Leveraging National Policy to Generate Awareness and Change Toward Contextualized STEM Educational Practices: The Case of Panama

Abstract

Providing quality education to all children within a country, and particularly one as diverse as Panama, requires science education practices that allow for local contextualization. This concept is particularly important if we aim to improve the educational experience and quality of learning for all, despite growing inequality, while also supporting minority groups in accessing and preserving their traditional knowledge and identities. In this chapter, authors share opportunities, challenges, and priorities for the implementation of contextualized STEM national policies and practices, including curriculum, instruction, and assessment. The authors conclude that there are needs for long-term policy and legislation, the development of the required human resource capital including teacher education and professional development reform, and models of previous efforts paving the way for successful implementation within the Panamanian context.

1 Introduction

Nadia De León supports educational programs at the National Bureau of Science, Technology and Innovation (SENACYT), the Ministry of Education (MEDUCA), and local nonprofits and directly with public and private schools. She conducts program evaluation and research on the Panamanian national educational system; enacts professional development programs for teachers and principals; and is actively involved in advocacy for educational policy reform, such as the implementation of the 2017 National Commitment for Education, an effort led by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) with participation from all Panamanian sectors, including public and private institutions, parents, teacher unions, and universities. Maria Heller is the National Science Learning Director at SENACYT. She has served in this role for two non-consecutive periods of 5 years, under different governments. Maria has worked in science education for over 13 years, designing professional development programs for science teachers at national scales, overseeing the design of materials for science classes, and leading national science assessments. Maria is one of the designers of the national flagship program Let’s Do Science,¹ a key program driving science education reform in Panama. Her work involved supporting the introduction of policy changes, such as a 2007 executive order, that allowed for the creation of a teacher-coach figure within MEDUCA.

The goal of this chapter is to reflect on the possibility of large-scale implementation of the ideas presented in the empirical chapters of this book within the Panamanian education system. Based on our current knowledge, experience, and roles within the Panamanian public sector, we include references to relevant policy, systemic, or budgetary concerns that may serve as incentives or barriers to such implementation.

2 Contextualization of Science Education in Panama

Panama is a small country with a population just under 4 million people. According to the 2010 census, over 12% of Panama’s population is indigenous. A high-income country (World Bank, World Development Indicator, 2017a, b) such as Panama has the economic resources necessary to financially sustain improvement efforts at current rates of investment in education, which is currently between and 3% and 4% of its GDP but could be further increased to over 5% to match the average for Latin American and Caribbean countries (Busso et al. 2017). Many Panamanian K-12 students attend private schools (one in eight students attends a private school, and one in four schools is a private school), particularly within Panama City. The public school system includes slightly over 3000 schools with approximately 50,000 teachers and 700,000 students (MEDUCA Estadística Educativa, 2016; Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censo 2016). Three public universities provide teacher education, in addition to a few private universities, and a post-secondary institution for teacher education.² Panama implements a national curriculum that includes science education at the elementary and secondary levels, followed by both private and public schools, although private schools are free to go beyond the compulsory curriculum by including additional content. Panama is within the top 15 countries globally with the highest income inequality and within the top four in Latin America (World Bank, World Development Indicator 2017a, b). Panama’s educational system produces unequal educational results. This inequality is reflected in higher test scores in private versus public schools (OECD 2011) in science and all other subjects, as well as in lower graduation rates and wider gender gaps in provinces with larger indigenous and Afro-Panamanian populations. The Panamanian government has a responsibility to develop and implement national policies that help close the gap that ails schools in the most disadvantaged regions of the country.

As public servants and practitioners, we are convinced that teaching and learning processes must be contextualized to the local reality of students to facilitate and deepen their understanding of curricular contents as well as to make science education relevant to their lives. If science education does not provide opportunities for students to use their traditional knowledge and value their heritage, their motivation to learn science may be negatively affected (Sánchez Tapia et al. 2018). On the other hand, growing evidence shows that culturally responsive teaching and learning improves education outcomes (Aronson and Laughter 2016; Gay 2010; Lee and Buxton 2010; Brown 2007; McKinley and Gan 2014). One-size-fits-all approaches to national curriculum development and teaching strategies are one of the many faults of the aging education system we have inherited from the industrial era. Providing quality science education to all children and adolescents within a country, and particularly one as culturally diverse as Panama, requires policies and practices that allow for local contextualization, particularly in terms of supporting ethnic minority groups in accessing and preserving their traditional knowledge and identities. Panama has engaged in national efforts to improve the quality of education by strengthening STEM education, for example, in a series of programs implemented by SENACYT in partnership with MEDUCA since 2005 to the present, including Let’s Do Science, Science and Robotics student clubs at schools, Science Fair and the Young Scientist Program,³ Khan Academy and local university-led math professional development for teachers, etc. Panama has also conducted efforts to improve equity within the education system. These efforts include providing indigenous communities with intercultural bilingual education (IBE) within the public school system, a policy implemented by MEDUCA and accompanied by an IBE teacher education program at a local public university (the only IBE teacher education program in the country). However, Panama has not yet begun efforts to contextualize science learning as a strategy to help achieve both equity and high-quality STEM education.

