20th International Service-Learning Conference
The Conference was opened by the Minister of Education Dr. Alejandro Finocchiaro and the President of CLAYSS, Agronomist Eng. María Alejandra Herrero, with UCA authorities. The Plenary was followed by the pleanry" Balance of the last 20 years: Contributions of Service-Learning to an inclusive and quality education", with the participation of Mr. Daniel Filmus, MERCOSUR Member of Parliament who rescued Paulo Freire as "central axis of Service-Learning" and the importance of supporting the community, which "should not be an extracurricular activity, it should be part of the community. Mr. Hugo Alberto Labate, Director of Learning Design of the Ministry of Education of Argentina, justified the trajectory and validity of Service-Learning in the education system for its relevance to the needs of educators and institutions, and the technical and the political support to sustain it as a state policy. The session was moderated by Prof. María Nieves Tapia, who later gave her talk "Innovation and educational tradition in Latin America and the world". Rescuing the importance of International Conferences, Prof. Tapia defined this meeting as "a great bonfire around which we tell our stories", and then she stated "what convinced the educators `to face projects of Service-Learning in their institutions was the story of experiences of Service-Learning in the voice of other educators".
In the afternoon, in parallel to the general activities, public officials and members of organizations from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Paraguay, Spain Uruguay related to Education met to discuss the "III Forum on Public Policies for Service-Learning". The activities of the first day ended with the panel "The impact of Service-Learning on the voice of alumni". Nelson Ceballos, a former student at the "Banda del Río Salí" Business School in the Province of Tucumán, summed up the importance of participating in these projects: “I had no previous experience. It was the first and most important. Oscar Roldán, a former student at Reynaldo Merín School 4-124 in Mendoza, reflected on the impact that the project he participated in had on him: “We didn't believe the magnitude of what we were doing. I dropped a blindfold from my eyes".
On the second day, as in previous years, the first panel was dedicated to the "Award winning experiences of the Solidarity Schools Presidential Award" 2016 in Argentina and the "Solidarity Education" Contest in Uruguay, moderated by Ignacio Hernaiz, Director of the OEI-Mercosur Office in Uruguay. The plenary session was followed by a presentation on "How Service-Learning networks spread around the world.", in which Roser Batlle (Spanish Service-Learning network), Amy Meuers (National Youth Leadership Council, USA), Alzbeta Brozmanova Gregorova (Universidad Matej Bel, Banska Bystrica, Slovakia) and Natacha Pino (REASE, Chilean Service-Learning network) spoke. The panel was moderated by Enrique Ochoa, Executive Director of CLAYSS.
Both days had concurrent sessions on different disciplines and themes associated with solidarity education projects and the last one included a "Meeting of Solidarity Students", who shared with their peers the projects they develop in their institutions and then read the conclusions to the participants of the Conference before the closing activities. In the closure, Dr. Andrew Furco, associate vice-rector of the University of Minnesota, stressed that he considers Argentine and Latin American experiences to be "the best in the world," and reflected on the impact of Service-Learning that "together with values can change a person's life. Max Gulmanelli, Secretary of Educational Management of the Ministry of Education, pointed out that Service-Learning "is a way of building justice and citizenship.
All presentations of the Conference can be downloaded (in Spanish) here. The videos of the plenary lectures are being uploaded to our YouTube Channel.
