A series of professionally made DVDs

The collected materials represent a rich source of cultural heritage about Bolivia’s indigenous people. Once the books, photos and videos have been systemised, it was thought to use them to develop interactive educational materials for primary and secondary education. This resulted in the production of a series of 5 DVDs on different indigenous communities in the Eastern highlands of Bolivia.

The DVDs are developed by an inter-disciplinary team of technical, anthropological and pedagogic experts in collaboration with a group of teachers and students. They include high quality, multi-media reference material on the history, and contemporary social, cultural and economic aspects of the lives of Bolivia’s many different indigenous peoples.

The products were initially implemented in a pilot group of 15 schools in the department Santa Cruz. Today, they are being used by 7,000 teachers and students. Teachers use the DVD’s in several courses throughout the year. Not only in history classes, but also in language classes. In this way, it has become part of the curriculum.

Raising awareness about the various indigenous groups in Bolivia

In Bolivia, the majority of the population has an intercultural background, mostly with indigenous influence.  Yet, in the education sector there are hardly any educational materials available to raise the children’s awareness about the wide variety of cultural, economic and social history of indigenous people in Bolivia and their day-to-day lives. This has resulted in a lack of understanding and often problems of racism amongst indigenous people themselves and between indigenous people and the mestizo population. 

An important objective of this project is to raise awareness about the cultural, economic and social practices and knowledge of the various indigenous peoples in Bolivia.

Other objectives include:

• Enhancing the quality of teaching - Enhance the quality of teaching and learning by teachers and students. It is also very important that teachers receive some training to teach them how to work with interactive material such as DVDs.
• Raising the self-esteem of teachers and students with an indigenous genealogy – Both students and teachers are often ashamed to admit that they belong to a certain indigenous group. With the APCOB project, they learn that they can be proud of their heritage and the heritage of others.

Learning to value and respect other cultures helps to curb racism

The users showed an interest in communicating with other people, other cultures, and the world in general. The ethnographic audiovisual material used by APCOB has helped the students rediscover the culture of the different people in the Oriente Boliviano; the Eastern regions of the country.

Teachers affirm that: “Thanks to the digital material prepared by the projects working in the area of education, students have become aware of the situation of indigenous peoples and this has instilled  respect in the students. Being more respectful has taught them to be more tolerant and to condemn racism.”

Now, thanks to the project, every year the students from the schools participating in the project use the DVD to portray and present indigenous ways of life. The children dress up in the clothing of indigenous people, cook indigenous food and even build an entire indigenous village.

Acquiring computer skills

As a result of the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) that are now being used in the classroom, the students have learned to contextualise content in the learning processes.

Teachers stated that “the process of learning and sharing content becomes pleasant when it is carried out with the help of didactic and interactive games. And this is something novel and original for the students too.”

Students affirm that using the internet has enabled them to get in touch with other cultures and other educational institutions.

One of the students described it  as follows: “Accessing, using and managing Information and Communication Technologies (ICT),  particularly the computer, was an amazing thing. We felt that when we learned how to work with a computer we had accomplished our first goal.”

Other results

An agreement has been signed with the Ministry of Education in Bolivia to distribute DVDs and train teachers from 200 schools that are taking part in the national ICT for education programme. As part of the collaboration with the Ministry, a guide has been developed to show teachers how to use the interactive DVDs.

The project has also signed an agreement with the National Museum in La Paz to develop a new interactive DVD about the Aymara indigenous people, which is the largest ethnic group in Bolivia. The DVD will target primary and secondary schoolchildren and will be the 6th DVD about indigenous peoples in Bolivia produced by the ABCOB project so far.

Monitoring of the 15 schools currently participating in the projects stopped when the project was finalised at the beginning of 2008. Therefore, a small agreement is being prepared to continue monitoring the schools.