Interviews
Pedagogical teams from the Metropolitan Region were trained to enhance scientific skills in their classrooms
The 64 educators, preschool education technicians and special education educators who will participate in the Early Age Inquiry Program (PIPE) already have all the tools to implement PIPE in their classrooms. The training sessions were held on April 9, 10 and 18, 2024 in various locations in the Metropolitan Region.
The training associated with the PIPE initiative aimed to strengthen the scientific competencies of the pedagogical teams, so that the participants could then mediate the development of these competencies and critical and scientific thinking in boys and girls so that they understand the environment that surrounds them. /as surrounds.
PIPE is a science teaching initiative aimed at middle and transition levels of Early Childhood Education, aligned with the National curriculum, which is executed throughout the national territory through the Explora Program of the Ministry of Sciences, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation. This is how, in 20 communes of the Metropolitan Region, it is implemented by the Explora Associative Project, Northern Metropolitan Region, which is released by the Advanced Center for Chronic Diseases (ACCDiS ), through the University of Chile and its Faculty of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences.
This year PIPE will work on the technology learning area, which is composed of two modules according to the educational level: “We invent by nature” for intermediate levels and “Let’s tell stories” for transition levels.
“These types of instances are fundamental for the first ages. In recent decades, it has been evident that the rate of scientific ability in boys and girls has decreased over time and therefore, we as educators have to promote and enhance this content within our classrooms. It is essential to acquire a certain scientific language in them, which allows them to expand their world and knowledge, so that in the future they can perform well in the other courses that come,” commented Ximena González, educator at Colegio República del Paraguay.
Education and heritage: scenarios that gave life to PIPE training
The first meeting was held at the Central University of Chile (UCEN), where what the program is and its methodology was explained, then a talk-workshop on scientific competencies was held, led by Dr. Monica Villa, scientific disseminator. and academic from the UCEN.
The second training was held at the Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna Museum, a place that brought together history and cultural heritage, to give way to important topics related to non-sexist education, inclusive and intercultural education in early ages, in order to respond to the principles of gender equity, inclusion and interculturality proposed by the Explora program.
In this sense, Dr. Ximena Azúa Ríos, academic at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Chile, highlighted how challenging it is to work on non-sexist education in the early ages, since that is where all the studies show that there are greater gender bias. At the same time, she highlighted the importance of relating science and gender from childhood, “imagining being a scientist is not something obvious for all girls in our country, therefore, having these discussions, asking questions and having appropriate debates to every age, is essential to create critical opinion in girls. Without a doubt, science and gender is a complex binomial,” he stressed.
On the other hand, the educator Danisa Briones from the Torres del Paine Garden of the Municipal Corporation of Renca, said that PIPE seemed like a good instance to be able to make her teaching work a little more complex, “because although it is true, the children and girls are curious by nature, creative and inquire all day, sometimes we lack tools to deepen this thinking and take them to another level, I believe that PIPE provides us with new strategies and gives us the opportunity to question the environment, which sometimes with years we forget.”
The third and last training took place at the Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences UMCE, where the talk-workshop called “Importance of developing good inquiry questions in early ages” was held, directed by Dr. Nélida Polh, communications director of the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity (Ieb).
During her talk, Nélida explained that children do not need to be at advanced levels to be scientists, in the early ages everyone is a scientist by nature and although nursery education has been largely neglected in the world, Educators in Chile have proven to be eager to learn new methodologies that bring them closer to science and the development of critical thinking in girls and boys and contribute in this way, with the development of their own inquiry questions.
“In the workshop we worked on a methodology called EEPE, Teaching of Ecology in the Schoolyard, which is basically a simplification of the scientific method that consists of observation, and through it, formulating specific questions and generating actions that allow answer those questions, without the need for expensive devices or an advanced level of training, and then reach the results, conclusions and reflections, which in turn generate new questions of inquiry” explained Nélida.
Finally, during the last day of training they were given the material kits that will allow them to carry out the implementations in their classrooms “I am very excited! They are very playful, simple and totally manipulable materials for children, they all point to the different activities that we work on in the training, for example “long live the radio or pipa y pepa” I am very excited to start with the implementation” said Professor Alexandra Yulas Serrano, professor at the Gabriela Mistral High School in Independencia.
PIPE will be implemented by the educators during May and September, months in which individual accompaniment will also be carried out to have feedback from the participants and learn first-hand about their experience. The 2024 process will end in November with a meeting space between the pedagogical teams represented, in order to exchange experiences and generate new opportunities for improvement.