Additionally, in a country such as Panama, for which biodiversity is such an important resource, national mandates and government programs that support teachers in the contextualization of education for our children in their local environments are yet to be developed, although collaborations with local nongovernmental institutions, such as the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Biodiversity Museum, have included professional development for public school teachers that utilize inquiry and place-based learning approaches to science education that could pave the road for such national efforts. Furthermore, whereas some efforts for the contextualization of education, particularly that of intercultural bilingual education for the indigenous populations, have been in place for many years in Panama, no data are publicly available from rigorous evaluations, so evidence-based decisions are difficult to make.

In general, the authors note the lack of national long-term policies within the Panamanian public administration. Many programs that affect science education generally respond to the Strategic Plan for Science, Technology and Innovation (PENCYT) and the Strategic Plan for the Ministry of Education, which span 5 years (MEDUCA 2009, 2014) and respond to government plans by the political party in power. In fact, other relevant policies, such as the National Plan for IBE mentioned previously, have also been developed in 5-year formats and are commonly not available online or accessible to the public. The country would benefit from longer-term strategic planning and implementation of educational policies. Despite dozens of modifications in the intervening decades, Panama’s educational legislation and policies continue to function within the regulatory basis of the Organic Law of Education,⁴ which dates from 1946. Many of its premises have become outdated, and the regulations in place often make reform initiatives difficult to implement. For example, the implementation of the Let’s Do Science program, which established a program for teacher professional development and coaching to support inquiry-based science learning, required a presidential executive order (Ministerio de Educación 2007) to allow for teachers who completed the program to be designated as coaches without losing the privileges of a permanent appointment as a public school teacher, since current law did not permit such a figure as a coach within the existing public school system, nor did it allow for the flexibility within the system to create such new positions.

3 Contextualization of Science Curriculum and Instruction to Achieve Greater Cultural Relevance

Although Panamanian educational policy does not specifically promote the adaptation and contextualization of instructional activities, beyond IBE, it does allow for it. Panamanian national curriculum is a set of required subjects with specific required hours of instruction per subject depending on the grade level. Each subject contains suggested content, but teachers are free to design and implement instructional activities to teach the content as they see fit. However, public schools use standardized textbooks for each subject, which are distributed nationwide and are often utilized as the sole source of instructional activities for the classroom, discouraging individual teacher adaptation and contextualized activities. Additionally, the curriculum and school administration system do not encourage interdisciplinary collaborations across subjects. Fortunately, in 2017, MEDUCA published a set of Fundamental Learning Rights,⁵ similar to national standards, for science, as well as math and language. These new standards should allow for the development of contextualized instructional practices and assessment tools and are well-integrated with national programs led by MEDUCA and SENACYT, such as Let’s Do Science and Maximum Learning, an ongoing national program that responds to current policy aimed at better integrating recurrent classroom assessment and differentiated instruction, which includes a focus on literacy, along with science, mathematics, and other areas.

While IBE policy supports contextualization for indigenous students, other populations are not currently contemplated by existing regulations. For example, the number of foreign children in Panamanian public schools almost doubled between 2015 and 2017,⁶ reaching nearly 2% of the total student population. Panama has historically received important numbers of immigrants, more recently including asylum seekers from Venezuela and Colombia, and is currently experiencing an increasing flow of transient refugee populations on the Caribbean coast and in provinces such as Darién (which borders Colombia) and Chiriquí (which borders Costa Rica). Currently, no national policies are in place to support schools in serving this population. MEDUCA has yet to prepare appropriate responses from the education sector. As Delen (Chap. 4) indicates, professional development programs aimed at preparing science teachers to support the needs of migrant populations may be needed. Such programs could encourage teachers in their learning of refugee students’ cultures and the particular experiences from which their families may be escaping, thereby positively influencing teacher attitudes. Additionally, although most of Panama’s population is concentrated in Panama City, nearly half of our student population lives in rural areas. Instructional design, pedagogical practices, and educational programs, stemming from or supporting national policies, rarely consider the contexts of students’ communities. For example, the Panama Canal Authority has recently begun transformation of a program intended to teach students about water conservation in rural isolated schools within the Panama Canal watershed. Program facilitators have learned that many participating students have never seen the Panama Canal. Thus, they had a difficult time achieving learning objectives while trying to make sense of references to container ships and locks. The program is now being revised to be more community-based and focused on students’ experiences and identities while still connecting them to the topic of water conservation as it relates to the functioning of the Panama Canal.

