Education can be efficient and transformative when one focuses on whole student development. That’s why, besides sharing theoretical knowledge, it’s essential that schools provide meaningful education that makes sense for children and adolescents and meet the demands of this century.
For over two decades, the Ayrton Senna Institute has disseminated this message and aimed at breaking barriers moving towards quality education. We are committed to society; especially educators, managers and public and private leaderships. Our goal is disseminating knowledge and initiatives to promote integral education as a pillar for fully developing students from municipal and state public schools.
We believe integral education creates more opportunity for children and adolescents as it goes beyond simply imparting knowledge and developing cognitive skills by teaching math, Portuguese and science content. Integral education also provides possibilities for developing social and emotional competences such as self-confidence, determination, stress tolerance and others; these skills support people as they face their daily challenges.
In practical terms, we have to prepare children and adolescents to make use of these and other competences to take a stance in a critical, responsible, creative, collaborative, autonomous, resilient and solidary way, whether it’s in a personal, academic, professional or social context.
In order for this education to be a reality, we create educational technologies with science-based evidence. In 2017 we assisted in making sure that scientific findings about education created a positive impact on education secretariats and classrooms in more than 500 Brazilian municipalities in 16 states.
In 2017 we also worked intensely on supporting nation-wide public policies. Some of the most prominent actions undertaken by Ayrton Senna Institute included participating in initiatives, monitoring efforts and mobilizing resources to support the creation of Base Nacional Comum Curricular or BNCC (The Brazilian National Common Core), which determines the basic content curriculum required from Early Childhood Education to Elementary School for every Brazilian school. The final version of the document includes not only cognitive skills, but social-emotional skills, which shows that integral education can become a reality in Brazilian schools.
Our efforts for implementing successful education solutions in large-scale are only possible thanks to our state and municipal-level partnerships and the support of socially-responsible companies, which provide assistance and consultancy to education secretariats and schools, especially in regards to incorporating innovative methodologies and social-emotional competences in teaching programs.
Our initiatives in 2017 wouldn’t have been this successful without education professionals, researchers and scholars from different areas of knowledge, public and private sector organizations and engaged citizens. This team enabled us to promote concrete changes in the lives of children, adolescents and adults; and paved the way for us to continue advocating for education in order to propel the full development of our students and our country in the coming years.