Jhon Alexander Echeverri Acosta

Jhon began teaching in 2014 at the Commercial Educational Institution of Envigado. The town suffers from a number of socio-economic problems. Nonetheless, the children are highly motivated and want to learn. He works with students from grades six to eleven, and organises his teaching around the needs of each class. From the beginning, he found himself asking some fundamental questions about teaching. How can I implement an innovative methodology that transcends the classroom and reaches out into the community? How do I encourage my students to generate projects that solve community problems? How do I arouse my students’ interest through science and technology to improve everyone’s lifestyle? After a lot of analysis and experimentation, Jhon came up with an approach he named, Methodology Of Socio-Environmental Investigation GCA.

Thanks to Jhon’s research projects and innovative strategies, he has achieved the active participation of the educational community in different programmes. Nine in ten members of the educational community of Envigado Commercial take part in his projects, such as educational videos and a newsletter.

The GCA Environmental Science Newsletter supports research processes for environmental projects that seek to minimise the problems of air pollution, solid waste pollution, pest proliferation and pathogen vectors. This has improved life in the classroom, skills in reading comprehension and writing and results in state tests and have been recognised right to national level. Thanks to a methodology that he now wishes to patent, the school has been able to obtain awards and recognitions at the municipal, departmental, regional, national and international levels. Jhon has shared his methodology in educational forums, educational conferences and International Congresses of the Universidad Pontificia.