Facilitating the development of contextualized science curricular materials in Panama, as proposed by many of the authors in the empirical chapters of this volume, will be particularly important, given that our current science textbooks do not necessarily address the contexts of all ethnic and linguistic communities within the country.

Like Román et al. (2020) found in Galapagos, the authors have also encountered Panamanian teachers eager to teach content they feel is relevant to the traditions of the communities in which they live and to the ecosystems their students encounter. In the authors’ experience, government agencies such as MEDUCA and SENACYT have supported the implementation of initiatives funded by international organizations, such as UNICEF and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), that bring students’ home-lives, community values, and areas of lay expertise to the foreground of classroom activities. These initiatives have been regarded by teachers and government officials as having positive results in terms of empowerment, motivation, and learning, as well as reading and writing skills. Teacher and facilitators’ comments regarding empowerment often include references to students’ changes in attitudes when working with subjects with which they are familiar, especially concepts they have mastered and can teach to their own teachers, who then engage with them in mutual learning processes. However, such initiatives have not focused on science education.

One example of a small-scale project including community-based learning units that included science topics is the one led by the local nonprofit Casa Taller from 2011 to 2014 with funding from a private foundation and support from MEDUCA and SENACYT. In the context of this project, it was observed that teachers’ perceptions of students who were struggling academically radically changed during the implementation of community-based learning units. For example, during the enactment of a 6th grade unit focused on migratory whales, students felt empowered to have conversations with family members and with teachers about a topic they knew very well and were passionate about, resulting in the engagement of the entire community in the science learning process. Another example was the implementation of a learning unit focused on birds in a forest area near the Panama Canal. The unit was enacted at a multi-grade elementary school where children were expert connoisseurs of the local birds, so they were eager to learn with this unit and to discover new information about birds. However, no such programs have been implemented at a large scale yet, and no systematic evaluation of small-scale science programs has promising results that could facilitate their scaling up.

4 Contextualization of Science Assessments

As we continue to improve the contextualization of science instruction, further contextualization awareness must also be introduced to standardized test development, as suggested by Härtig and Neumman (Chap. 5). Härtig and Neumman warn of the harmful impact of non-contextualized evaluation, because it may bias the measurement of student learning. Given the validity of this concern, we find it imperative to build efforts toward greater contextualization of standardized assessments in Panama. MEDUCA has recently begun efforts to develop national standardized assessments in science, language, and mathematics, with the active involvement of foreign assessment specialists. Assessments are currently being implemented in the 3rd and 6th grades, with developing plans to continue toward the 9th and 12th grades. The development of these assessments and evaluation system is supported by funding from the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) (PN-T1208), through a large project aimed at improving the efficiency and quality of Panama’s education system. Thus, the current momentum and availability of funding would make it possible to add a contextualization component to these initiatives so these assessments become valid for assessing the knowledge of students who are part of indigenous, rural, and/or other communities. The ongoing establishment of a national evaluation system and the consequent analysis of results should provide data to support the need for contextualization and for contextual information to help understand factors that may affect such results.

With regard to international assessments, despite periods of non-participation in the past, national policy is now moving toward continued participation in international standardized assessments, such as PISA conducted by OECD and the learning assessments conducted by UNESCO in Latin America and the Caribbean (UNESCO n.d.). In past applications of such tests, SENACYT witnessed student confusion due to lack of contextualization of the item’s text, since some items included references that were irrelevant or even unintelligible for some students. For example, we have witnessed students in indigenous rural communities puzzled at references to a skateboard. In a standardized test, an item asked students to identify “a cube” (cubo in Spanish), without considering that in Panama the same word also refers to a water bucket. Therefore, many of the students selected a cylinder image as the correct answer instead of the correct answer. Another item referred to the experience of seeing fogged mirrors when one comes out of the shower, which rarely happens in Panama’s warm weather if one showers with cold water, as most people in low-income communities do. In the past 3 years, MEDUCA and the National Bureau for Science, Innovation and Technology (SENACYT) have been participating in the process of designing international standardized test items to minimize these challenges. The program has included professional development for math, science, language, and elementary school teachers in the area of item development to build the countries’ assessment capacity. These efforts to date have included funds to send teachers abroad and to bring foreign specialists to the country to provide training and to facilitate item design processes. These efforts have led to the production and testing of hundreds of standardized test items, the publication of a guidance document, and the cascading of professional development by those teachers who completed the original program. Explicit elements of contextualization can feasibly be included for item design and adaptation in these ongoing initiatives. Doing so would increase the feasibility of implementing contextualized evaluation strategies, as proposed by Härtig and Neumann (Chap. 5), including a comprehensive approach that considers the role of the response format; the importance of congruence between students’ experience, learning scenarios, and assessment formats; and the inclusion of a variety of tasks that match students’ learning.

