English Winter Camps 2013

¿Qué es un English Camp?

Los camps son campamentos de inmersión a la lengua inglesa, diseñados para entregar a estudiantes de educación media municipalizada y particular subvencionada, la oportunidad de practicar el inglés en contextos reales con actividades interactivas, a través de un dinámico plan curricular elaborado desde el Programa Inglés Abre Puertas del Ministerio de Educación, durante las vacaciones de invierno y verano. Un camp es una actividad que se realiza durante una semana de vacaciones, con una jornada que va entre las 10:00 y las 17:30 horas, guiada por un equipo de nativos angloparlantes y profesores chilenos de inglés, proveyendo al estudiante de los materiales y la alimentación necesaria.

Estimados/as estudiantes,

Los invitamos a participar de nuestro de proceso de convocatoria a los Campamentos de Invierno 2013.

Para la correcta inscripción se debe completar el formulario online dentro de los plazos estipulados (10 de Mayo al 10 de Junio a las 17.30 hrs).

Antes de postular a los campamentos te solicitamos leer las siguientes indicaciones:

•  Revisa las fechas en que se desarrollarán los campamentos en tu región.

•  Completa este formulario SÓLO SI cuentas con autorización de tus padres para asistir al campamento en Julio 2013 (8 al 12 o 15 al 19) y no tienes otros planes familiares.

•  Completa este formulario SÓLO SI tienes real interés en participar. Si quedas seleccionado y no participas, estarás impidiendo que otro/a estudiante realmente interesado/a, pueda asistir.

•  Completa este formulario solo si tienes la seguridad de conseguir la documentación requerida para participar (autorización Padres y Director) y cumples con los requisitos (promedio ingles igual o superior a  5.0 y eres alumno/a de establecimiento Público o Subvencionado)

•  Lee cuidadosamente el formulario y asegúrate de conocer todos los datos requeridos. TUS DATOS DE CONTACTO SON FUNDAMENTALES PARA COMUNICARNOS. Si estos no están escritos correctamente, tu postulación no será considerada.

VALPARAÍSO (08 - 12 de Julio 2013)

Modalidad: MINEDUC

Localidad: Quillota (overnight)

Cantidad estudiantes: 80

Modalidad: MINEDUC

Localidad: Viña del Mar - Valparaíso

Cantidad estudiantes: 90

¡nuevo! Formulario de postulación para estudiantes:

Ver / completar formulario de inscripción para estudiantes - English Winter Camps 2013

Las postulaciones estarán disponibles hasta el lunes 10 de abril 2013 - 17:30 hrs.

¡nuevo! Instructivo English Winter Camps 2013:

Ver / descargar instructivo - English Winter Camps 2013

Información complementaria en .pdf

ENCUENTRANOS EN FACEBOOK

“English Camps MINEDUC” 

University directors debate changes to Chilean education [Senior]

The Council of University Directors of Chile (Cruch) met Thursday in Punta Arenas to discuss higher education reform. The main topic of discussion was revising the PSU, the entrance exam to Chile’s traditional universities, which in the past has favored students of private high schools.

Cruch represents twenty five public or government-subsidized universities including Universidad de Chile and Universidad Católica, the two largest and most prestigious institutions in the country. It meets monthly to review formal education policies.

Last year, international education companyPearson investigated the PSU and found several flaws, including an apparent socioeconomic biases.

The PSU is a standardized multiple choice test made up of four different subjects. Students are required to take the mathematics and language arts sections and then choose between the science or social science sections. The Pearson review found that students from private, urban schools scored significantly higher than public school students on the mathematics and science sections.  

To rectify this, Cruch decided to modify the science section into three separate pieces: biology, chemistry and physics. Pearson’s investigation concluded that technical secondary schools scored above average on physics-related science questions, but below-average in chemistry and biology. In theory, dividing the science segment into the appropriate sub-sections would allow students that specialize in certain sciences higher scores.

Other changes to the PSU include getting rid of a quarter point penalty for wrong answers.

“There isn’t really a technical reason to have this,” said Juan Zolezzi, vice-president of Cruch and dean of Universidad de Santiago, in regards to the penalty point.

Pearson noted that penalty points only encouraged students to skip questions instead of thinking through problems, which he described as the “opposite of education.”

Also on the agenda was the reevaluation of the Indirect Fiscal Support (AFI) program. The AFI awards money to Cruch universities based on the top 28,000 scores in the language and mathematics sections of the PSU of the previous year. Universities receive an awards package directly portional to the percentage of their students with PSU scores among the top 28,000.  

Critics of the AFI say the program has a number of faults. First, there has been a dramatic increase of students accepted into universities, so the endowment should no longer be based on the top 28,000 scores. Since 2009 Universidad de Chile and Universidad Católica have won more than 40 percent of AFI’s US$50 million budget.  

