The visit of the Minister of Education, Roberto Fulcar, who headed the Dominican delegation that worked in Spain from May 9 to 12, with an important agenda with government agencies, international integration organizations, universities and academics, ended with important achievements.
He also participated in the Thirty-first International Congress of Education and Psychology (INFAD) and in the first ECALFOR International Congress on Quality and Innovation in Higher Education, where he spoke on the theme: “Challenges of teacher training in times of the COVID-19 pandemic. Main approaches to the changing role of educational systems”.
While in the exercise of the pro tempore presidency of the Organization of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture (OEI) and the Andrés Bello Agreement (CAB), the Minister of Education of the Dominican Republic was awarded the Gold Medal for Academic Merit as a result of the teacher training policy designed and implemented in the national territory since the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year, under extraordinary conditions due to the pandemic. This distinction was received from the president of the National Association of Developmental and Educational Psychology for Children, Adolescents, Elderly and Disabled (INFAD), Mr. Florencio Vicente Castro, who highlighted the innovative, creative and daring nature of the Dominican proposal Aprendemos en Casa Preservando la Salud, which he described as “innovative” and from which he concluded “Europe must learn”.
Together with the Cervantes Institute, the main study center for the use and management of Spanish languages in the world, an important agreement was signed through which teachers, technicians and students of all levels in the public and private sectors will have free access to all the digital content of the Cervantes Virtual Library, which has thousands of titles online in our language.
Dr. Fulcar emphasized that “this agreement did not involve any expenditure by the Dominican state”, pointing out that this type of agreement “represents an example of how it is possible to achieve achievements for our educational system while taking care of the budget financed by all Dominicans”.
In a meeting held with representatives of the Ministry of Culture of Spain, it was agreed that the Ministry would donate 30,000 books of different areas of knowledge to the MINERD for the benefit of educational centers and communities, which will be arriving soon to the country and will be distributed with a sense of territorial equity, giving priority to those localities which have less access to public libraries, within the framework of the policy of promoting reading carried out by the Ministry, through the program Dominicana Lee and the project Puentes Culturales (Cultural Bridges).
Likewise, in his capacity as president pro tempore of the OEI, Dr. Fulcar held a working meeting with the technical team and the secretary general of this organization, Mr. Mariano Jabonero, with whom he signed the call for the Annual Summit of Ministers of Education to be held on November 25 in the Dominican Republic, an emblematic date for the country and the world that recalls the tragedy and at the same time the passage to immortality of the Mirabal sisters, who today constitute a symbol of freedom and struggle for the rights of women at a global level.
The mission also held meetings with the Ministry of Education and Teacher Training of Spain, and had the support of His Excellency the Ambassador of the Dominican Republic to the Kingdom of Spain, Mr. Juan Bolivar and his team.
At the same time, he participated in several activities with the Dominican intellectual Amaury Justo Duarte, who currently holds the post of ambassador to the Kingdom of Morocco and with whom similar agreements will soon be signed in the search “that the government of President Abinader has set out to spread the image of the Dominican Republic as a country that is committed to the transformation of education to graduate citizens, generating employability and boosting competitiveness, through the Education for a Better Life model, which is being promoted in the country today”, concluded Dr. Fulcar, minutes before boarding his flight back to Santo Domingo.
