“I think the DIA class gave us all something,
and it was something different for each of us; what it left me was something I
never, ever used to do: thinking about what I say.”
Julio César Estrada
This program was selected
because of its potential for creating, within elementary school classrooms (in
both the public and private sectors), an environment of freedom, expression,
and communication, based on the appreciation of the plastic arts.
It is also notable because
it shows how a private company, acting with social awareness, has succeeded in
developing, through plastic art, a form of public-private cooperation for
strengthening esthetic education.
GOALS SOUGHT
The general objectives of
this program are the following:
- Incorporating art as a means to achieve human development.
- Training DIA (Development of Intelligence through Art) teachers as mediators with a transcendent vision of education and who are open toward adapting their teaching practices and bolstering learning and development processes.
- Promoting their own integral development and that of their students through exercising four areas of skills: cognitive, communicational, affective, and social.
- Creating a place of learning that fosters in teachers the capacity for pedagogical mediation to develop skills, dialogue, and the collective construction of knowledge, in an atmosphere of harmony and respect.
WHAT IT INVOLVES
The DIA program is a didactic methodology that uses visual art as a
stimulus for developing the intelligence of students and teachers. It involves
creating a dialogue about works of visual art within an environment that allows
the free expression of experiences, opinions, and knowledge, in which the
teacher-mediator – by encouraging the construction of learning and the
development of cognitive, affective, communicational, and social skills –
motivates active participation by the students.
DIA classes
are weekly 50-minute sessions, held throughout the school year during the six
grades of primary education.
The program covers three developmental stages for the
students: language for learning, imagination for understanding, and
interpretation and construction of meanings. It also provides three levels of
training for teachers, monitors, and facilitators: sensitization, observation
and active listening, and meaningful dialogue and collective construction of
knowledge. Specialized programs in literacy, arts appreciation and parents are
also offered.
TARGET AUDIENCE
The DIA program has different kinds of beneficiaries in various areas:
- The teachers, who are trained by the program and who include, in the classrooms of public and private schools, the capacity for pedagogical mediation through visual art;
- The monitors or principals and directors of schools and organizations, who provide the teachers with monitoring and assistance; and
- The facilitators, who replicate the program by training teachers and monitors. These teachers mainly serve children in preschool, primary, and secondary education. Also, the DIA Program works in other non-school environments – such as shelters, museums and libraries, prisons, and other community forums – serving the needs of disabled children, indigenous populations, etc.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Building a sense of
citizenship demands the ability to reflect and to dialogue. In DIA classes, the inherent skills needed for those processes are
encouraged, including: systematic
observation, understanding, the construction of hypotheses, and debate; the
security needed to express an opinion; attention to what one is trying to
communicate and to do so in a clear, structured, and assertive way; listening,
openness, respect for the ideas of others; and the self-regulation of actions.
Through the methodology of the DIA program, teachers create a learning
environment in which the students’ ideas are heard, respected, and appreciated,
knowledge is built, and different situations are explored with awareness,
creativity, and a critical attitude.
COMMUNITY
PARTICIPATION
The DIA program has
progressed hand-in-hand with the facilitators, teachers, and students. It is
they who, with daily practice and the discoveries they make, set the guidelines
for adapting the methodology to each different classroom and to each group of
people with whom they work.
TEACHERS’ PROFILE
School teachers, mediators,
museum docents, cultural promoters, and preschool, primary-, and
secondary-school teachers receive training to work and embrace the DIA
methodology.
These teachers’ profiles
change significantly as they open up to new strategies for communication,
perception, and skill development to encourage their students to express
themselves and to investigate, and to construct language and thought, thereby
helping create a place of diversity where they can tell their own stories and
express their imaginations.
Training for DIA teachers
involves 20 classroom hours and 12 hours of practice and feedback; it offers
the know-how and skills necessary to put into practice the pedagogical
mediation methodology proposed in the program.
