This training program’s objective was to reflect on the inclusive approach with professionals and the board of directors of the DEG. At first, the theoretical, political, and methodological aspects of the inclusion approach were presented since this is where the Inclusion Coordination focuses its work. Then, elements associated with a proposal to articulate the Plans for School Coexistence, Participation and Citizen Training, School Improvement, and Inclusion were discussed.

Heads of different teams and work areas participated in this training program, such as: Inclusion, Diversity, and Interculturality; Educational Trajectory; Curriculum Extension; Improvement Support; Special Education; Educational Transversality, among others.

This training program was requested by the Alonso de Ercilla Institute, with the objective that its primary and secondary school teachers acquire tools for the development of pedagogical practices that consider gender and sexual identities. This need arose during the consolidation process of a co-educational project, which has been progressively incorporating women into the establishment. This context has encouraged institutional advances in inter-gender inclusion mechanisms, however, in pedagogical practices, there have been acts of microdiscrimination that have been resented by the school community. This training program seeks to provide teachers with the ability to carry out a non-exclusive training process, as well as to guide them on how to train students who problematize gender and sexual orders.

The Multidisciplinary Research Project SOC 1103 “Normality, Difference, and Education” focused an important part of its intervention and research on a case study in six educational establishments in the commune of Santiago, with which it established a collaboration agreement.

During 2013, an ethnographic research was carried out in these schools, whose main purpose was to gather exploratory information about the social and cultural patterns present in each of these establishments. The central question that guided the research work was: how is the production and reproduction of difference structured, organized, and managed within each of the establishments, identifying and understanding the particularities specific to each one.

The following year, the project carried out a training program and accompaniment work for professors in these schools, whose purpose was to think about and problematize the construction of normality and difference based on the pedagogical practice itself. This was done based on the themes highlighted by ethnography.

The schools that participated in this process were: Republic of Lebanon School, Republic of Panama School, Republic of Ecuador School, Francisco Arriarán School, Salesianos de Alameda School, and Alonso de Ercilla Institute School.

This training program is aimed at generating a space for reflection and training regarding current curricular policies, the various perspectives of approximation to them, the discourses on which they are built, and their implications for educational practices in context. Currently, the curriculum is a priority issue for educational policy and also for school institutions, due to the various curricular changes that have been made over a short period of time. Although these changes are of a very different origin, nature, and scope, both for professionals in school institutions as well as those in the academic field, public opinion has not been clear or evident in relation to these differences. In this context, it is relevant to have a training program that addresses from different theoretical perspectives both the dynamics of continuity and change of the curricular discourses (macro level) and the curricular processes that are developed at the meso level (school institution) and at the micro level (classroom).

This training program was given in 2015 to officials of the General Education Division (DEG) of the Ministry of Education. It was led by Olga Espinoza, Doctor in Education and academic in the UC School of Education. She is part of NDE’s Core Team.

This course seeks to offer a training space for officials of the General Directorate of Education (MINEDUC) who work in the field of interculturality and educational policies in order to articulate discourses of inclusion within the current educational reform. Based on the understanding of basic concepts about interculturality, as well as the historical context of the roles and procedures through which the actors of intercultural spaces are currently interrelated, and the scope linked to the rights and the development of intercultural bilingual education in Chile, this course seeks to facilitate the development of competencies that promote the understanding of the importance of establishing intercultural relationships that tend to mutual recognition and promote competent and relevant work performance and leadership, based on the assessment of the sociocultural diversity present in Chile.

This training took place in 2015 under the direction of Francisca de la Maza, Doctor in Social Anthropology and academic in the Faculty of Education at the UC Villarrica Campus. She has participated as a NDE collaborator.

This training program consists of training officials of the General Directorate of Education (DEG in Spanish) of the Ministry of Education in critical perspectives of inclusion and its approach in educational spaces. It aims to generate a space for reflection with a problematizing approach in regard to the production of normality and difference in schools. The guidelines of the Education Reform project, whose central challenge has been to put an end to segregation and to promote heterogeneity, are the backbone of this training program. Due to these challenges, DEG visualizes the need to reflect on the concept of inclusion and its implications to advance in the construction of a story that is consistent with the ongoing reform process, which updates the discussion about these issues and concepts that are articulated with other aspects of institutionality (such as the curriculum) and, finally, guides the process of creating public policies. This training program aims to be influential on two levels: first, at the theoretical/conceptual level with respect to contemporary perspectives of understanding inclusion and diversity; and second, at the practical/institutional level regarding the ways in which diversity discourses in education policy are understood and operationalized. Thus, this training program seeks to help MINEDUC professionals reflect on and visualize the effects that the language of policies has, the practices that it encourages, and the implicit forms in which “privilege” and the idea of a “different” other are constructed.

This training program has been given on three occasions, in 2014, 2015, and 2016. Professionals from various areas of the MINEDUC have participated, such as the Inclusion, Diversity, and Interculturality; Educational Transversality; Improvement Support; Secondary Education; Curriculum and Evaluation; SEP; among others.

Within the framework of the SaviaLAB Technological Camp, a program put on by the School of Engineering at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile that seeks to train teachers of rural technical high schools in innovation methodologies in the classroom, teachers were trained in diversity and inclusion issues in school. This training program aimed to change the perspective in which the issue of diversity is usually addressed— which has been traditionally associated with the deficit and understood as an individual problem— to one that allows teachers to understand and thematize the normal within school spaces as a constitutive element of what is considered “diverse.”

Carolina Rojas was in charge of this training program, where it was first given in Concepción, Bio-Bio Region and then in Futrono, Los Ríos Region.