We will co-create with the already growing SOLE Colombia Community of educators, librarians, volunteers and citizens a self-organised decentralized project to undertake immediate collective action towards the challenges children and youth are facing due to pandemic and rising violence spreading throughout the country. Action will be framed in education, gender and inequality. Together we will design, implement, analyze and redesign our actions for further scale.
Children and youth in Colombia are clearly the most affected by the pandemic and violence. Public schools and libraries, which were safe places for many of them, have been closed for a year without a clear timing for opening. Additionally, most families lack internet connection and devices at home, to allow for precarious remote learning. Finally, the public debate about the opening schools does not include the voices of children and youth.
Together with our SOLE Community of over 2500 citizens, where over 1/3 are children and youth, from 242 locations around the country, we will co-design strategies to give children and youth immediate opportunities to learn, connect and dialogue with peers and adults using Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs). These hybrid strategies will include the use of available infrastructure - internet and devices - and public spaces as well as community and mass media. Kids need to be heard!
This participatory design and testing of possible solutions will engage children and youth so they can continue their learning process. One that the pandemic has frozen or stepped back. In the long-term we will be revitalizing a whole generation which is already showing to have devastating consequences given lock-down and increasing violence, in homes, streets and internal conflict.
