There is a lack of character education resources created in Spanish by and for Spanish-speaking researchers and practitioners. It is common for different stakeholders in the education systems of Latin American countries to turn to North American resources. This project, led by Henry May and Nicole Bruskewitz at Coschool, aims to help address this gap by developing key resources on character education and SEL for schools, organizations, educators, researchers, and parents across the Spanish-speaking world.

Edumoción is the first professional community for educators in Latin America. It offers access to evidence-based content and capacity-building courses to help educators build character education and socio-emotional learning (SEL) into their professional practice and practice community. The Coschool team will work with three TWCF supported projects in Colombia to create content that supports the implementation and dissemination of their character education innovations via the Edumoción platform. 

The three projects are Expedición Gratitud (Sonia Carrillo, Universidad de Los Andes), Hello Insight Latin America (Antonio Merino, YMCA Latin America), and PRIMED Colombia (Henry May, Coschool). The main output will be a series of courses that aim to support the uptake of TWCF funded innovations. For example, working with the Universidad de Los Andes team, Coschool will create a master course on gratitude, which includes specific training for teachers on how to use and implement the Expedición Gratitud app. Likewise, in collaboration with the YMCA, Coschool will create a series of courses that seeks to improve the capacity of youth serving organizations to better use data in their character education programming generally, and to prepare them to use the Hello Insight Latin America survey tool, which was developed through previous TWCF funding.

The courses and content created across the Edumoción platform with this funding will be evaluated for impact via pre/post tests using these indicators: increase in knowledge about character or SEL, wellbeing and self-efficacy in teaching character or SEL. The team will use qualitative measures to determine what elements of the learning experience were most/least effective for reaching the learning outcomes, the impact of courses on professional practice/personal life, and how to improve the learning experience.

Image courtesy Coschool