El Niño, a phenomenon with opportunities

Learning history and valuing community assets for an empowering digital
curriculum in northern Peru

The project expands the reach and enhances the impact of a prize-winning, on-line, educational innovation in environmental storytelling about the El Niño Phenomenon (ENP). This initiative was piloted in June 2019 as part of participatory qualitative data collection for AHRC project “Fishing and Farming in the Desert? A Platform for Understanding el Niño Food System Opportunities in the Context of Climate Change in Sechura, Peru”, and in response to COVID-19 restrictions on face-to-face, in person teaching in Peru. On-going research is exploring how livelihoods in poor communities have historically taken advantage of ENP rains and temporary lagoons that form in the Sechura desert. “A phenomenon with opportunities” targets secondary school students in Sechura province (northern Peru), where 61.9% of the population live in poverty. Here, the state has identified low education rates as a key dimension of poor levels of social inclusion (MIDIS 2013). Working with Peruvian NGO collaborator PRISMA, the Unidad de Gestión Educativa ([UGEL]: Sechura School Board) and a desert secondary school, Instituto Educacional Daniel Alcides Carrión, storytelling training will develop on-line, digital, and research skills for more students and scale-up this experience to impact curriculum development for 154 schools and 21,059 students in the wider Sechura area. In so doing, it addresses urgent concerns about the unequal impacts of COVID-19 on learning opportunities globally.

Project Aim

The project aims to build on and expand the reach of the success of the pilot developed in the ‘Farming and fishing in the desert’ project, pilot that is a prize-winning, on-line educational innovation around storytelling in Sechura, a desert region of northern Peru

Project Objectives

1

Expand the pilot experience to date in Daniel Alcidez Carrion School (IE DAC) to all secondary cohorts .

2

Scale this experience up throughout the Unidad de Gestión Educativa (UGEL).

3

Act as a focal point and catalyst for developing National Curriculum dialogue and resources on El Niño and climate resilience in Peru and UK .

4

Open new heritage spaces through innovative partnerships with a local ethnographic museum and an outdoor eco-park.

Project Funded by: