Social Innovation, Art and Creativity to Transform Teaching

The Creative Environments program, developed by Crear in partnership with the Argentine ministry of education, CAF, and a variety of local governments and civil society organizations, aims to promote art and creativity as vehicles of excellence, leadership and educational transformation.

Aimed at strengthening socio-emotional skills and improving coexistence between young people and adults in high schools and their communities, the initiative encourages artists and teachers to work collaboratively in a new way of teaching and learning using their bodies, art and creativity. The project’s director Inés Sanguinetti said that participants “work with their own playful-creative methodology based on the premise that art encourages curiosity and drives creativity, improving the quality of education, as well as individual and collective well-being".

Given the relevance of the program and its high impact potential, FLACSO’s Culture + Territory Lab joins the project as a strategic partner to investigate and evaluate the methodology and didactics implemented in Corrientes and Jujuy, with a qualitative-quantitative and scale-oriented approach, based on virtual devices such as teacher training in Corrientes and the resource library of activities in both towns.

The results of this research are expected to contribute to the multiplying potential of Creative Environments. In this regard, CAF social innovation director Ana Mercedes Botero noted that “this alliance is a meeting point between three organizations that share the motivation to provide solutions to the social challenge of an education that builds up new ways of doing things, as well as promote soft skills in the youth population.” “With this study, led by FLACSO, we aim to facilitate the implementation of the program to new contexts and contribute to the scale of social innovation,” Botero added. 

Creative Environments has been singled out as an innovative educational program by the Teacher Education Program for Latin America and the Caribbean (PREDALC), which brings together the World Bank, CAF, OAS and IEO, reaching more than 60,000 people across 100 schools. Given the current COVID-19 pandemic, Creative Environments is taking place online, producing content for the provincial educational ministries’ websites.