A book written by its own students and in a new academic context affected by the pandemic. Like most of the establishments in the country, in March 2020 the Instituto Agrícola Pascual Baburizza (IAPB), a private, subsidized, non-profit high school, supported by the Fundación Educacional Luksic, which provides technical-professional agricultural and livestock training at the intermediate level, had to close its doors due to the Covid-19 pandemic that affected the country. Faced with the new challenge of transforming the teaching methodology to an online one, the Fomento Lector team, an area belonging to the school library, decided to get down to work.
In order to lighten the academic load of the students, the IAPB implemented a method of subject articulation in which two or more subjects are integrated. Based on this, Fomento Lector joined the Departments of English, Technology and Introduction to Agricultural Production (IPA) to begin to lay the foundations of what would become a digital book written by the young people themselves. This is how “IPAndemia: a record of learning in times of pandemic” was born.
In this new book, each student would explain the main tasks of the crop, harvest dates, organs of the plants that are consumed, tools and machinery used for planting, among other important data within the agricultural specialty studied at the IAPB. In addition, all of this would be translated into English.
The IAPB follows the Fontan Relational Education System (Serf), in which the students elaborate their own Personal Study Plan, from which they started in April 2020 to decide which would be the topics to work on during the year. All of them had to have something in common: they would write about types of crops such as vegetables and fruit trees.
José Tomás Herrera, a student in 1st grade during 2020, says that participating in the activity was very gratifying: “For me it was fun, because it was a new experience and I know that this learning will help me later on”.
During the Book Week held online between April 26 and 30, 2021, the Fomento Lector team, together with the IPA Department, launched IPAndemia to the Pascual community, receiving congratulations for the work done.
“I find it wonderful that there is a record of what our students are capable of doing. This book was born from their work, from their learning. This makes me happy. This material also carries another hidden message: what our students are capable of doing,” said Marisel Baez, Specialty Coordinator.
This book shares what students have learned during the pandemic year. The book is available for free download at the following link: www.fundacionluksic.cl or www.iapb.cl. “We invite you to get to know the work of the first year students who, with perseverance in research in times of pandemic, managed to capture their learning about crops in this volume,” said Patricia Prieto, Coordinator of Reading Promotion at the IAPB.
