St. Joe’s supports international schools
Fe y Alegría, a nonprofit organization associated with the Society of Jesus which builds and manages primary and secondary schools in low-income areas on three continents, will enter the 19th year of its partnership with St. Joe’s in 2019.
Founded in 1955 in Venezuela, Fe y Alegría (Spanish for “faith and joy”) serves 1.5 million students in schools primarily spread across South America with additional locations in Madagascar, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Spain and Italy.
Ann Marie Jursca Keffer, director of the Faith-Justice Institute, said the early years of the St. Joe’s and Fe y Alegría partnership involved St. Joe’s faculty in the department of education facilitating teacher training initiatives with educators at Fe y Alegría schools in Bolivia.
Those efforts of cross-cultural education immersion have continued with the Faith-Justice Institute’s organizing of faculty immersion trips to Bolivia and hosting of delegations from Fe y Alegría.
“It’s not just our faculty and staff going down and learning from Fe y Alegría,” Keffer said. “Every other year, as of this year, we’ll be bringing a delegation from Fe y Alegría up to the States.”
The last Fe y Alegría delegation to visit St. Joe’s toured certain schools in the Philadelphia area out of an interest in learning about special education in the United States.
Catherine Collins, a reference librarian in the Francis A. Drexel Library who went on last year’s faculty immersion trip, was impressed by Fe y Alegría’s efforts to stay up-to-date with the latest technology being used in secondary education.
The Geometer’s Sketchpad, a program Collins saw used in a Fe y Alegría classroom while on the trip, is also used in her daughter’s ninth grade geometry class.
“It was fascinating to see a concrete representation of the Jesuit mission,” Collins said. “We read about it and talk about it, and to see it actually put in action like that was really amazing.”
The Faith-Justice Institute’s partnership with Fe y Alegría has also influenced several classes within the St. Joe’s curriculum, including Introduction to Data Mining, a Decision & System Sciences course taught by Kathleen Campbell Garwood, Ph.D.
Students in the Data Mining course analyze data from a survey commissioned by Fe y Alegría, in partnership with the Bolivian government, to evaluate socioeconomic trends among the country’s secondary school students.
The students work closely with Miguel Angel Marca, national adviser for general education at Fe y Alegría Bolivia.
The ultimate goal of the analysis is to develop an algorithm which would help Marca identify schools and regions most in need of support.
Garwood said she hopes Fe y Alegría’s influence on the Introduction to Data Mining course helps students to see the humanitarian potential of the skills they learn in business school.
“You have the bad rap as a business school teacher that we teach students to get finance jobs and to go out into the world and make a lot of money,” Garwood said. “What we’re teaching them [in this course] is how to help people reorganize their systems so they can maximize the number of people they can help.”
Each year, the Faith-Justice Institute sells Christmas cards made by Fe y Alegría students.
Proceeds from the card sales this year will go to the Mother Ascensión Nicol School in La Paz, Bolivia.
