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Meeting held at the University of Chile contrasted the educational strengths and weaknesses of Nigeria, Sweden and Chile.
The disparate realities in Technical Vocational Education in Sweden, Nigeria and Chile were analyzed last August 28 at the International Participatory Colloquium on TVE, organized by the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) of the University of Chile and the Faculty of Education Sciences of the University of Talca. Can TVE be too academic, what are the trends in public policies for school libraries, is English language relevant within the system, or where should practices for interacting with information in digital environments be developed, were some of the main questions.
At the beginning of the debate, CMM research associate and director of the Activating Problem Solving in the Classroom (aRPa) initiative, Patricio Felmer, pointed out that “Chilean technical-professional education comprises 40% of higher education, around half a million students a year are in tertiary education. This is very important, not only because of the number of students, but also because most of these students are the first in their families. It is a very crucial level for the development of every country. Having said that, here at MWC we are very interested in continuing the work at this level, in terms of professional development and also research”.
Fernando Bolaños, postdoctoral researcher at ARPa and organizer of the colloquium, explained that he has spent more than 4 years exploring different regulatory documents, such as public policy, curricula, laws, among others. “We want to make visible different realities of vocational technical education and also break the monolith of what vocational technical education is. We must not forget that in Chile there is technical professional education, made up of a series of specialties. For example, in secondary technical-professional education there are around 35 and within these 35 coexist different realities that require different practices. And there enters, for example, the conversation about the role of school libraries to develop practices of interacting with information, and also enters the role of mathematics to develop mathematical reasoning. And finally we have English as an essential practice of professional technical education careers in Chile today”, he said.
Relive the streaming here:
https://www.youtube.com/live/dYxs8TaB6Ks?si=0nz3AQMG87K9GDsl
*CLICK ON THE NAME OF EACH SPEAKER TO REVIEW THEIR YOUTUBE PRESENTATION*
Nigeria
The opening talk was given by Professor of Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu-Alike (AE-FUNAI) Nigeria, Dr. Ugochukwu Chinonso, who explained how the 6-3-3-4 educational system impacts everyday life, science and technology. “The six represents the years of primary education, the first three refers to junior secondary, the second three to senior secondary and four refers to university education. In Nigeria we have what we call technical university and also all the conventional secondary schools. Technical universities are specifically made to train and develop technical educators or graduate who will become a technician at a sub-professional level”, he said.
The African representative specified that vocational technical education considers taking practical subjects, such as carpentry, wood technology, plumbing, decoration, mechanics, among others. “How can I use these skills to improve myself and create jobs?” he asked. During instruction in the TVET program, and in both the master’s and doctoral programs, there is a face-to-face approach that considers learning, practicing – if necessary – and teaching. So periodically we will do some field demonstrations, like in my field, for example, we produce chairs, tables and other designs, and I tell them (the students) how they can sell it and how they can make a living from it, so these are skills that people need to survive“, he emphasized.
“When they are able to have these investments, with small businesses run by themselves, the society is going to grow, there is going to be peace in the society and lastly, when graduates have jobs in existing firms or start their small businesses, it becomes easier for the economy to grow, it is undoubtedly that with more jobs the economy is going to grow (…) the importance of developing in Nigeria this, is that it helps individuals to take care of themselves and have their needs met”, he concluded.
Sweden
Next it was the turn of Dr. Ola Pilerot, professor at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science (SSLIS) of the University of Borås in Sweden, who spoke in depth about why libraries are important. After showing different establishments around the world, the European specialist affirmed that “I think of knowledge when I think of libraries, why is knowledge important? We need to know things to be able to do things, but then I changed my mind a little bit, maybe it is not knowledge, although I prefer the concept of knowledge is more beautiful than information (…) to be able to know something we need to gain experiences or in other words, to become informed”.
Ola Pilerot, an academic at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science (SSLIS) at the University of Borås in Sweden. Photo: Alonso Farías.
“Libraries are not only books, they are also people and must have places to meet. This has to do with the potential of the library as a great promoter of democracy. Under the theoretical context of social capital, which talks about how people create links or bonds between them. This can be a very important product or result of library activity, primarily related to the library room (…) the Swedish library act states that libraries should contribute to the development of democratic society by facilitating the dissemination of knowledge and hosting the free expression of opinions. Libraries, within the general library system, should promote a role of interest in education, training and research of other cultural activities”, he said.
Ola Pilerot also reflected on “today’s society is constituted in a way where information is fragmented, because we all have cell phones, we Google and we think we can always get a question/answer, but at the same time, there is an erosion of trust. I would like to use the expression I took from a Norwegian sociologist, Thomas William Ericsson, who talks about the tyranny of the moment, where we want everything right now, under the culture of now. So information becomes fragmented and I think there is only a range between information and the urgency of knowledge. Libraries and archives are still the only custodians of this valuable knowledge. We should have some kind of agreement that we should know what kind of information we should keep, what kind of information we should allow for our societies. Libraries have the potential to give us this stable infrastructure of knowledge, because we know that we have professional librarians who make a good selection of resources that they want to give us. So, this is in contrast to this tyranny of the moment”.
Chile
Representing Chilean education were Dr. Karina Cerda, from the Faculty of Education Sciences of the Universidad de Talca; Natacha Pardo, from the Pontificia Universidad Católica; Francisco Ortiz, from the Instituto Santa Teresa de Los Andes; and Germán Osses, from the Instituto Nacional de Capacitación Profesional (INACAP).
