Innovation in Colombia

Since its inception, the Alberto Merani Institute has defined new goals for education, conceived a new curriculum, a different type of school, developed its own textbooks, and generated a novel assessment system. Therefore, we can say that the Merani Institute is a pedagogical innovation, as it defined new purposes, content, sequences, and new assessment systems.

Over these thirty years, we have tested a new pedagogical proposal, which we have called Dialoguing Pedagogy (De Zubiría, 2006b). Initially, we called it Conceptual Pedagogy (De Zubiría and De Zubiría, 1986); however, the developments we made to the initial proposal over the last decade forced us to change its name to better reflect the pedagogical approach we advocate today.

But to get here, it was necessary to test each of the initial ideas and, thanks to follow-up and research, to review, adjust, and validate the initial proposal.

We still remember the expressions of the first teachers who accompanied us in the creation of the IAM when they said that the institution caused them enormous anguish and fear, knowing that what was true today might not be true tomorrow, and that what was being told to parents, teachers, and students today might be interpreted differently tomorrow. Most human beings cannot tolerate ambiguity, cannot navigate uncertain terrain, and become stressed when they have to navigate unstable, changing, and flexible terrain.

Creativity in a conformist culture is much scarcer than we think. And innovations are profoundly creative, as they test new purposes, new content, and new ways of teaching. And in doing so, they must be subjected to validation. Some of them work, and others don't. Innovations that have monitoring and research systems—like Merani—can gradually correct and improve initial ideas; they can adjust and modify them, so that over time they mature and become consolidated.

However, most innovations fail to implement monitoring and research programs, and as a result, they tend to disappear. It is estimated that five years after their creation, 95% of innovations in Colombia cease to exist, having been absorbed by traditional schools, largely because they accept the pressure they receive from the Ministry of Education (MEN) and parents. That has not happened to Merani, and twenty years later, it continues to innovate and seek new ways to continue improving the quality of the education it provides.

What has Merani innovated?
Traditional school has focused on teaching a multitude of information, irrelevant to the current era, decontextualized and disjointed. The vast majority of this information fails to be stored in children's brains, and in most cases, school becomes a profoundly boring space for learning facts that mean almost nothing to students, and which are readily available to most of them through global information networks. Traditional school is designed for a world that no longer exists, one in which computers, calculators, textbooks, or external memory were supposedly absent; a world extremely different from the fast-paced and profoundly changing world in which we once lived.

Since its inception, Merani wanted to build a very different school. A school with different purposes, different content, different textbooks, and different assessment systems. From the beginning, we believed in creating a school that fostered the development of thinking, that would develop young people who were more independent, more creative, and more interested in knowledge. We wanted to create a school where children would understand and comprehend each of the content covered, and where the development achieved was not merely cognitive. This shift in educational objectives generated a necessary modification in the curricular content and sequences, and a new type of educational institution. This is where Merani's innovation lies. In a word, Merani prioritized development over learning, as its pedagogical approach postulates today: Dialoguing Pedagogy (De Zubiría, 2006b).