Research Brief: EnseñaPerú

Context:

The Peruvian educational system seeks to educate 9.4 million education students through multiple levels of government coordination. After the launch of the decentralization process in 2002, the system has operated with three levels of government with complex power dynamics: the national level (Ministry of Education), the regional level (25 Regional Departments of Education), and the local level (220 Educational Districts). While the main policy instruments - curriculum, educational evaluation and certification, and teacher career policy -  are determined at the national level, regions and districts can shape and adapt those instruments to local realities. In particular, districts handle teacher payrolls, teacher coaching and development (with regional and national intervention), and initiatives to improve education. However, historically, policy efforts have been approached fundamentally through a top-down process, and the question of the efficacy of this approach remains in light of the scarcity of methods that include bottom-up approaches.

Peru developed its breadth of skills strategy less than a decade ago in a context of constant layering of policies and extreme political instability. During the 90s, Peru did not have an official national curriculum, which was developed in 2005 after the declaration of emergency of Peruvian education in 2004. However, this first iteration was highly content-driven. It was only in 2016 that Peru decided to launch a 31-competency framework with the aim of reducing content-driven teaching and developing competencies beyond reading comprehension and math - including citizenship, collaboration, the development of identity, and the ability to prototype and conduct research. However, teachers received little to no professional development to make this curriculum a reality in classrooms, and national evaluation systems kept evaluating narrow outcomes of literacy and math (up until 2023, when the first national evaluation of socio-emotional skills was introduced, though administered and used only by the Ministry). All these changes have been layered through the hands of the 21 ministers of Education that Peru has had since 2002.

In the last iteration of the National Plan of Education - a plan that orients government policy from 2021 to 2036 - the central concept was to educate for a “plentiful citizenship”: healthy emotional life, responsible citizenship, and sustainable work; an inspiring concept at the highest level of policy. However, Peru still struggles to transform its districts' educational systems, either to excel in fundamental skills or to pursue broader outcomes.

Across the world, there is still little research to fill the gap of how to transform educational systems, particularly in understanding the conditions through which educational systems can transform to pursue broader purposes and outcomes. Furthermore, most of the research in this field does not include communities as co-researchers on how to transform their own educational settings. These are gaps that we seek to address through our research agenda.

Research aim and objectives:

This study will examine the enablers and barriers to the development of commitment and coherence in marginalized Peruvian communities that want to transform their district’s education. Moreover, the study will seek to understand how power dynamics and interrelations play a role in how individuals from different roles decide whether to commit to a collective project of education transformation. Finally, the study will collaborate with community research collectives so that the community develops its own research activists who can contribute to themselves and the world on how to transform education systems.

Approach and methods:

We will use a participatory research approach (Tandon, 1981; Cornwall & Jewkes, 1995) to collaborate with community research collectives to develop knowledge (refining research questions, defining methods, data collection and analysis, and reporting results). We will also combine that approach with a systemic approach (Bronfenbrenner, 2000) to uncover the complex dynamics of educational change beyond formal institutions and regulations.

The way in which we will define the system for this study will be the district[1]. We will choose 2 districts where we have observed a nascent and diverse collective of community members committed to transforming their educational system. Since we will focus on commitment and coherence conditions for educational transformation, the design allows each district to pursue a different educational outcome.

Our research will be empirical, and we expect most data to be qualitative (focus groups, interviews, journals, etc). We expect to draw on techniques of systems mapping, social network analysis, discourse analysis, comparative policy analysis, etc. We can also draw on documentary analysis of the national curriculum and district and school plans.

Outputs:

Short-term: We expect that some of our first research outputs towards the middle of the year will be the systems mapping of each of the two districts (compared and contrasted) and initial inquiries on what it means from the community’s perspective to transform a system, be committed, and to achieve coherence.

Medium-term: once we have a solid community diagnostic of the main power and understandings, we can move on to understanding what generates or hinders commitment and coherence within a particular district[2].

[1] Systems are complex. (see Ladyman, J., Lambert, J., & Wiesner, K. (2013). If we apply this notion to a district, we can list some of the elements that integrate this complexity: people, institutions, data points, laws, infrastructure, programs, financial resources, cultural heritages, hierarchies, incentives, punishments, beliefs, etc.

[2] We can choose, if we see fit, to address this stage as a Participatory Action Research project.