Bringing STEM Education to Uncharted Territories
I’m often asked how we find our partners in new countries, and the answer is always multifaceted.
Our journey of course began in the Philippines, where my co-founder Cynthia Goh and I are from. In the beginning, we only had our existing network to help kickstart our initiative. For instance, the University of the Philippines-Los Banos gathered teachers in Laguna and my high school Mariano Marcos State University Laboratory High School gathered teachers in Laoag City. We then collaborated with the Department of Science and Technology, who then introduced us to Ateneo de Davao. Personal connections also played a crucial role, with friends and family of our volunteers linking us to teachers, universities, local government units, provincial departments of education, business owners and schools in their hometowns.
Our expansion wasn’t limited to the Philippines, as it organically grew as our community grew. When one of the teachers we had trained in Palawan moved to Thailand, she and her new school invited us, establishing a presence there. Guyana came onto our radar through a volunteer who was a student at the University of Toronto and hailed from that region, and our venture into Jamaica was a direct referral from the Ministry of Education in Guyana.
Until 2019, most of our partnerships were forged through these networks. However, the pandemic prompted a shift, and we worked with many groups online as video calls became more prevalent. In October 2023, we received a cold email from a faculty member in Indonesia who found our website. This led to several video calls, and within a month, we had agreed to deliver training to teachers in Banjarmasin on using locally-available materials to create activities and engage secondary students in science. By May of 2024, six Pueblo volunteers flew from Manila to Banjarmasin by way of Jakarta to deliver our first program in Indonesia at Lambung Mangkurat University.
The training was a success. We will be coming back to Lambung Mangkurat University for another training session in 2025 and will be collaborating on academic papers detailing results of the training.
This journey underscores the importance of adaptability, resourcefulness, and the power of personal connections in expanding STEM education to new frontiers.
We are always looking for new partners in the countries we already visit or in new countries we have not yet explored. If you know where Pueblo Science can go next, please contact us via email (info@puebloscience.org), and we can go from there!
This blog was written by Mayrose Salvador, the executive director of Pueblo Science.