Santi, 6, is taking a televised kindergarten lesson at home as students return to the categories that are still in Mexico City schools on Monday, August 24, 2020.
Rebecca Blackwell / AP
Millions of schoolchildren across Mexico this week in front of a screen, not with interactive categories online with a teacher, but with pre-recorded systems on television, this is a component of a distance learning effort announced through federal officials this month.
The Mexican government has signed agreements with the country’s largest television networks to open new virtual channels to transmit distance education systems in students’ homes.
“This is not done in any other country in the world, we are pioneers,” Mexican President Andrés Manual López Obrador said when the deal was announced this month.
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When the Secretariat of Federal Education cancelled face-to-face categories in mid-March, few imagined that the pandemic would remain active at the start of the school year. Education Secretary Esteban Moctezuma Barragón said there are now 40 million fellows at home. “allows the pandemic to be manageable for hospitals. “
But many teachers say that television courses will meet fundamental educational desires and that giant portions of the country have the generation to track distance learning. They warn that without viable alternatives, the socio-economic gaps in Mexico will widen.
Monserrat Medina Zentella attends school online, amid the new coronavirus pandemic, from his home in Mexico City on Monday, August 24, 2020.
Ugarte /AP Frame
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Secretary Moctezuma Barragón and other officials say television is a more available medium than the Internet, pointing to studies showing that there are televisions in nine out of 10 Mexican households. worked as an executive for the owner of the largest television network at the time in the country.
Housing TV ownership is below the national average in southern states, such as Oaxaca. Knowledge of the census shows that almost one in 4 families in Oaxaca does not have a working TV. In the neighboring state of Chiapas, another survey found that the number of homeowners with television even more. Some families have promised their electronic devices since the beginning of the pandemic.
An electronics store and a bank owned by billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego, owner of mexico’s largest television network, sells televisions with the ability to shop with monthly payments.
Shannon Young / The World
Even in families who have their own position, receiving loose channels can be patchy, many others hire cable or satellite facilities for reception, others, such as Adriana Madrazo, whose son must start kindergarten in Oaxaca this year, use their TVs as instant monitors to watch videos online.
Education officials have released the schedule of broadcasting courses on single and paid TV, but have not defined the main points of the on-demand or streaming options. On the first day, Madrazo visited the Facebook page of the Ministry of Education and was discovered in the comments. segment with many other parents. The Ministry of Education is now publishing video classes on a YouTube channel.
Madrazo says the data on where to place the component online “have been more word of mouth”.
Your 5-year-old son Zaín is enrolled in kindergarten, but school parents are waiting for the main points about whether and how school television will be reflected in the school year.
“At government press conferences, they announced the show itself but gave no details. . . We do not know the content of the programming, the topics to cover, how long it is intended to last, who teaches the courses, what are the evaluation methods. There’s no program to follow. “
“At government press conferences, they announced the program itself, but were not given the main points. Strategies are. There’s no program to follow, ” he said.
Zaon Mendez Madrazo and his parents on the lawn began their month of detention.
Shannon Young / The World
During his months of detention, the circle of relatives opened a lawn and began raising turkeys, chickens and ducks. Madrazo says worrying about other living things is what catches your child’s attention the most.
His biggest fear is that Zaon, an only child, has had normal contact with other young people his age since mid-March. She seeks to form a small organization with like-minded parents.
Uncertainty about schooling led the Oaxaca teachers’ union to dust off a schooling plan that arose from protracted combat opposed to federal school reforms in 2016. The union says its proposal responds to situations within Oaxaca larger than the centralized federal model.
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Oaxaca has one of the largest indigenous peoples in Mexico and is home to 16 other languages. One of Oaxaca’s exclusive school systems uses the bilingual Aboriginal schooling model, which emphasizes bilingual learning. Teachers with regional variants of Aboriginal languages produce manual learning tools for their students.
The federal government rejected in 2016 the plan of the Oaxaca teachers’ union, drawn up after months of moves and protests to oppose a package of reforms that say they would impose a single style in a state where socioeconomic situations and connectivity to fundamentals such as electricity. and water are particularly lower than in other regions.
But now the Oaxaca teachers’ union has postponed the start of the school year until September 7 and will put in place an option for television education. Logistics remains unclear, but some schools in Oaxaca have begun distributing textbooks and opening channels of communication between teachers and parents.
As millions of academics in Mexico return to school with television-broadcast classes, some teachers in Oaxaca absolutely overlook the television school with weekly worksheet brochures.
Shannon Young / The World
Adolfo Gutiérrez, an elementary school instructor in a mountain hamlet in the indigenous region of Mixe, says that the indigenous bilingual nature of schooling has lagged effects on lesson plans.
“It creates a culture and a way of how other people relate to natureArray. . . It’s a profound thing. “
It is also anything that is not easily translated into television screens produced in Mexico City. Gutierrez does not reject the concept of a television school, but says it is simply not a viable option for his students. Many do not have TVs and some sí. no there is electricity. The mountainous terrain can also block TV, Internet and cellular signals.
“Here in the community, the genuine way to teach would be to move the user with students to school. “
“Here in the community, the genuine way to teach would be to move the user with students to school. “
He says teachers will likely meet with parents to expand a plan to move forward. Suggests staggered courses and takeaway worksheets. But for face-to-face categories to resume, education and fitness officials give teachers the green tone for open schools.
And before that happens, the country will have to control the pandemic, the residents of the domain where Gutierrez lives have coVID-19 well contained through final access to foreigners and restricting them to urban domains.
Gutierrez says that if officials do not take into account the express situations and desires of rural schools and Aboriginal students, these young people will be left behind, but hopeful that parents and teachers will be able to seize the opportunity.
“There will have to be a way, ” he said. It’s just a matter of organization and not getting there. “
It remains to be noted how Oaxaca’s academics will do in the “new normal” of schooling on the occasion of a pandemic. For many, TV categories are at least one backup option that is larger than nothing.
Teachers who fiercely opposed education reform in 2016 now have little frequency to argue that a remote edition of their style of choice is better than the federal choice of television learning.
While federal officials when and how classes can be resumed in person, many teachers and parents are looking for tactics to maintain a taste for training that allows a point of interaction with televised classes that cannot be achieved.
This search for small-scale alternative solutions creates cracks in the uniformity of the federal government’s centralized model.
What is transparent is that educating the public about a pandemic in a country of enormous socioeconomic disparities requires outdoor thinking, even when that box is shaped like a flat-screen TV.
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