Vía Educación (Spring 2021)

Project Background:

Vía Educación is a non-profit organization in Mexico seeking to improve people’s quality of life by promoting sustainable social development through education. The organization believes that every person is capable of improving their opportunities in life as well as those of their communities. The organization’s main objective is to implement best practices and share knowledge related to quality education and social transformation from an interdisciplinary and systemic perspective. It has a professional team of more than 40 collaborators in seven cities of the country, committed to equal opportunities for quality education, the development of communities and families, human rights, respect for the dignity of people and confidence in their transformation potential.  Since its beginnings, the organization has placed a strong focus on research and the evaluation of its programs. This year, the Monitoring, Learning & Evaluation team is transitioning and expanding into a laboratory of social innovation. Among other things, the lab will focus on designing innovations and generating evidence to inform and address social and educational challenges. 

Opportunity:

 Vía Educación seeks to collaborate with the DAT Team in carrying out a comparative study of the educational context and indicators in the two Mexican states of Nuevo León and Yucatán. Some of the questions to explore are:  (1) What are the challenges that the education systems in these states are facing/will face because of the school closures to prevent the spread of COVID-19? and (2) What are some actions and innovations that may help overcome these challenges? Thus, Vía Educación would like the DAT team to contribute to these by providing initial inputs to deepen the understanding of the context in such states and to have a basis to design innovations that respond to their educational needs.

 

Definition of Success:

Working with the Notre Dame DAT, Vía hopes to be inspired to design and implement new responses to the educational opportunities of the five targeted states by having a first analysis of each state and some initial ideas of forward-thinking practices worth exploring.

Meet the Team:

Final Deliverables:

Final Presentation

One-Pager

Letter Writing Guidelines

Deportes de Comunidades

Vía Educación (Fall 2020)

Project Background:

Vía Educación is a non-profit organization in Mexico seeking to improve people’s quality of life by promoting sustainable social development through education. The organization believes that every person is capable of improving their opportunities in life as well as those of their communities. Vía Educación implements Learning Communities, a project whose model is founded on 30+ years of research and practice by the Community of Research on Excellence for All (“CREA”) at the University of Barcelona. The model involves “implementing ‘Successful Educational Actions’ (SEAs) characterized by reorganizing the available resources in the school and the community to support all pupils’ academic achievement” (Flecha, Soler, 2013).  The model is implemented internationally through different implementing partners in countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Spain, Perú, among others. Vía Educación is the implementing partner in Mexico, working with nearly 200 public elementary and middle schools across 8 states in Mexico as of July 2019.

Opportunity:

Via is interested in expanding its work in citizenship education, and would like the team to review mechanisms for citizenship education in non-formal spaces around the world.  We are developing a collaboration with a local Mexican organization focused on civic participation in neighborhoods to broaden the reach of our community programs. It would be great to have a review of what other organizations are doing, their theory of change, a comparison among the different initiatives, innovatives and high-impact practices and implementations, and some insights on how it could be adapted to Mexico. DAT students will have support from Via not only in providing information and responding to questions, but also in connecting the team with stakeholders for interviews and surveys, etc.

Definition of Success:

Working with the Notre Dame DAT, VIA hopes to be inspired to expand its work on citizen education, identifying best practices both globally and in Mexico in citizenship education as well as presenting the ideas in ways that are engaging with and attractive to policymakers and administrators.

Meet the Team:

Final Deliverable

Final Deliverable - VIA F2020 by DAT on Scribd

Vía Educación (Spring 2020)

Project Background:

Vía Educación is a non-profit organization in Mexico seeking to improve people’s quality of life by promoting sustainable social development through education. The organization believes that every person is capable of improving their opportunities in life as well as those of their communities. Vía Educación implements Learning Communities, a project whose model is founded on 30+ years of research and practice by the Community of Research on Excellence for All (“CREA”) at the University of Barcelona. The model involves “implementing ‘Successful Educational Actions’ (SEAs) characterized by reorganizing the available resources in the school and the community to support all pupils’ academic achievement” (Flecha, Soler, 2013).  The model is implemented internationally through different implementing partners in countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Spain, Perú, among others. Vía Educación is the implementing partner in Mexico, working with nearly 200 public elementary and middle schools across 8 states in Mexico as of July 2019.

Definition of Opportunity:

The Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) team at Vía Educación would like to understand the link between these programs and academic achievement. Are the schools involved in this program scoring higher on standardized test scores than they did before they were implementing the program? While the model’s theoretical background asserts that schools implementing SEAs improve their academic achievement, we would like to explore this relationship in practice. An important thing to keep in mind is that the implementation in the 200 schools in Mexico is not homogenous across all schools - rather, schools choose which of the 7 SEAs they want to incorporate into their school. 

What does success look like? 

Success for us would look like a clearer picture of the relationship (with evidence) between the program and academic achievement, that we could use to support the theoretical arguments behind this program. This project is an opportunity to collaborate with a successful educational program as well as an opportunity to put in practice your data analysis abilities (mostly quantitative) to empirically demonstrate the relationship between the program and academic achievement.

Meet the Team:

- VIA Educacion (Fall 2019)

Project Background:

 Vía Educación is a non-profit organization in Mexico seeking to improve people’s quality of life by promoting sustainable social development through education. The organization believes that every person is capable of improving their opportunities in life as well as those of their communities. 

Vía Educación developed a methodology for social transformation based on building problem-solving capacities on communities of youth and adults. The methodology aims to increase individual and collective self-efficacy among community members; develop civic competencies through solving relevant community needs; and strengthen social capital. This methodology is the backbone of the organization and is applied in a variety of programs and settings in Mexico. 

Definition of Opportunity:

With that in mind, the Investigation and Evaluation team at Vía Educación would like to explore the link between these acquired skills (teamwork, democratic and citizenship participation, conflict resolution, assertive communication, collective organization skills, among others) and mobility (social, educational, economic). An emerging body of literature suggests that civic engagement may affect peoples’ wellbeing. Are our participants expanding their opportunities in life? The team would like to further learn about this, and even possibly incorporate a tool we could apply with our alumni network and current participants to test this potential relationship. 

What does success look like? 

Success for us would look like a clearer picture of the relationship between civic participation skills and mobility (e.g. a couple of pages concisely stating what literature has to say about this relationship as well as the mechanisms behind it – that is, if there is a positive relationship, how do civic participation skills contribute to expanding an individual’s opportunities in life?). We also would appreciate a concrete tool that we could use to test in the field to measure this relationship in a variety of settings (e.g. urban, indigenous, marginalized, rural communities, etc.) and populations (from students in high school to teachers and authorities in Mexico’s public school system as well as neighborhood community members).

Meet the Team:

View fullsize