Support from students, professors, and administrators has been overwhelming to the point that we’ve had hundreds of more participants than anticipated. Thanks to the dedicated support of the administrators of the universities, we were able to open our program to the additional students and professors who wanted to participate, as well as have Alma‘s training program be adopted as official university curriculum.
Furthermore, thanks for the amazing work of our tech mastermind/ online curriculum wizard, Javier Tejera, Alma was invited to the Moodle Global MOOT Conference in October of this year in Mexico to present on “Post-digital Learning Spaces in Rural Peru: Reaching Teachers from Low-resource Remote Communities. Javier‘s presentation will cover how a post digital perspective with a mobile first approach is proving to be highly effective in providing accessible and inclusive education in the Peruvian Andes.
And as you all know well by now, none of this would be possible without your generous support. We thank you for being part of Alma and invite you to continue supporting the promotion of an approach to teaching and learning based on indigenous knowledge, critical and creative thinking, and social-emotional wellbeing. Please check out these updates from the field! Thank you!
Ian McGroarty
Executive Director
Alma Children’s Education Foundation