HAMK Edu and Global Education celebrate successful co-operation in The Dominican Republic
HAMK Edu and HAMK Global Education have led a reform program of vocational education and management in co-operation with INFOTEP in The Dominican Republic. The partners organized a closing seminar and a conference for observing project’s achievements recently in Santo Domingo.
We had a great joy to travel to The Dominican Republic to close INFOTEP’s (Instituto Nacional de Formación Técnico Profesional) two-year program “Programa de Desarrollo de Educación Vocacional” in February 2020 with my colleagues and co-trainers Pirjo Tuominen and Nana Niskanen. The program was an initiative of Mr. Rafael Ovalles, and it was managed by Mrs. Maura Corporan from INFOTEP. My inspiring duty has been to lead the pedagogical process of the program. The event at Santo Domingo was also a celebration of INFOTEP’s latest publication, the new pedagogical model, which was co-created and experimented during the development process.
The HAMK delegation was led by Director of Global Education Maaret Viskari and Vice Principal Heidi Ahokallio-Leppälä, who also gave a key note speech on continuous learning in INFOTEP’s 1500-participant educational conference. Maaret Viskari introduced the pedagogical model to the audience, and gave several practical examples how it is implemented in INFOTEP in different regions of the country.
Our partners at work, Dominican educators and managers, have done a remarkable job in developing educational solutions to local challenges in:
– management,
– teacher training,
– curriculum development,
– developing digital skills of teachers and students,
– decreasing drop-out rates and preventing social exclusion,
– in strengthening collaboration between companies and the institutions,
– in personalizing studies,
– in learning environment development,
– in competence / skills demonstrations and
– in strengthening flexibility and student autonomy.
The localization of the educational development in the program has been supported by HAMK team by continuous guidance process based on the design principles of 1) context-sensitive dialogical approach, 2) focus on educational challenges of practice and 3) a concern to develop capacity to sustaining change in systems (Ryymin, 2018).
We had also an interesting opportunity to visit in schools and dialogue with students and teachers how they feel about renewals, e.g. in the famous institution of culinary and hotel management of INFOTEP in Higüey. Further, we are more than happy to continue the collaboration with new initiatives.
Text and more information:
Essi Ryymin, Project Manager
Mobile: +358 50 461 7557
E-mail: firstname.lastname@hamk.fi
Photos: INFOTEP
Further readings:
Ryymin, E. (2018). Dialogue, Data, Design – How Global Education Research and Development Drives Educational Innovations. HAMK Unlimited Journal 19.11.2018:
https://unlimited.hamk.fi/ammatillinen-osaaminen-ja-opetus/dialogue-data-design/
Collaboration with The Dominican Republic Continues – Photo Gallery of the Study Visit in Finland:
https://blog.hamk.fi/global-education/collaboration-with-dominican-republic-continues-photo-gallery-from-finnish-study-week/
The Dominican Republic and Finland: New Training Programme for Educational Developers:
https://blog.hamk.fi/global-education/the-dominican-republic-and-finland-new-training-programme-for-educational-developers/
The Showcase blog of the Dominican development projects in Spanish (on the process):
https://blog.hamk.fi/infotep/
