By early August, Alma will have trained over 10,000 teachers in Bolivia and Peru; helping them to connect the gap between theoretical national curriculums and practical classroom implementation, all within the context of remote and virtual learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our distance learning proposal was adopted first by the largest province in Cusco, Peru, Qusipicanchi, and then by the entire department of Beni in Bolivia.
Because teachers must rely on parents to assure that students complete their lessons, it is vital that parents understand the step-by-step process of the learning activity in Alma’s proposal – especially for preschoolers and young primary schoolers. Therefore, after receiving some feedback from teachers in Peru, we were asked to create a manual for parents to do just that. The challenge: many of the parents in our target communities are functionally illiterate.
Therefore, we worked with our Alma teachers to create draft comic strips for each activity in our proposal, clearly illustrating the key aspects of each step in the activities. Some additional text was added, but the goal was for the images to speak for themselves. We then hired an artist to bring the illustrations to life. This past Monday, after three weeks of discussion and revisions, we presented the parents’ manual to the local branch of the Ministry of Education in Quispicanchi.