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For the Colegio Americano, the school must have an environment where students find the possibility of communicating, of making decisions and an openness when faced with what they consider real and effective. In this way they will develop the capacity to face, understand and resolve problems.
The above ideas are summarized in a well-balanced combination of the principles of constructive and active pedagogy.
The five pillars of this educational focus, which the UNESCO has been promoting for several years and is still in effect our school’s teaching, are:
Learning to know:
This refers to the domain of the instruments of knowledge considered as a means of improving human life and as an end in itself. As a means, it is the instrument that makes it possible for human beings to understand the world that surrounds them, in a way that is sufficient to live with dignity, developing their capacities and communicating with others. As an end, it refers to the enjoyment of understanding, knowing, discovering, and appreciating the wonders of knowledge itself and of individual and collective research.
Learning to do:
This has the characteristics associated with learning to put knowledge into practice. Learning in reference to doing needs to evolve towards more intellectually productive tasks, which imply working and thinking.
Learning to live together:
This learning serves to identify and find ways out of conflicts, to solve them peacefully and it contributes to becoming conscious of similarities and interdependencies that exist among all human beings, and, especially, of ethnic and regional realities. It means learning to live in the Ecuadorian, Latin American and world reality, which is multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and has great regional diversities.
Learning to be:
This refers to the contribution that education should make for the global development of each person: body and mind, intelligence, sensitivity, esthetic sense, ethical responsibility, and spirituality. Thanks to education, all human beings should be empowered to have autonomous and critical thinking, to make their own judgments, and to decide for themselves what they should do in different circumstances of life in order to become better people.
Learning to take action:
This refers to the development of capacities to initiate new challenges that contribute to permanent development, to have a vision, to imagine the future and faced with it, act as required. It means becoming proactive in uncertain and constantly changing conditions.
These five principles guide the methodological organization that the Colegio Americano has implemented and which is applied by means of:
- Implementation of a curriculum that conceives of the human as a cultural, historical and social being, with thought and language. This is carried out in the macro-curricular as well as the micro-curricular design.
This implies developing a holistic curriculum that looks for links between different areas of knowledge, based on research. It provides an education that, on the one hand, tries to conserve and recreate some traditional values and, on the other, tries to serve as an instrument of change within society.
If we consider mankind as a cultural, historical social being, we are essentially contemplating the curriculum of the relations between education and society. For that reason, from the macro planning that determines the profile of the graduates to the preparation of class plans or syllabi, we try to respond to the deeds and demands that society and its institutions present to the Colegio Americano.
- Training teachers and students so that they are alert to advances in science and technological applications and in humanities, and are able to put theoretical knowledge and artistic-social and cultural tasks into practice.
- At the same time, the actions of the School, its sections and each teacher try to promote the desire to learn and the love of knowledge in the children and young people we educate. This begins with a positive interaction through psycho-motor activities, preparation for reading and writing, arithmetic, children’s esthetics, bases of intelligence and the socio-affectivity of the preschool child, reaching critical creativity and discipline in the adolescent. It passes through the incentives of organization and group work, setting the bases for reasoning, which have been prepared beginning in primary school. All of this takes the developmental stage of the student into consideration.
According to this explanation, the methodological model of the Colegio Americano can be seen in the attached scheme:
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