40 Participants Selected for 2008 Inter-American Partnership for Education

 

A select group of English language teachers from public schools and public universities throughout Mexico will be traveling to Hanover, NH this summer for the 2008 program of the Inter-American Partnership for Education (IAPE).  The IAPE is a Clinton Global Initiative Commitment and is a program of Fundación Televisa, Nextel de México, the Rassias Foundation at Dartmouth College, and Worldfund.  The forty participants will engage in twelve days of professional development seminars, workshops, and dialogues with leading educators.  All program expenses, including airfare, meals, and lodging will be fully-funded by the program sponsors.

I have just returned from Mexico where, along with my colleagues Helene Rassias-Miles, Executive Director of the Rassias Foundation at Dartmouth College, and Elena Espinosa de los Reyes, Director of Worldfund in Mexico, I had the opportunity to meet individually with nearly sixty finalists for this program.  Screened from an original pool of over 120 applicants, the finalists represented elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, and universities from Chiapas to Chihuahua and everywhere in between.  They teach in a one-room rural schoolhouse; in telesecundarias; in schools in tough urban neighborhoods; in a boarding school for troubled youths, and in schools with large indigenous populations. They include teachers who are just completing their undergraduate degrees and those who have been teaching for nearly thirty years.  They include classroom teachers, district supervisors, and university-level teacher trainers.  What the final group of forty participants has in common is a passionate commitment to transforming English language education in Mexico.  One teacher traveled ten hours each way by bus for her interview.  Another, when asked if she could anticipate any reason that she might not be able to participate were she to be selected, responded without hesitation, "Only if I die.  But then you can still have my ashes."

All participants have made a three-year commitment to the field of English-language teaching at public institutions in Mexico and to mentoring, observation, feedback, and community outreach as part of the IAPE community of educators.

Jim Citron, Director, Inter-American Partnership for Education, May 2008