By Alejandra Mejia | Fundraising & Communications - El Salvador office
ConTextos’ 5th Annual Teachers’ Conference was held on Thursday November 8th, 2018. This annual event seeks to consolidate and maintain an active a network of more than 1,200 teachers from 80 schools and municipal libraries in the country.
This year, 238 teachers participated in an experience that helped enhance their identity as professionals working in the education field and added to the training that ConTextos provides at the schools and libraries.
This year’s Conference was titled “Reading Others” and we looked to provide the opportunity for teachers to explore the intricacies related to different dimensions of diversity and human identity.
Teachers participated in three different workshops: the Human Library, an activity led by Accesarte, where they had the opportunity to face a series of people representing different stereotypes regarding religion, professionals, gender indentity, political affiliation, among others. Readers had the opportunity to read the human books to later have a guided dialogue reflection with a group of peers.
Another group participated in the Art workshop led by Alexia Miranda, a local artist, where they had to look each other “in the eye” to read their subjects and make portraits of themselves as well as others. The third group was involved with theatre, using their body language, voicing their opinions, expressing themselves and letting go of accumulated stress, sharing their experiences with regards to prejudice that they have experienced or have seen others experience, reflecting on how they saw themselves as agents of change in the classroom and their communities, this workshop was led by Egly Larreynaga.
The Teachers Conference is also an opportunity to celebrate and recognize teacher’s creativity in applying different and innovative methods. This year the “Mango Dorado” (Golden Mango) Award added two new categories: One for “Young Library Leaders” and another for “Innovative Libraries” in addition to the Teacher’s category.
To participate teachers send a literacy project that they consider is innovative and a jury made up of their peers selects the winners. We received 8 different projects from schools and this year’s winner was the “Family Writing Project” implemented by teachers at the
Sisiguayo School , located in the Lower Lempa River region of Usulutan.
The Rio Chiquito School, located in Chalatenango, won for the “Innovative Libraries” category and Izcaquilio School, located in Ahuachapan, for the “Young library leaders”category.
We recognized the support ConTextos has received since 2013 from Fundacion Poma and awarded its Executive Director, Alejandro Poma with the “Se da Aca” Award. The idea of the “Sa da Aca” prize comes from the Hebrew word “Tzedakah” whose literal translation is “Justice”. The idea is that giving is done with a sense of justice and moral obligation beyond charity.
Teachers as donors: Each year teachers give a voluntary contribution to support the Teacher’s Network, creating a common fund for themselves, $ 99.05 were raised this time and the money will be destined to support the Golden Mango winning project.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
