During our last two days at Colegio Roosevelt, I enjoyed spending time with the students and seeing them complete the projects that we had been working on the past two weeks. They finished up their UOI (unit of inquiry) project on biomes and created a quiz using PowerPoint to have their parents take at the upcoming parent-teacher-student conferences. Seeing how motivated and interested each of the students were in their projects and schoolwork was definitely my favorite thing to see at the school. Many of the students spent a lot of time out of school working on projects and writing stories and poems, even if they don’t have to. By allowing and encouraging his students to be autonomous, Mr. Riley created a class environment where the students wanted to learn, which allowed them to flourish.
While I didn’t spend a lot of time in any other classrooms at Colegio Roosevelt, I did notice one of the Spanish teachers also created a fun environment that kept the students intrigued and motivated to learn. During the 40-ish minutes I was in the Spanish class on Wednesday, the students Skyped another fourth grade Spanish class from another school and both classes attempted to guess where the other class was. They began the class by hiding everything that said “Peru” or the name of the school, or anything else that would give away their location. Then the students decided who would have what role. A few students took turns asking questions, others wrote yes or no on Post-It notes and stuck them on a World map to narrow down possibilities, and others brainstormed ideas and questions. By the end, the students from the other class guessed that we were in Lima, Peru and after a few more guesses we figured out that they were in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The students all completed their own tasks and respected the idea that everyone played a role, and they all worked together well in a group.
These concepts of autonomy, cooperativeness, contributory effectiveness, and the ability to flourish, as Harry Brighouse points out in his article and as we discussed in seminar, are the “moral and political aims” of education. By encouraging and guiding students to exemplify and develop these elements, we teach them how to think more in-depth and critical about situations in school, and throughout the rest of their life.
After spending the morning at Colegio Roosevelt on Thursday, we then returned to El Agustino in the afternoon and split up into three groups and went to various Encuentros after-school programs. After hiking up the side of the mountain where many people from the community live, Carrie, Martín, and I arrived at the small school where the children would meet us to play games, create origami, and teach each other some of one another’s language. While these activities are informal and aren’t even during the school day, they still teach the kids critical thinking skills, autonomy, cooperativeness, contributory effectiveness, and the ability to flourish.
