The Value of Your Voice

Brazil's Ministry of Education has approved Everyone a Changemaker Learning materials that have been co-authored by Ashoka for up to 1.5 million high school students
Value of Your Voice
Source: Ashoka

Brazil is undertaking a national effort to reform its school curricula so that teaching no longer fragments knowledge by disciplines, students learn to master empathy, and learning is built around students’ life projects. As part of this effort, Ashoka is partnering with the Santillana Group, one of Spain’s largest publishers and owner of Moderna, the leading educational publisher in Brazil, to incorporate an Everyone a Changemaker framework into textbooks and educational platforms for public and private school systems.

For more than six years, Ashoka in Brazil has been establishing strategic partnerships with governments, schools of education, teachers' unions, media, and publishers to change the definition of what constitutes success in growing up. Santillana is present in 132,000 schools in Brazil that serve 27 million primary and secondary students taught by 1.7 million teachers.

"The partnership between Ashoka and Santillana isn't ordinary," said Luciano Monteiro, Santillana's Institutional Relations Director. "This book results from a unique co-creation approach. Our collaboration is based on a shared vision and mutual trust. Our efforts to create learning resources that emphasize care, solidarity, responsibility towards the other and the environment reflect the values we cherish."

Santillana and Ashoka are collaborating on educational materials and methodologies that develop three competencies: personal (self-awareness), social (empathy and interpersonal relationships), and planning (imagining the future while practicing changemaking). Last October, Brazil's Ministry of Education approved Everyone a Changemaker educational materials that were co-authored by Ashoka as part of Programa Nacional do Livro Didático (PNLD) that purchases textbooks for nearly 30 million students and supplemental resources for teachers in public schools.

Over 50 percent of the students use at least one educational resource developed by Santillana," said Monteiro. "This book is an opportunity to affect the lives of about 8 million Brazilian students. The partnership with Ashoka brings Santillana into the changemaking know-how. The gain for Ashoka, we assume, is precisely the outreach scale that we provide, which can accelerate the vision of Everyone a Changemaker."

The educational materials, titled The Value of Your Voice, comprise a student textbook, a teacher's guide, and three video tutorials that can be used in Brazil's three-year high schools. The Value of Your Voice provides dynamic and modular learning tools that millions of students can use to take action in their schools and communities. Ashoka and Santillana, the publisher of these materials, agreed to adopt the Everyone a Changemaker framework as the narrative backbone of the book.

Value of Your Voice

This effort sets new standards for textbooks that speak directly to the students and stimulate teachers to put students in charge,” said Flavio Bassi, vice president of Ashoka Latin America. The Value of Your Voice will potentially reach 1.5 million students across the country in the next year, helping high school teachers and students establish a new pathway towards changemaking and students' self-development.

These educational materials can be chosen by teachers throughout Brazil to support an independent study track called "Life Project" that was included in the high school curriculum by the Ministry of Education in 2017. The Life Project independent study aims to develop students' socio-emotional skills so they can envision and design a dream for their future, and make changes to their world that allow them to realize their dream and build a better world for all.

This educational approach is designed to expand a student's cultural universe so they gain an awareness of themselves and others that depends on trust, attentive listening, family support, access to knowledge, and the ability to interact with the community through oral and written communication in order to express and defend ideas and points of view. Students will learn to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of their efforts to shape the future, thereby becoming fully engaged citizens who understand that happiness is a collective endeavor.