Letters from Peru

CASE

How do children live on the other side of the world? How does their daily life look like? Do they learn in the same way? How are they educated and how is education approached in the southern countries?

An International Cooperation Scholarship provided me with the opportunity to experience first-hand the answers to some of these questions in a three-month internship as a teacher at a Peruvian school. With the aim of expanding the impact of this opportunity to other colleagues in the profession, I developed an innovation project that also constituted my final thesis.

SOLUTION

Letters to Peru is a mail exchange project between elementary school students in Peru and Spanish teachers. Every month, the mail pals had the opportunity to learn from each other writing and reading about their culture, traditions, gastronomy, hobbies, education, daily life...  

CONCEPT

The three-month mail exchange project was designed for elementary school students in Piura (Peru) and Spanish teachers. Each teacher was paired up with a student, becoming mail pals. Every month, they were encouraged to share their point of view on a new topic: education, culture, traditions, gastronomy, hobbies...And will receive a letter from the other side of the ocean.

Sharing perspectives gave both teachers and students the opportunity to reflect upon their own reality and unveil foreign experiences that are so far we can often only imagine. Letters to Peru was a tangible way to learn first-hand from other cultures and ways of life, to create bonds between strangers, to extend the limits of the familiar world, and to reflect about social realities that are closer than we think.

PROCESS

Before landing in Peru, I had a blurry idea of what their educational situation was. My ideas were preconceived, usually associated to what I had seen in the media or the stories I had been told about. The reality hit me in the face when I experienced it as a teacher, and when its main characters, the students, showed me. At the same time, I realized they had never been in direct contact with people from northern countries. Their image of this region was determined by what they had seen on television or what they had studied at school. So, what if they and my Spanish colleagues were told first-hand about these unfamiliar realities?

Considering all the above and with the aim of working values such as solidarity, cooperation or partnership, this project was proposed as a way of learning through shared experiences and situations between people who experienced unsimilar daily lifes. The idea was to enable an information exchange between teachers and students from distant realities that lead to reflection on the covered topics and an ulterior collection of the outstanding insights from the project.

During three months, the mail exchange between participants on various topics allowed them to learn and reflect upon everyday issues with differences and similarities in other parts of the world. My role as a facilitator gave me the opportunity, on the one hand, to see the world through the eyes of those who live in unfamiliar realities for a large percentage of the northern world’s population. On the other hand, it provided insightful reflections on the power of education at any circumstance that contributed to my development as an educator.

OUTCOME

Letters to Peru was selected to take part of the Research Fellowship Program developed by the Theory and Politics of Education Department at the Education Faculty of the UAM (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid).