Shape Colombia: breaking frontiers and building a new way to teach and learn languages

“When we first met the foreigners, we could understand that the world is only one and it’s not as big as we thought. I’m not very different from somebody that lives in Turkey, for example. The frontiers were made by us.” This is how the student Santiago Garcia Zea, 15 yearls old, explains the impacts that the Project Shapes Colombia has in the children’s lives. He studies at IED Villemar El Carmén and is one of the 30.000 people benefited by the initiative in the public schools of Bogotá with language support from international cooperators.

In the second semester of 2014, the Colombian capital received 200 foreigners to work with AIESEC and Secretaría de Educación. The project has helped students from vulnerable areas to improve their English or French throughout dynamic activities that put away the formality of a regular class to create an environment that allows the children to learn while having fun.

For Santiago Garcia, that has been watching the classes for almost two semesters, the methodology itself changes the way the students see the process of learning a language. “I had never met anybody from another country and, suddenly, I had the change to get to know young people from Russia, India, Turkey and Ghana. It was really great to have this opportunity to practice my English”, says.

Santiago’s father, Fernando Garcia, shows gratitude for the improvement his son had with Shape Colombia and highlights the importance of changing the relationship between teachers and students to captivate them into the subjects studied. “This is the best idea I’ve seen in Colombia regarding education. Mainly, because it breaks with the traditional methodology used in the schools. Now, besides the regular class, we have youth that teach youth, using the same language to stimulate them to develop their language skills – something that is inspiring for our children”, tells the man.

In the first semester of 2015, around 100 schools of Bogotá are going to receive Shape Colombia. For that, AIESEC will hire about 200 international cooperators from all over the world. If you want to be one of them, this is the right time to join us. Send your CV with your AIESEC TN ID to aulasdeinmersion@gmail.com. If you're not part of our network yet, contact your Local Comitee.