INVESTMENT AND FINANCING
The program is funded
through the sale of its products and by public and private sponsorship. It
invests an annual amount of one million, one hundred and thirty-eight thousand
(1,138,000) U.S. dollars.
EVALUATION AND RESULTS
The impact of the DIA
program was assessed between 1998 and 2008, through different quantitative and
qualitative investigations that made use of case studies and comparative
studies:
- “Impact of the DIA Program on modifying the intellectual, affective, social, and communicational skills of school-children” (carried out by the Tanesque Educational Center in three stages, which lasted three years and three and a half months (1998-2001).
- “Evaluation of the DIA Program at the preschool level” (conducted during the 2003-2005 school year by De la Riva Consultants and volunteer teachers from the National Kindergarten Teachers’ School)
- “Impact assessment of the DIA Program. Case study: Catorce de Abril primary school” (carried out between 2007 and 2008 by a research team under the coordination of Dr. Adriana Andrade Frich, a researcher at the Ibero-American University). The main findings of this evaluation were organized according to the program’s results among teachers and pupils.
- “Evaluation of the dia workshop Kaleidoscope ‘The Art of Seeing’” (carried out by the Department of Academic Development, Secretariat of Medical Education, Faculty of Medicine, UNAM). Capacity-building in boys and girls was corroborated in order for them to have a subjective perspective about human beings, recognize that each person perceives the world differently, and improve their capacity to observe.Taking into consideration the results and conclusions of the research, we can assure that dia creates the knowledge learning, abilities, attitudes and values needed to have thoughtful, active, respectful, open and supportive students. Likewise, teachers have demonstrated to have developed capacities for mediation and to build learning environments for dialogue and knowledge-building.
RISK FACTORS
According to the
institution behind the DIA program, it faces challenges that could be
considered structural:
- Restriction on the participation of private institutions in the implementation of new educational methodologies in school practices.
- Resource limitations that may be due to low sponsorship levels from private institutions that support low income schools and institutions.
- Difficulty to give continuity within each institution due to regulatory problems; this impacts the permanence of teachers and principals at schools, together with that of the education authorities.
FUTURE PLANS
Expand the work that is being developed to other contexts, and
begin implementing a new and extensive impact research. Also, this program
plans to prepare three training projects:
- DIA Parents’ Council, a proposal to provide parents with a forum for dialogue, reflection, learning, and coexistence.
- DIA Language and Expression, a proposal to encourage the pleasure of reading among primary-school children, build their reading comprehension, and foster creative writing.
- DIA Art, an opportunity to create, appreciate, discover, analyze, and criticize different periods in art history.
In 2012, progress was also
made with the consolidation of the program; for example, with the publication
of the book DIA 1, which includes updates to the methodology. In addition,
progress was made with strengthening the DIA
community with on-site and distance monitoring, and with the development of
strategic alliances with national and international institutions.
Another future plan is to
expand the project by extending its work with at-risk children and adolescents
who suffer from either chronic or terminal illnesses, cognitive disabilities,
or socio-cultural disadvantages.
REPLICATION POTENTIAL
For 15 years this
initiative has been impacting formal and nonformal public and private
education, covering thirty (30) of the thirty-two (32) states of the Mexican
Republic, around three thousand (3,000) basic-education schools (mostly at the
primary level), and fifty-three (53) centers of tertiary education. It has
trained more than five hundred (500) DIA facilitators, and two thousand,
three hundred (2,300) monitors who monitor and assist almost twenty-five
thousand (25,000) DIA teachers, with an impact on six hundred thousand
(600,000) basic-education students and more than twenty-seven thousand (27,000)
higher-education students.
In 2009, the program
embarked on a new phase with the inclusion of the teacher-training colleges for
primary-school teachers. As of 2011, around fifty (50) teacher-training
colleges have been served and one hundred and forty (140) professors have been
trained as DIA teachers.
PERSON IN CHARGE: Edwin Triujeque Woods, Academic Coordinator.La Vaca Independiente, S.A. de C.V. (Private
institution at the national level.) nerwic@lavaca.edu.mx
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