A meek burrito with a deafening rebuilder and a mischievous flame of soft fur have become the stars of an innovative educational proposal that aroused the love for reading and managed to improve the reading comprehension rates of hundreds of schoolchildren in the province of Quispicanchis, in the Cusco region.
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Both quadrupeds, which support the work of the peasants of the high Andean communities, are allies of the pedagogical strategy “Quispicanchi Lee, community that learns”, promoted by teachers Vilma Apaza, Valerio Huamán and Vilma Arphi, with the aim of improving the learning of children and adolescents.
Platero and Pituca have become the itinerant libraries that, since 2021, travel various annexes of the icy districts of Ccatca, Ocongate and Quiquijana with their saddlebags full of books of stories and magazines, offering knowledge with intercultural approach and revaluing ancestral knowledge in hundreds of schoolchildren in rural areas located about four thousand meters high.
Vilma Apaza explains that this initiative, winner of the 2023 Educational Management Practices Contest, organized by the Ministry of Education, arose in response to the results in reading comprehension that the children of Quispicanchi obtained in the census evaluation of students (ECE-2018), where 21 % barely reached a satisfactory level.
Improvement of learning
Once its initiative was approved, the Teachers team applied, during the 2021 and 2022, a series of strategies that involved schoolchildren, their families and other teachers, and thus born in several villages on Wednesday pedagogical Wednesdays, to encourage reading in the school community, always with the company of Platero and Pituca.
“When we get to schools pulling the burrito and flames, all the children run to caress them, to play with them and to take the books, magazines and brochures that carry, because they know that their pages bring thousands of stories to tell,” Apaza says.
The strategy was successful and this year will be expanded at the regional level with the support of MINEDU specialists, in alliance with the NGO World Vision and Fe y Alegría, under the title of “Ayni Educational: Teachers who sow and citizens of the future”, and is expected to reach more than 50,000 schoolchildren from the most remote areas of the region.
In addition to Promoting reading in children and adolescents, the initiative also stimulated schoolchildren to create dramatizations of stories, compose and record songs in native languages, write stories inspired by their ancestors and produce plays with messages from their Andean worldview.
Apaza says that this process allowed to organize reading festivals “Tinkuy and ancestral knowledge”, Encounters in which schoolchildren from several schools participate, guided by teachers who become storytelling and dramatize various stories.
The project advances successfully and now, 80 % of schools have libraries with texts in Spanish and Quechua, many homes have their reading corner and stories, That before they were only in the oral memory of the grandparents, today they are written, read and shared.
