Education/News/May 2025/Simón Bolívar Teacher Training College joins the Let's Read Wikipedia Program
Simón Bolívar Teacher Training College joins the Let's Read Wikipedia Program
In May, the Escuela Superior de Formación de Maestros Simón Bolívar (ESFM - Simón Bolívar), located in the city of La Paz, joined the challenge of developing creative lesson plans to develop different media and information skills.
This new version of Leamos Wikipedia en el Aula (Let's Read Wikipedia in the Classroom) called on students between 18 and 54 years old. This group of future teachers enthusiastically expressed having had previous contact with Wikipedia and showed confidence in the contents offered by the free encyclopedia, recognizing the key role that Wikipedia has played in their own training processes.
It corroborates the importance that young people, adolescents and children give to technology and the information they receive on the Internet in their academic formation. In this sense, we believe that the training process that Leamos Wikipedia undertook with this new generation of teachers reinforces the relationship they already had with the encyclopedia, as well as allowing them to deepen their knowledge regarding its collective construction, the pillars that support it, the values and, of course, the potential it has to contribute in the classroom.
We are excited about this fact because it will also allow them to exploit Wikipedia even more for their academic training and, in the future, within the classrooms they lead. Wikipedia in the classroom, an experience of a leap into what is known and to be known in the ESFM “Simón Bolívar”.
ESFM Simón Bolívar professor Willy Zurita, a free knowledge enthusiast, collaborated with his experience in this news lettter. The following is his reflection on the development of the Leamos Wikipedia program:
Wikipedia in the classroom, an experience of a leap into what is known and to be known in the ESFM “Simon Bolivar”
By Wirob7
What follows is a reflection inspired by the experience of working in the ESFM Simon Bolivar through the project Leamos Wikipedia, in which special emphasis was placed on the relevance of this resource, in particular, towards the specialty of Values, Spirituality and Religions.
To begin with, this experience can be inscribed not only as a space to innovate in pedagogical methodologies, but also to evaluate and recognize the commitment and excellence of the work of Wikimedistas of Bolivia, who have proven to be authentic agents of change in education.
Likewise, the Escuela Superior de Formación de Maestros Simón Bolívar, with its rich history dating back to the beginning of the last century, has established itself as a bastion of teacher training in the Plurinational Education System of Bolivia. Integrating Wikipedia in the classroom in the specialty of Values, Spirituality and Religions has meant opening new doors in teaching, merging the educational tradition with the digital tools of the current era. This process has allowed both teachers and students to face contemporary challenges, exploring the updating of knowledge in a collaborative and open access environment.
The work done by Wkimedistas has been crucial in every module and stage of the project. From the design of workshops and training sessions to the implementation of strategies to improve Wikipedia content. The commitment of the community has been reflected in the development of rigorous, updated and enriched articles with a pedagogical approach.
The evaluation that can be made in this regard is very positive, highlighting that the synergy between the Wikimedians community and the ESFM Simón Bolívar not only promotes the constant updating of information on Wikipedia, but also reinforces the vocation of service and passion for education in those who participated.
Particularly, as in any experience of educational innovation, areas of opportunity have also arisen. The need has been identified to deepen the training of some teacher trainees and professors in the advanced use of digital tools, as well as to improve the feedback mechanisms to achieve an even more fluid integration between technology and pedagogy. This evaluation process has not only allowed us to recognize achievements, but also to outline improvement paths for future interventions, strengthening the idea that education is a field in constant evolution.
In addition, the implementation of Wikipedia in the Classroom has stimulated an enriching debate on the relevance of incorporating interdisciplinary discussion spaces. The collaborative practice has served as a laboratory where innovative practices that combine values and spirituality content are shared, generating a lasting impact both in the educational community and in the digital realm.
As a final reflection, it is necessary to highlight that working with the ESFM Simón Bolívar in the framework of Leamos Wikipedia has been a transformative experience for the participants who already feel part of this community. It has allowed to prove that education can be reinvented when collaboration is embraced and the experience of those who join the task is valued.
The evaluation of the work of the Wikimedistas of Bolivia shows us that, through innovative training processes, it is possible to strengthen the training of teachers, future teachers and, consequently, have a positive impact on the education of future generations.
This project is a clear example of how technology and values can coexist in perfect harmony, creating learning spaces where the cultural legacy is respected and the construction of new knowledge is promoted. The invitation is to continue exploring these paths, to innovate and to commit to an education that is, above all, human, inclusive and transformative.
Axios, ethos and mores: go ahead, values!
What comes next?
Our next steps as Wikimedistas de Bolivia is the graduation of two groups: the first one composed entirely by teachers of the Simón Bolívar 1 Educational Unit; and the second group formed by this group of teachers in training of the ESFM Simón Bolívar.
In the case of the first group, we can say that the lesson plans proposed by the teachers also demonstrate the degree of analysis of their environment: for example, teacher Zuleyka Reyes proposes to work on the comparison of the information found in the school grade book and that found on the Internet about women who participated in the independence of Bolivia. Her objective is to reflect on the gender gaps that exist in the learning texts between the contributions made by men and women, in addition to complementing information among the sources that students can find in their text and on the web.
Or, for example, the work of teacher Viviana Maidana, 6th grade teacher, who incorporates Wikipedia as a gateway to information sources for the development of the monographs that her students must complete as part of their training program, which is an important point of the program, precisely because one of our objectives is to promote its use as an important repository of information built from reliable and verifiable sources.
We will share with you how each of these two groups lives and celebrates their learning in Leamos Wikipedia.