Attended by teachers from Paraguay, the Postgraduate Diploma in Mathematics Education second version offered by the Center for Mathematical Modeling of Universidad de Chile (CMM) started. The milestone is part of the internationalization process of the program that seeks to improve the methods and contents offered by the trainers of pre-service teachers, academics of continuing education programs for teachers, and those who have team leader responsibilities in schools.
The group is composed by six teachers, engineers and mathematicians from the Paraguayan Organización Multidisciplinaria de Apoyo a Profesores y Alumnos (Omapa), organization that designs and develops programs to introduce improvements to the Paraguayan education, mainly in the field of Mathematics and Sciences.
“We signed an agreement with the CMM and are beginning a specific job aiming to develop a proposal that upgrades elementary teachers from first to sixth grade,” says Gabriela Gomez, Omapa director. The project is funded by the Paraguayan Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología and includes a first stage where the professionals of the organization ‘go back to school’. “We as self-taught people are curious, eager to discover. But we have this shortcoming: we do not know what we do not know,” she says.
The Paraguayans will be in Chile for 15 days in July and other 15 days in January. During these periods, they will deepen contents related to numbers, geometry, algebra, data and chance, problem solving methods, and analysis and development of classes, amongst others. In one of these modules, they will share with Chilean and Argentine mathematics teacher trainers, who have lived other experiences. The program also considered an online part to be taken from Paraguay in order to continue working on issues like video analysis and classes design.
After this update stage, Omapa will draw up its proposal with support from the CMM, explained Salome Martínez, Education Lab director: “We will collaborate on research with Omapa. This obviously creates possibilities for a very interesting work”.