Another criticism of the AFI is that it creates bias. Studies done by both the Ministry of Education and the education think tank Educación 2020 show that universities now accept students based primarily on PSU scores.

“Universities are only encouraged to find the best PSU scores. There is no incentive to find necessarily the best students,” Carlos Figueroa, a political analyst at Educación 2020 told The Santiago Times.  

Former Education Minister Harald Beyer — impeached by Congress earlier this month amid allegations of professional negligence — believed that the AFI “distorts and contaminates the entire admissions process” and wanted to replace it with a different fund. It is currently unknown whether Cruch will revise the AFI or work with the Education Ministry to create an entirely new endowment plan.      

All approved changes made to the PSU will go into effect early 2014.

Provide opinions in at least 50 words

Deadline: May 31st, 2013

Press freedom still lacking in Chile [Junior]

Freedom House, an international human rights watchdog, released its freedom of the press rankings ahead of World Press Freedom Day, and Chile remains at only “partly-free” after being dropped down from “free” last year. Despite this disappointing ranking, the Andean country fared better than the region as a whole.

Chile’s overall global ranking by Freedom House lists the country as “partly-free,” on a scale that lists countries as either “free,” “partly-free” or “not free.” An earlier index released in January by  international organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF), placed the country at 60th, a jump up 20 spots from the previous year. The RSF report reflects a segment of the year, while the Freedom House report reflects the entire year.

The Freedom House index takes into account, “the legal environment in which media operate, political influences on reporting and access to information, and economic pressures on content and the dissemination of news.”

Chile first dropped down to “partly-free” in 2011 following increased arrests and pressure on journalists — particularly photographers — covering the education protests across the country, Ana Piquer, executive director of Amnesty International in Chile, told The Santiago Times.

“There have been allegations of police violence specifically aimed at employees of the press that were covering the demonstrations, apparently trying to avoid the collection of evidence of human rights abuses,” Piquer.

“[Multiple organizations] reported beatings, arbitrary arrests and confiscation of audio-visual material, and it is unacceptable from the point of view of human rights, and it directly affects the freedom of the press in Chile,” she added.
Piquer also noted that the lack of diversity among the major media providers in Chile can cause certain issues to remain invisible, and create an incomplete understanding of others.

“In Chile the media are concentrated in certain economic groups, so that their editorial lines tend to be aligned,” Piquer said. “ With few exceptions, it is common that all the media coverage is about the same topics. Therefore, it is frequent that certain subjects are invisible, or the coverage does not reflect all angles of the case.”

Professor Faride Zeran,coordinator of Universidad de Chile's Freedom of Citizen Expression Program, also spoke to The Santiago Times about the dangers of a concentrated media in Chile.

“If we stick to the concentration of media that exists today in Chile, in the newspapers with the duopoly El Mercurio-Copesa, in the radios with the Spanish and national conglomerates that homogenize the spectrum... the picture is bleak,” Zeran said. “Mostly because there is no diversity of other media that collect the country's political, social and cultural wealth.”

Zeran gave the example of the documentary,  “El Diario de Agustín,” that has been kept from Chilean airwaves. The documentary exposes the connections and influence of the government on El Mercurio, Chile’s historically largest media chain, throughout the last half century.

“[There is a ] persistence - from the military - of a culture that encourages dictator-era censorship and self-censorship, in which authorities’ fear is so strong that today a documentary awarded internationally as 'The Augustine newspaper' of filmmaker Ignacio Agüero... not only cannot be displayed on public television... but also on channels dedicated to the diffusion of documentaries, ARTV, which after announcing the exhibition, a few weeks ago, decided not to show it,” Zeran said.

Karin Karlekar, project director of Freedom of the Press for Freedom House, explained to The Santiago Times that there is much Chile can improve on, such as implementing legislation designed to open up the media landscape.

“Even though there was a lot of legislation passed strengthening provisions for community radio in Chile it seems like the implementation of has not been fully implemented,” Karlekar said. “I think that it would be a positive step to try to regularize the legal status of community radio which is a very important media environment in Chile and also would help to increase media diversity and help with concentration issues.”

She also noted the police and judiciary could place a greater effort in protecting and securing press freedom, citing the example of the still unsolved 2011 bomb attack that rocked the headquarters of Copesa, the Chilean media conglomerate that publishes the national newspaper La Tercera.

Provide Opinions about it in at least 50 words

Deadline: May 31st, 2013

Chile’s social housing policy: creating socioeconomic ghettos? [Sophomore]

Bajos de Mena — a housing project built on the periphery of Santiago between 1994-2004 — is currently the focus of a recently announced multimillion dollar government project to regenerate deprived areas.

Despite having a population of more than 120,000, Bajos de Mena lacks a police or fire station, schools, good transportation links or even a supermarket. Housing vulnerable families from across the region, it has also become a hotbed of deprivation, social problems and crime.

