The Educational Program at the MNS

From all the strategies oriented to the general public, one of the most successful and longest is the Educational Program. Carried out by curator Victor Curay during the years 2003 and 2004, the program aimed to encourage regional teachers to actively use the museum as a classroom for teaching prehistory of the area. An important aspect to understand why Victor Curay developed this program at the MNS is his background. Although he graduated as an archaeologist and worked in several research projects before working as a curator at the MNS, he also had a deep interest in teaching. He worked for several years at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru as a teacher assistant, training young archaeology students in the courses of survey, excavation and pottery analysis. This experience has helped him develop strategies on how to summarize archaeological information to be transmitted to a small audience, as well as interactive activities to be applied in a classroom. He also had training courses supported by the embassy of USA on museum management.

Being an employee of the Ministry of Culture, he has been also asked to travel in several occasions to control the security of archaeological objects that were lent for exhibitions at foreign museums, having the opportunity to closely observe other educational programs at those museums. In late years, he has been working as a teacher for a tourism educational institute in Chiclayo. His background in education and his experience visiting museums in other countries have greatly influenced his intention to develop an educational program at MNS.

This program was the first to be done in a museum located outside the capital city of Lima. At that time, very few museums were actively training school teachers to use museum exhibition areas for their classes. Most of the school visits were limited to hire a guide and have that person explain each exhibition room while students passively listening. Activities prior or after the visit were not carried out or limited to students written reports. As Victor Curay mentioned, he considers that school teachers are promoters of change (understood as social development promoters). Therefore the program should be aimed to them since they can work as connectors between kids, their parents and

the museum. He also refers to a concept of cultural identity for reaching local population (Curay 2011), tied to the regional concept of the Lambayeque.

As explained by Victor Curay (2011), the educational program at MNS included training workshops for local teachers from schools at Ferreñafe city. These workshops consisted in training school teachers about regional history and identity, proposing the insertion of this content into school planning through the concept of transversal knowledge and activities carried out at the museum and in classrooms. During the workshops teachers are also encouraged to use the museum as an educational resource not only to explain the Sicán society but also the cultural identity of Lambayeque region. Taking as reference the work done by Freyre (2001) at the Puruchuco Museum in Lima, the workshop divided the activities in the classroom and at the museum proposed to teachers in three stages:

1) Preparation for the visit to the museum.

This stage is developed in the classroom. Teachers give an introduction to the topics to students to be worked at the museum.

2) Visit to the exhibition halls

In this stage, students visit the exhibition halls and explore the topics discussed in the classroom, trying to look for answers to the questions posed by the teacher.

3) Conclusion about the visit

This stage is developed in the classroom. The idea is to discuss the information gathered during the visit to the museum, further talking about the proposed topics.

This general planning for the visit is supposed to be adjusted to each schooling level. The Peruvian schooling system comprises four levels called cycles . Each cycle corresponds to three years of education for pre-school, primary school and the first years of secondary school plus the last two years of secondary school. Topics of the education curriculum are divided according to each cycle depending on the age of the students and the quantity of topics to be discussed. It is important to mention that the last change in the education curriculum happened on the year 2008 and considered a new division of courses where topics could be linked to student s daily lives by the concept of transversal themes or contents . These contents are defined in the National Curricular Design for Regular Basic Education as topics that can help answer contextual problems of an area, based in values and attitudes (Ministerio de Educación 2009:22)

Attendants to the workshops during 9 months (16 sessions) included 30 teachers from pre-schools and primary schools in Ferreñafe city on its first year, widening the attendance for the second to 100 teachers from Ferreñafe, Pueblo Nuevo, Mesones Muro, Pítipo and Kamari s districts. This increase on participation responded to the fact that the first year was considered a pilot plan, while on the second year agreements were signed to the regional administration of education (Ferreñafe Educative Development Area, nowadays UGEL, Local Education Management Unit Ferreñafe) under the program title of Training Workshops on Cultural Identity . This agreement was a suggestion from the attendants to the first year since it would assure a compromise from regional authorities to support the program and pressure local teachers to attend the sessions. The workshop sessions concluded with the I Educational Fair about Cultural Identity , where teachers presented reports and expositions about how they applied their experience in the workshops to the classrooms, as well as folkloric dances.

