Stories from the other side of the world

Work, work, work,work,work…. (picture Rihanna singing this lol )

On my last post, I mentioned that I was supporting the development of a handbook on Lifelong Learning. The past Thursday and Friday the staff, interns and me, met with the authors of the handbook to revise the chapters they have written. Those couple of days were long and intense as we discussed every single component of the handbook; nevertheless, I found them very interesting. As each author explained how they envisioned the chapters they wrote, I was able to get the full picture of what they wanted to convey in each one of them. I had read those chapters several times before. With my team, we had meetings in which we discussed the things that we thought should be change in order to meet our needs. However, all of this changed after this meeting, or at least it changed for me. As I heard each author speak about their conception of lifelong learning, it challenge my own thoughts about what this term encompasses as well as how policies should be implemented on everyday life to actually lead to change. I ended up with 10 or more pages of notes and with a lot of questions… But I think the main question, is how much can actually a document/handbook/guideline actually change patterns and customs of a society. In other words how can we assure that policies are put into practice and if they are put into practice, how can we assure that they are being implemented in the way that they were intended, especially in the context of developing countries… And I know that we have monitoring and evaluation and myriad of assessments that could be implemented to check this, but still I don’t think I have a comprehensive answer for that question…

Expert’s meeting

Besides the handbook, I have been reading and commenting on the draft of a report on Recognition Validation and Accreditation (RVA)of Non-Formal education in a selected country of Latin America. The draft is part of a compilation of reports/case studies that are been written on the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) regions. In my first year at Penn, I took a couple of classes in which I engaged with the the topic of non-formal education. So it has been an interesting experience for me to learn what are the tools that have been used to measure the outcomes of non formal education. Apparently Europeans are experts on this subjects. Also, some countries in Africa and Asia have been working with the RVA of non-formal policies for a long time while in the LAC region is still a pretty new concept. So, I believe it will be really interesting to see, the proposals on RVA of non-formal education that come up once this report gets finish.

A little fun never kill nobody 😉

One of the advantages of been in Europe is that it’s pretty easy (as long as you don’t experience issues with some airlines) to travel to other countries. I think that one my new hobbies is to check the RyanAir app and see how much would it cost to travel around. So far, I visited Italy (Venice) and Malta (Valleta) Both places are B E A U T I F U L and each of them provably deserve their own posts, so I’ll try to keep it keep it short and just share some pictures and interesting facts.

Venice:

It has more than 150 canals and over 400 little islands. Water transit is a real thing. Although, gondolas are mainly for tourists, there are a tons of water taxis, ferries, and so on. Most of the movement of the island happens in the water. Venice has the best gelato of the world (this might be biased, but seriously I’ve never had anything yummier before)

Piazza de San Marco

Burano

Gondola trip

Malta:

It was the second country most bombarded during WWII. Is the smallest country of the EU.The official languages are English and Maltese. Maltese is a combination of Arabic, Italian and Spanish. Is a very religious country, it has more than 300 churches.