Education: Key to Social Transformation

“Conversation Café” is an online meeting space organized by Catalyst Now (https://catalystnow.net/), a global network of organizations, educational institutions, companies, and individuals working for social transformation, of which CLAYSS is a member. In this new edition, our director, Nieves Tapia, and our Institutional Relations and Network Coordinator, Luz Avruj, were invited to lead the meeting on 10th July under the motto “Educating to transform”.

Emphasizing the importance of solidarity service-learning (SSL), the event brought together more than thirty participants throughout Latin America interested in this transformative pedagogy. Luz began by presenting on SSL and the work CLAYSS has done for over twenty years; then Nieves took the floor. Our director highlighted our joint work with UNESCO in promoting SSL and their 2024 publication, which we edited: La solidaridad como futuro de la educación [Solidarity as the Future of Education] (https://www.clayss.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/libro_unesco_web.pdf), available in Spanish free of charge on our website.

After their presentations, there was a rewarding exchange of experiences and questions. In her closing remarks, Nieves stated that the means developed by CLAYSS to implement solidarity-based service-learning projects “can be useful to any organization interested in training its people differently” because “we cannot educate a new world with old pedagogies.”