The Gimnasio Moderno, faithful to its founding principles, understands that education is not thought from static and immovable categories, but from its permanent challenges. Don Agustín already pointed it out: “Gimnasio, we call it, thinking about the activity of the body and the spirit. Modern, we add, as if to feel obliged to keep on continual renewal. ” Academic strengthening starts from understanding the development of students in all its dimensions, because educating is more than teaching intellectual skills. Educating the person as a whole implies stimulating and developing their emotional, social and ethical skills, taking into account the potentialities that are specific to each person.
An innovative, challenging and useful curriculum
In order to achieve an education focused on the development of each person, their relationships with others and with the world, by 2027, the school will have an interdisciplinary curriculum that recognizes the problems of the environment and that provides students real experiences from cooperative projects, in national and also, international learning networks.
It is about building, between teachers and administrators, students and parents, a dynamic and flexible curriculum that allows students to develop their skills in the social, environmental, intellectual, ethical, emotional and practical fields. Communities of student-teachers, teacher-teachers, teachers and universities (local and international) will allow to consolidate the spirit of dialogue that characterizes this community, a school with open doors to different cultures and knowledge. The intellectual production of the research centers for community and social development will be projected.
Student and teacher roles
We believe that the Active School, reconfigured from the pedagogical developments of more than a hundred years, has absolute validity in its fundamental purpose, which is the leading role of the child and adolescent in their learning processes. In the Gimnasio Moderno, students are educated for their own development, in environments of freedom and that recognize the differences of each person. The teacher contributes to academic strengthening because it allows students to find meaningful experiences for themselves, designing conducive learning environments. Today’s student, like the one in 2027, will not only have the possibility to explore the world through his interests, but will also find himself in need of solving problems that affect us all. By strengthening the “inner being” of each student and developing their individuality, empathy and self-knowledge, this approach will strengthen collaborative learning, within the framework of balanced management of cutting-edge technologies.
In order to rise to these challenges, the good teacher is open to review his practices in a constant dialogue with other colleagues, starting with those at school, with whom he must work on projects and in his classes, but also with other teachers in the classroom. country and the world that can enrich their exercise. In education, as in many other fields, renewal has been notable in recent years, and it is hoped that this development will not stop in 2027. A teacher must permanently update his pedagogical and didactic knowledge, giving another meaning to its exercise, integrating the areas of knowledge and the different languages, the formative and the academic, the new technologies and the memory of the past.
ICT: Educating in the age of applications
ICT has transformed what happens in the classroom. They have also transformed our relationship with knowledge. The school, in order to rise to these challenges, that doesn’t mean anything different than to better understand the world in which the students live, carried out an investigation to envision these challenges (See: Educating in the Age of Applications) that was consolidated in an ICT project. Currently it prepares teachers for a pedagogical integration of technologies in the classroom, and students, as an integral part of their education, receive Mindcraft training from the earliest ages.
In the future, we dream of a curriculum where technologies go through the pedagogical act. We find in them, despite their risks, an unbeatable opportunity to educate in difference and creativity. By 2027 the school faces the following challenges
- Generation of educational innovations within classrooms, fully integrating new technologies.
- Design of online courses, in association with universities and other institutions in the world, in addition to the selection and use of existing material thanks to virtual channels.
- Implement an online resource center for teachers and students for all academic areas of the school.
- Enabling spaces for the construction of innovative proposals in education, in a permanent dialogue between western and eastern proposals on education.
- An identity marked by cultures, recognition of others, understanding of diversity.
Pedagogical Approach
The pedagogical approach of the school would aim for:
- A student-centered educational approach that rescues the principles of the Active School.
- An approach that goes beyond the disciplinary fields of the knowledge areas.
- An approach om learning how to learn.
- An approach in which the school is no longer focused on teaching to focus on learning for each student.
- An approach that takes into account the formative assessment , where emphasis is placed on the developments achieved.
- A model that fosters different didactic modalities, articulated with the purposes of the development of each student and the resolution of problems and conflicts.
- An approach that conceives reading and writing as social practices, fundamental to interpret, criticize and transform the world.
- An approach that claims the importance of mathematical and scientific knowledge to understand and transform the world.
- An approach that takes advantage of ICT for a more differentiated education, protecting the privacy of students, enhancing creativity and interaction with the world, diversity and cooperative work.
This post is also available in: Spanish