Although the program was considered successful by organizer Victor Curay and teachers, political changes of the authorities in charge of education matters in the regions let to withdrawal of their support. After that, the program was reduced to those schools who asked for it. Political changes have been an important influence in the MNS initiatives with local people, since the museum director is an active member of the APRA political party. These changes come with every election for district and provincial authorities, as well as for the president election. APRA has been a very strong political party in the north coast for decades, but their strength has been declining over the years because of corruption issues and the monopoly of public posts by their members. Nevertheless, it is still a strong party and its representative was the mayor of Ferreñafe during the years 2003 to 2006. During this period, the MNS had a strong support from local authorities, in part because the director of the MNS, Carlos Elera, was councilman then, especially in the insertion of Sicán representations in parks and roads in the city. This support contrasted with the following 2007-2010 period, when Acción Popular (an opposing party) won the mayor elections. As a result, the communication between the city hall and the MNS was weak. Activities carried out at the MNS, like folkloric music and dance festivals were discontinued, and the educational division of the city hall did not coordinate with the MNS for any future planning or activity. After the year 2011, a mayor that ended his period when the museum opened was re-elected, giving a new boost to the relationships between the city hall and the museum, but accusations of corruption and a revocation process to the mayor has slowed down this support.

The decline on this program also had several other reasons. While interviewing some teachers who attended the program, they added the important aspect of time, either by their side or Victor Curay as organizer. In the case of teacher s time schedule, it was difficult to arrange meetings at the museum

because many of them had another job on their free time, especially male teachers. Receiving a low salary (between 1100 to 1200 soles per month) for taking of a whole family with an average of three kids was the main reason for having more than one job. An incentive to attend the workshop was to give certificates of attendance signed by the UGEL, since teachers can use it on their curriculum vitae as training experience in order to increase their salaries, but this incentive only worked the first time they attended it.

Time availability was also an important element for the organizer too. One teacher commented that because Victor Curay had other responsibilities at the MNS, it was difficult for him to arrange meetings with teachers.

There is no permanent staff at the museum, like public relations. There should be trained staff, not tourist guides but someone related to education. Although there was a good intention from Victor, sometimes he didn t have time and couldn t meet with us. (ST23, 2009/07/23)

This aspect is particularly important since the main problems for an education program at the MNS are the overlapping functions of the museum staff and the lack of trained specialists dedicated to education. While the museum is considered an educational institution, professional specialists at the museum are mostly dedicated to research, preservation or administrative work. In the case of Victor Curay, as the curator of the museum and administrator in charge, he has several responsibilities. As it was explained before, as curator of the museum, he is charge of the exhibition display and the maintenance of the exhibition halls. His duties as administrator include the control and supervision of museum staff, which ranged from maintenance, cleaning, ticketing, archaeological remains classification and preservation, among others. Beyond these activities he has his responsibilities as a teacher in educational institutes in Chiclayo city, as well as coordinating the training course for American interns at the museum. As it can be observed, although there are several people working at the museum, most of the responsibilities were concentrated on the only person that had interest and experience in the educational program for school teachers.

Another important problem has been the lack of appropriate materials for students and teachers to be used. As it was mentioned, there are very few reference materials for the public. The pamphlet prepared for tourists, although having a very good quality in graphics and design, has a specialized language. Moreover, its cost (around 12 soles) is another impediment for teachers and students to acquire it. Victor Curay confirmed the necessity of printed materials that can be used as reference for teachers at class, preferably dedicated for them. Printed materials seem to be especially useful in rural areas where the access to Internet is still limited and there are few good public libraries.

Nevertheless, one problem to elaborate these materials was the lack of funding for editing and printing given by the Museum and the Executive Unit. Another problem was the lack of human resources to make them. While archaeologists at the museum lack of enough time, qualification or interest to build them, local teachers also have few experience in preparing educational materials.

This aspect is especially important since these materials should be adapted to the contents of the main curricula given by the Ministry of Education in order to be used by teachers.

One last problem with this program was the lack of feedback evaluation by teachers. While the program was organized by an archaeologist and many teachers participated actively, there were no mechanisms of feedback to revise the program in order to improve it on following years. Success of the program was measured by the consistency of attendance of teachers and their participation in the workshop sessions. The activities and results presented at the ending festival also gave some idea of the interest teachers may have had in the program. But this kind of evaluation was very subjective, especially if it was made by the organizer, since local teachers may express their own opinions but would not directly point out its problems. Even if they expressed their own opinion, it was mostly a general comment, usually pointing out the good results rather than the bad ones. It was necessary, then, to find mechanisms for teachers to express their opinion of the program. Victor Curay has also considered this problem, but he could not elaborate any adequate mechanism to solve it. He suggested that anonymous polls or reports may be a good idea for teachers to express their opinions more freely.

Although the Educational Program had several limitations, it was one of the few opportunities where a group from the Public (school teachers) could directly interact with archaeologists and share some of their ideas about archaeological remains. In this sense, the Educational Program, in contrast with the other strategies, served to create a space where attendants could actively engage in discussing the position archaeologists have as professionals towards archaeological remains instead of just passively receiving information. The premature ending of the program, however, left several aspects of the interactions between archaeologists and school teachers without further development.