Argentina-Education Assignment

Analysis of the Ministry of Education Online Education Portal

The objective of the Edu.ar portal website is to provide Open Educational Resources (OER) to make education more accessible and inclusive for all children in the K-12 grades in Argentina. It provides a great deal of resources such as lesson plans, case studies, video material to support some lessons, and training material for teachers. The materials are available for use without restriction, which means that teachers can use them “as is,” modify them according to their needs and distribute as needed. There is a wide variety of resources on many different topics as well as references for further study.

One of the resources that I found particularly useful was “La clase del día: la conquista de américa desde la mirada indígena.” The lesson includes a short reading from Victor Heredia’s book Taki Ongoy. La verdadera historia de la Conquista. Heredia provides a personal account from an indigenous perspective of the intrusion of the Spanish soldiers into their land. The story vividly describes the horror inflicted upon the indigenous inhabitants and the slow destruction of their previously pristine homeland. The questions posed at the end of the reading are quite effective because they invite the reader to question the commonly held assumptions of October 12 as a day of “discovery.”

 Given the topic of our trip, I reviewed several materials related to gender and sex education.  I found them to be quite useful in the sense that they tackled sensitive topics but in a clear and concise format (most of the lessons are short).  For some of them, particularly those related to teenage pregnancy, I think it would have been better to have a female narrator to make a stronger connection with the prospective mothers.  I am not sure why they elected to have men doing it.  Overall, the videos were quite instructive.