Is a school without specific subjects feasible?

Hugo Pardo Kuklinski

At least this is what Hugo Pardo Kuklinski believes. Having attended to his talk at Universidad Nacional del Litoral on September, 28th, we wonder: can we work through projects at workshops instead of following strict curriculums for every subject?  He proposes that teachers in this ideal context should be ‘mediators’ to which turn for help or guidance only, but not so a necessary actor that students cannot work if he or she is not around. Something Hugo tries to achieve by letting students work in “networks” (in groups that are in constant connection) is that they become independent learners.

You might be thinking “Okay, so I need to change the whole system if I want to create this learning environment, how do I do it?” Hugo Pardo gave us an insight on how he tried to change the system in his project “SERo” in Colombia. To give you an idea of what this project was about we can say that during his stay at Colombia he and his coworkers visited a school where they made all sort of change. They modified the sitting arragement in the classrooms challening the idea that the teacher should be always the center of attention in front of the class. In order to do this, they encouraged group work and project work as well. He admits that since it was a totally different way of teaching which tried to turn upside down everything, he and his co-workers found some resistance among parents and teachers which led the project to ‘fail’. He also mentions that students had a rough time in adapting to this new learning environment because of the drastic change. Seeing this, we came to the conclusion that if teachers and schools are trying to adopt the “networking” method, they should create a new school from scratch or they should do it gradually on existent schools.

On the other hand, he also told us of the same kind of project taking place in our country. Due to the fact that the context was so different to the one in Colombia, it was a success and students together with the teachers at such school enjoyed the experience and were motivated to participate. Therefore, we can state that is worth it to take the risk of getting out of our comfort zone so as to try new ‘methodologies’ and practices which can motivate our students to go to school with renewed energies and expectations.

It is a fact that nowadays people need to be creative, innovative, and independent as well as able to work in cooperative groups if they wish to succeed in what they want to do (all concepts mentioned by Pardo in his talk), so the learning environment should be one in which this characteristics are encouraged. What is more, the inclusion of ICTs in the education of 21^st century students is a must for them to have all the necessary tools to succeed in further activities.

To read more about Hugo Pardo’s projects you can visit www.outliersschool.net or his  blog www.digitalismo.com/blog.