• – Through practical workshops, inverted planning models and other innovative pedagogical strategies, the program launched in 2019 by Fundación Luksic in alliance with the Laboratorio de Investigación e Innovación en Educación para América Latina y el Caribe, SUMMA, delivers educational accompaniment to five schools and high schools in the Region of Arica y Parinacota.

Building bridges. That is the meaning of the word “Chaka”, which inspired the name of an innovative educational accompaniment program that is currently implemented in five schools and high schools in the Region of Arica y Parinacota. It is a project created in 2019, through which the Fundación Luksic in a strategic alliance with the Laboratorio de Investigación e Innovación en Educación para América Latina y el Caribe, SUMMA, seeks to transform and improve the quality of learning using methodologies focused on collaboration.

With practical workshops, inverted planning models, instances of reflective dialogue regarding the teaching methodologies applied, as well as strategies that promote interaction, metacognition and positive feedback among students with common goals, Chaka has implemented a model of accompaniment in the establishments involved, throughout the pandemic period.

In this sense, the director of the Laboratorio de Educación of Fundación Luksic, José Gutiérrez, published an opinion column in the organization’s magazine entitled “The role of human connections”, in which he highlighted the importance of dialogue between educational communities and how they have approached the fact of implementing a project of these characteristics in the midst of a pandemic, considering the countless challenges that this has meant for the education system. Below, we highlight the full column.

The year we appealed to humanity

At the beginning of Chaka, when we started talking as SUMMA and Fundación Luksic teams, we had a clear idea of how the implementation of the project would be and the possible risks that existed. In 2019 we moved forward steadily, generating alliances with the five educational communities where we were going to implement the project and laying the foundations to have a strong foundation capable of facing any setback.

And then came 2020. Last year made us face a completely different scenario than anyone could have imagined, much less prepared. Uncertainty hit us emotionally, physically, at work, socially, and motivated us to work more closely together to face the difficulties together. Faced with these scenarios, as a Summa team and together with the school teams, we identified two major challenges for the actions we had planned. On the one hand, not knowing what was going to happen and the difficulty of making plans in that context. On the other hand, the great burden we saw in the school communities.

It was not a year as we had thought it would be when we began to devise the project, but it left us with lessons learned and bonds that perhaps we would not have been able to build in any other way. We prioritized accompanying each other, getting to know each other and reserving special times for interaction, in a year when we needed that company more than ever.

In a few more years, I believe we will be able to look at 2020 and be proud of the work we have done. But especially we will be able to identify it as a year in which we appealed to our humanity, commitment to the students and to the professional capacities of each one of us to build a stronger common project from here.

We are grateful for the commitment of assistants, teachers, directors, managers, sponsors, Chaka professionals and consultants. It is in you where the strength of this program lies.

José Gutiérrez

Director Laboratorio de Educación de  Fundación Luksic

You can review the complete magazine here: https://bit.ly/3gWbxyS