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Towards the last period of the year 2020, a bleak outlook for Mexican education was looming. The ever-widening digital divide was yet another obstacle to the education of thousands of children. The pandemic had left educational havoc, such as the loss of communication among teachers, social isolation, socio-emotional effects on children and evidenced the lack of capacity of parents to support their children in school activities. Together, the aforementioned phenomena resulted in two serious problems: school dropout and learning backwardness. Faced with this situation, MIA and the Xalapa City Council decided to take action and address the problem through an attractive and useful pedagogical alternative to support children.
Thus, the educational intervention “Reactivating MIA Learning” was born, which represented an opportunity to address the learning lag in reading and mathematics in children and adolescents from third to sixth grade of elementary school. We also sought to reverse the emotional effects generated by the health emergency. We then began planning the innovation; the person in charge of the pedagogical area drew the general lines to help reduce the tension that distance learning was generating, seeking to recover interrupted study habits and establishing socialization links in the participants, while reactivating basic learning in reading and mathematics.
The project was ambitious, because we wanted to achieve a lot, so our main concern was how to do it. It was then that we decided to carry out an intervention with a hybrid approach, but with access to those children located in priority areas of the municipality of Xalapa, who were the main educational victims of economic and technological inequality, whose circumstances led them to interrupt their curricular learning processes, to drop out of school, or were at risk of doing so.
Despite having already visualized both the modality and the beneficiary population, the question of how to do it remained unanswered in its entirety: how to reach these children without exposing our health or violating the sanitary norms that forced confinement and social distancing?
After a few days with the question ringing in our heads, the answer came: we found that, in order to support the children through hybrid learning, it was necessary to design a guide with activities (based on the approach of “teaching at the right level”) that would promote autonomous work at home, and would also respond to their learning needs in reading and mathematics. Together with the guide, instructional audios were recorded to accompany the participants’ activities, motivate the educational processes and reduce the tension generated by the new way of “learning at a distance”. The messages in the audios were intended to be dynamic, with a close and warm language, seeking to make the participants feel motivated and confident in each of the tasks they performed.
With the educational material ready, we looked for the people who were to play the role of monitors. It was not difficult to find them. The call was addressed to recent university graduates, who, because of the pandemic, were not likely to find a job in the near future. Therefore, participating in the educational innovation provided them with a job and learning opportunity. Twenty-three enthusiastic people, eager to contribute and learn, were selected and trained in: the functions of an educational monitor, the methodology and contents of the innovation Reactivating MIAlearning
During one week the 23 monitors and the coordinating team visited 15 neighborhoods and 5 rural localities in the municipality of Xalapa, offering educational support from house to house. The task was not easy but the impetus of the team of monitors made it possible for 360 girls and boys to enroll in the educational innovation. The initial learning evaluation was applied and groups were formed by level: beginner, elementary and basic.
The educational innovation was carried out in distance and face-to-face modalities, according to the conditions and technological possibilities of each participant.
Distance counseling was provided through Zoom or WhatsApp, twice a week in 60-minute sessions.
Small groups of 3 to 5 children were formed, who went to the libraries of the rural localities and met once a week, face to face for two hours. In special cases, home tutoring was carried out, also once a week. .
Each monitor was in charge of 10 participants. During the counseling sessions, the monitors fostered an atmosphere of trust in which the participants exchanged experiences about the activities in the guide, the monitor resolved any doubts raised and carried out a group reinforcement activity in accordance with the activities proposed in the guide. In this way, the different modalities of the advisory sessions became spaces for collective learning, interaction and reunion among the participants.
Reactivating MIAlearning played an important role in the improvement of basic learning in reading and mathematics. Sixty-one percent of the participants improved in reading and 43% in mathematics. In addition to progress in basic learning, there was also progress in the social and emotional areas of the participants.
On the other hand, Reactivating MIAlearning served as a formative window for Xalapeño citizens recently graduated in the field of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences. The diversity of modalities of the project allowed them to put into practice the knowledge and skills of their training, but at the same time, it introduced them to the use of information technologies, educational applications and digital tools for pedagogical use.
An unfavorable impact of the confinement has been the lack of interaction and the need for coexistence in the children’s sectors. Reactivating MIAlearning allowed various participants to re-experience practices based on collaborative learning, peer communication and horizontal feedback within the learning processes: “In the basic mathematics group, the children formed a good team, they helped each other to solve exercises, they formed a good friendship…” (Elsa’s report, 2021)
The health scenario led us to develop new skills and strategies to implement educational innovation. In this set of actions, a qualitative impact of Reactivating MIAlearning was inserted, we refer to the need to adapt the processes of training, initial measurement and development of pedagogical encounters between the educational figure and the beneficiary to a distance modality. Based on this, we developed skills linked to the use of information and communication technologies. This was a comprehensive process that, in addition to benefiting MIA’s operational bases, indirectly influenced monitors, participants and adults to approach other forms of blended learning, beyond the official guidelines.
Finally, we close by talking about another impact of our educational innovation: positioning ourselves as organizations concerned with eradicating the unfavorable educational panorama, intensified even more by the pandemic. With Reactivating MIAlearning, both adults and children perceived favorable changes, which were externalized in the instruments to assess satisfaction with the project, the testimonies pointed out that the children: “They developed their imagination and creativity”, “They overcame shyness to speak in public”, “They showed more responsibility before school tasks”, “They improved their moods because they coexisted and socialized”, “They have self-confidence, gained security”, “They gave positive meaning to error”, They are more autonomous”, “They learned to work as a team” and “They recharged energies”.
