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Profiles of teachers and doctors who work for educational inclusion
Carlos Cortes: "Educational inclusion goes beyond the teaching of academic areas, inclusion implies the participation of the individual, even until his own death, life passes, even in scenarios of paint".
The profile we are looking for
In this interface, dedicated to doctors and professors, we begin the dialogue with the profile of an expert: Carlos Cortes.
“Life happens even within contexts of uncertainty and pain. The language and the symbolic is very powerful to generate bonds and in those moments, even in the last ones, life has a place. Graduating children, even in the final stages of their lives, end up being acts of reconciliation.”
"My passion for hospital pedagogy arises from recognizing myself as vulnerable in contexts of pain and illness, connecting it with my capacity to serve from a different, innovative, human and affective pedagogy. This is how Carlos, a 44-year-old from Bogota, pedagogue, and director of the hospital pedagogy program of the Fundación Cardioinfantil, describes his deepest passion.
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It emphasizes the difference between the hospital classroom and the hospital pedagogy. It is clear when explaining that the hospital classroom is a proposal that was born in 2010 from the Secretary of Health of Bogotá, whose objective is to guarantee the continuity of education in children in a situation of illness who must be absent from their regular classrooms to receive chronic treatment.
"Hospital pedagogy is a broader concept that covers academic needs and additionally emotional, spiritual, social management and accompanies the individual in some cases until death"; says this Colombian doctor.
Professor Carlos Cortés was born in Bogotá (Colombia), he attended technical high school and later did his pedagogical studies “because of a call from the heart” thanks to which he focused on a degree in special education: “I myself felt different, I moved away from what technical and conventional and my place was with the communities that feel different, that gave meaning to my life”, he says.
After graduating as a pedagogue, he began work in regular education schools at the same time that he worked on citizen culture projects for displaced and demobilized persons: Once I tried both aspects, I decided that my place is within hospital pedagogy."
He joined the Fundación Cardioinfantil thanks to a call in 2008 and began his life training because in that space he found a way to unite his passions in the social and human. There he met many children who entered the clinic with study expectations that were truncated by a diagnosis of illness; I am not a child nurse; says Dr. Cortés, citing the words of a Venezuelan pedagogue. His experience shows that children build their identity beyond an illness.
It was then that he learned about the District's hospital classroom processes and questioned whether the educational guarantee was sufficient, or whether emotional management should be included in that process. This is how Carlos began to build what is today the hospital pedagogy; a program that, beyond academics, helps these children with illnesses to identify themselves and at the same time, to develop bonds, social and emotional as they deal with their condition.
How does the hospital pedagogy program directed by Carlos work and mesh?
The program has 3 pillars: educational assistance, emotional assistance and resilience associated with their illness; training in values and direct connection with a regular classroom that, in addition to providing the academic curriculum, allows them to reintegrate into it with adequate levels of inclusion and participation.
Bearing this in mind, by the year 2020, Bogotá had approximately 30 hospital classrooms close to the mother district schools that support them, but Carlos has worked for the last 14 years so that these mother classrooms provide an adaptation of the curricula, subjects, contents, evaluation processes with closer and more functional, meaningful and fun strategies, within the hospital, at the home of the child with a disability condition that prevents him from moving and finally in the regular classroom.
“My life is marked by very strong emotions, but the fact of living with a disease cannot cancel emotions, ties, educational training, play spaces, and life processes. Comprehensive education inside and outside the classroom must contain all these aspects, so, for this, teachers must go to the rooms of a hospital or an intensive care unit”, says Dr. Cortés.
With the same passion that narrates his beginnings in this type of inclusive and participatory education, Carlos recalls how, over the last 10 years, the Charter of Rights for hospitalized children was created, rights that allow people like Carlos to adapt academic curricula to the specific needs of each child. This allows the implementation of multiple strategies such as pedagogy through therapies assisted with animals or pets, recreational areas, music therapy, in addition to the inclusion of specialized teachers in areas such as intermediate care units, mental health units, implementation of programs that support families so that they allow children to be projected as individuals who recognize themselves individually as active subjects with rights and opportunities.
"Many children marked my life," he says excitedly;but surely they will also mark my death"; With these words, Dr. Carlos Cortés realizes that comprehensive pedagogy not only aims to support an educational inclusion of that child who is affected by a disability or chronic illness, but simultaneously, that child must be educated in other aspects. that he has mentioned in this story of his “special” pedagogical life, and to whom the accompaniment to death does not escape. And it is that Carlos turns out to be the integral teacher for many children, even for those who want to feel included but who know very well that they will not return to the classrooms, even so, they love to belong to one of them.
“One day a mother looked for me at the hospital and asked me to go upstairs to say goodbye to her son. At first we were all confused, but we understood that life also happens in times of pain. I went upstairs and the boy opened his eyes and asked me to rate his homework”...
He ends his narration commenting that many parents and children ask them for company in their terminal moment, in fact, one day a group of children asked him to graduate them, recognizing their joy in learning and overcoming many barriers.
"Including academically goes far beyond educating in subjects, including implicitly makes the individual participate, even in his own death".
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