To understand how a project, which cost millions to build less than 20 years ago, once again requires such a huge investment, it is necessary to examine Chile’s unique social housing policy.

Depending on the criteria employed, Chile’s experiment in farming out construction of social housing to private contractors is either remarkably efficient or a recipe for socio-economic segregation and ghettoization.

The paradox of this neoliberal social housing experiment can be summarized by two very different facts.

The first is the dramatic quantitative reduction in the numbers of families with housing problems.

In 1990, 30 percent of families lacked adequate housing — living in shanty towns or in conditions extreme overcrowding. That figure has now fallen to 9 percent, according to widely cited statistics.

The second fact, however, is that many of the social housing projects built during this period of accelerated construction are universally acknowledged as isolated outposts lacking basic facilities, prone to fires and often high in crime and social problems.

What, then, can be made of these two juxtaposed facts? With plans to spend millions on demolishing and rebuilding large quantities of housing, should the traditional privatized policy be seen as a failure, or was it simply a necessary first-step for a developing country trying to solve a huge problem?

Understanding the unique Chilean case, its successes and its failures, requires the history of a classic problem: how should the state house its most vulnerable citizens?

Provide Opinions about it in at least 50 words

Deadline: May 31st, 2013

TEXT: http://rapidshare.com/files/826658366/Araby%20-%20James%20Joyce.doc

Chile’s month of discontent [Freshman]

The last month has seen another outburst of popular discontent in Chile. Workers at the northern port of Angamos went on strike March 16, after port operator Ultramar responded to a regulation limiting hours worked per week by axing workers’ thirty minute lunch break. Dock workers  around the country joined in solidarity, grinding the country’s export infrastructure to a halt for over two weeks. Most recently, workers at state-owned Codelco, the source of around 10 percent of the world’s copper, held a 24-hour strike to demand better pensions and enforcement of subcontracting laws.

As the strikes dragged on, the condemnations from Chile’s political and business establishment poured in. Many lamented the lost export earnings and potential damage to the country’s investor-friendly image. Some were overtly dismissive and condescending. Codelco chief Thomas Keller insisted that the striking miners’ stated objectives were simply a ruse. What really troubled them, according to Keller, was modernization and adoption of new technology in the sector — as if workers should accept such threats to their livelihoods with a smile and due appreciation for the march of progress.

Meanwhile, Finance Minister Felipe Larraín assured workers that “strikes are not the way to move the country forward.” Instead, they should put their faith in dialogue. President Sebestián Pinera, for his part, admonished workers that “it is difficult to build a country that works for everyone, yet it is so easy to destroy it.”

The strikers could be forgiven for wondering what country Mr. Pinera had in mind.

Provide opinions about it in at least 45 words.

Deadline: May 31st, 2013

TEXT: http://rapidshare.com/files/976925241/The%20Walking%20Dead~Issue%20001.pdf

Interview: Inti Castro’s graffiti legacy in Chile’s port city [8th Grade]

Inti Castro appears as a typical Chilean: casually dressed, dreadlocks, smoking a cigarette on an outlook over his hometown of Valparaíso.  If you saw him on the street, you wouldn’t know he is one of the most well-known street artists in the world.

The artwork of Inti, or INTI, can be seen from Paris to Lebanon, where his brightly colored murals span over sky-high buildings in the city centers.  From images of clowns to symbols of religious idols and political slants, Inti’s art embodies Chilean culture while sparking a commentary on the ongoing struggle of poverty within the country.

“I’m inspired by the Latin American people and culture before the Spanish invasion. The indigenous original towns, culture, people, and the continent in general before the European influence,” he says. “Difference is not a bad thing, it’s what enriches a culture.”

As the interview began, Inti immediately turns the meeting into a conversation between friends.  With one of his most well-known murals as the backdrop, he explains the significance of the massive piece of art, which can be seen from Cerro Concepción in Valparaíso and has evolved into an icon for the city.

Provide Opinions About it in at least 40 words.

Deadline: May 31st, 2013

Children’s e-book launched in indigenous Chilean language [7th Grade]

A new e-book and accompanying documentary will be released Thursday in Chile’s indigenous Mapuche language. The e-book, called “Epew Pichikeche ñi Rakizuam” (The Thoughts of Children), is written in both Mapudungun and Spanish. 

Youth from six schools in the southern cities of Puerto Saavedra and Carahue, where much of the population is Mapuche, wrote the books in special workshops where students were empowered to tell their own stories. 

“The most important thing is that it is focused on the children’s work,” Carolina Isla, project coordinator of the e-book, told The Santiago Times.

“The kids made the story without their families or teachers, they independently created the story,” she said.

Provide Opiniones in at least 35 words.

Deadline: May 31st, 2013