Through the presentation of a study, Cerda began by highlighting the work of the Learning Resource Centers (CRA), promoted in 1993 by the Ministry of Education. “What is interesting about these libraries is that there is no policy stipulating that the person in charge must actually be a librarian. In Chile, what they find in the documentation, is that they can be librarians or they can be in-service teachers (…) School libraries are the ones in charge of teaching students how to find democratic and relevant information. So these places within the schools should teach how to go to Google and look for information that is truthful and not Fake News, for example”, she criticized.
“During this process we discovered that there is no library exclusively for vocational technical education in the country. Therefore, we decided to study CRA libraries. One of our main findings of the study is that libraries are a passive resource and do not have an autonomy within the school community, they are seen as annexes and are not considered as an independent learning space. Whereas in the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), for example, the role is much more defined, with respect to qualifications for people working in IFLA such as teaching and learning, curriculum, instructional design, program management, planning and development, digital literacy, and knowledge of children’s and adolescent literature. In terms of personal experience, we found many skills that are not explicit in the Chilean standards in terms of desired practices”, she lamented.
Ola Pilerot, with Dr. Karina Cerda. Photo: Alonso Farías.
Then it was the turn of Natacha Pardo, who spoke about “English as a second language in education in Chile”, presented a national research on the problems of English teachers in technical schools and expressed the progress made by the Ministry of Education in this area. “In all types of secondary education they follow a general program that is the same in 9th and 10th grade and then they have a distance program in 11th to 12th grade. There are currently 934 vocational schools in Chile, which comprise 37% of the students, comprising almost half of secondary education. There are 35 specialties and 17 mentions in the different regions of the country”, she said.
Pardo also explained that “the national research we conducted showed that there is a lack of specific programs, resources and concrete tools to train English teachers who are working in technical education. One of the contents in common is the need for students to understand and read the manuals or instructions that allow them to use the equipment, because they mentioned to us that they had a lot of equipment in their laboratories that they did not use because the manuals were only available in English and the teachers did not know how to read them in English, so they did not use the equipment, they just showed them. That really caught my attention, there is a lot to do in this field”.
Next, the coordinator of the English program at the Santa Teresa de los Andes Institute (Graneros, O’Higgins region), Francisco Ortiz, spoke about the local reality and warned that “at ISTA we have more than 85% of the students in a situation of vulnerability. For this reason, the school and the government provide a lot of support, for example, free transportation and food (…) Currently we have 55% of students in professional technical education. The main reason for taking this program is the insertion to the labor market, it is also something they like, because they get a certificate immediately after finishing the academic program, they think that they will not have to study a lot and they will have access to resources. It is quite difficult for them to think about the possibility of studying in higher education because their parents and families do not have enough information on how the system works.”
“Last year we had 241 students in the twelfth grade. 136 took the national college exam and 62 were admitted to college, all of them being from the professional technical program. This was a milestone because we usually have 10 to 15 students per year, and it is happening now because we have professionals in the school who are recognizing the fact that information can close the gaps“, he remarked.
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The colloquium was brought to a close by Germán Osses, advisor for Integral Training in Basic Sciences at the National Institute for Professional Training (INACAP), who addressed mathematical reasoning within the PT system. “Many times we force the mathematical object to live in places where it probably does not live, maybe it does, but maybe it does not. There are methodological aspects to be able to bring the contexts of use to the vocational technical education scenario that are important to be able to investigate. Therefore, for curriculum design there are some key questions: What mathematics is going to be taught, why am I going to teach it, how are we going to bring it to the classroom, and at what moment? This will lead us to a path of being able to generate a curriculum design. First of all, to discriminate which mathematics is useful according to the institutional objectives, and then to know and justify that we are going to incorporate it for such and such a reason. Then we look at the methodological aspects in the classroom and at what point we are going to place it in order to have coherence also within the educational trajectory“, he said.
In this line, he emphasized that “this problem that one has, of linking the mathematics that is taught in the classroom with the mathematics in use, in occupational, social, personal and scientific contexts, identifying such reference practices, we can begin to have bridges that allow this transversality of knowledge that one seeks in the professional technical context (…) Creating these bridges are opportunities that one has to give mathematics its raison d’être. Incorporating it into scenarios of use also allows us to contribute to the generation of an identity of professional technical mathematics education”.
Field work
After the colloquium held at the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (FCFM) of the University of Chile, Fernando Bolaños and Ola Pilerot led a delegation that toured different national institutions to “reflect” on professional technical education.
“We are going to visit a CRA library, that is, we have explored the normative documents of the libraries, which are the Learning Resource Centers, but now we are going to go and see how it is lived, so to speak. Then we will visit the Santiago Library, which is very important and a reference in Chile. Then we will visit the library of DUOC in Providencia, which together with Inacap, are two of the most representative institutions of Higher Technical Professional Education in Chile. Finally we will go to the Faculty of Education Sciences of the University of Talca, which is in Linares, because this event was in collaboration with the University of Talca. And precisely in Linares with pedagogy students, that is, those who are training to become teachers, we will have an opportunity to reflect on this professional technical education from the role of the future teacher”, explained Bolaños.
Center for Mathematical Modeling
The CMM is today the most active scientific research institution in mathematical modeling in Latin America. It is a center of excellence of the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID) of Chile, integrated by eight partner universities and located at the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the University of Chile. It is also the International Research Laboratory (IRL) #2807 of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
Its mission is to create mathematics in response to problems in other sciences, industry and public policy. It seeks to develop science with the highest standards, excellence and rigor in areas such as data science, climate and biodiversity, education, resource management, mining and digital health.
Alonso Farías Ponce, journalist of the Center for Mathematical Modeling.
Posted on Oct 2, 2023 in News