One barrier to the contextualization of standardized test items in Panama, as proposed by Härtig and Neumann (Chap. 5), is the limited systematized information about local cultures available to inform such contextualization. For example, the law that established IBE also created an office for the research and revitalization of indigenous languages with a specific budget. However, the law focuses on language and not on culture or traditional knowledge. To generate or adapt locally contextualized items and tasks for Panamanian contexts, we find it promising and imperative to conduct an inventory of local alternative ideas. As all authors in this book note, contextualizing education requires knowing the students’ context (background, culture, beliefs, ways of understanding the world, language, and religion).

As Härtig and Neumman identify (Chap. 5), utilizing performance-based evaluations, in which students complete tasks as opposed to answer items on a written tests, and other carefully planned forms of assessment that consider students’ cultures and languages may help provide a better understanding of students’ abilities in varied contexts despite language and/or cultural barriers. The application of these forms of contextualized assessment beyond summative assessment can only be promising for improving the use of formative evaluation within science instruction. For example, the Maximum Learning⁷ program is a national initiative focused on improving learning outcomes and strengthening the education system’s assessment capacity. This program involved diagnostic assessments nationwide at the 3rd grade level as well as professional development, coaching, and support for thousands of teachers in the application of standardized diagnostics tests multiple times a year to inform their classroom practices. Including principles of contextualized item design and contextualized science education into a program like Maximum Learning could have positive impacts at the national scale.

5 Including Contextualization of Science Education in Teacher Education and Science Teachers’ Professional Development

Across all the proposals presented in the empirical chapters of this book, we find that the biggest challenge for application and scale-up is the need for strengthening the capacity of the Panamanian education system by developing the skills of current science teachers and science educators as well as by increasing their numbers. To develop contextualized curricular materials, such as those proposed by Sánchez Tapia et al. (Chap. 3), we need science curriculum developers and lesson designers to develop knowledge of contextualization principles. Moreover, to implement strategies similar to those used by Roman et al. and Delen et al. (Chaps. 2 and 4), we need to engage curriculum developers with expertise on curricular contextualization so we can provide effective supports for in-service teachers. These areas of specialization often require graduate training, which is scarce in Panama. Only 0.3% of the Panamanian population holds doctoral degrees, as opposed to 1.7% in the USA, and only 2.1% hold master’s degrees, as opposed to 9.9% in the USA (UNESCO 2017).

Because the national-scale implementation of any of the proposals in this book would require the support of middle-ground professionals, we must develop policies to support international collaboration and the development of such professionals locally. Furthermore, the feasibility of including contextualization of science education to teacher education programs, as described by Brocos and Jimenez-Aleixandre, is inextricably linked to national efforts to better support our colleges of education. In particular, we need to focus on improving the skills of the current faculty, increasing the number of science education specialists among them, increasing the number of faculty with doctoral degrees and active research agendas, and strengthening science education graduate programs. Present challenges and ongoing research seem to indicate that the current teacher education programs offered in the country are in need of an overhaul if they are to be successful in the quality of science education in the country. For example, in 2017, a study funded by SENACYT found that teachers’ levels of education were not a variable with significant impact in Panamanian students’ scores on a Latin-American learning assessment (Villalba Rey et al. n.d.). As we strengthen our own institutions of postsecondary education, we must continue to deepen a national effort toward identifying and funding science educators who develop specialized knowledge and skills abroad as well as support them in returning to the country to apply their new skills, thereby further building local capacity.

SENACYT has been enacting a program of international scholarships to strengthen national capacity for over a decade. As a way of supporting the improvement of national post-graduate programs, SENACYT offers funding for universities to enact degree-granting programs with a significant number of faculties holding doctoral degrees and having active research agendas. These funds also support collaboration with international researchers and scholars as well as require students to dedicate themselves full time to the program of study and to publish their research. These programs could expand to include science education graduate degrees offered through Panamanian universities.

Additionally, SENACYT has provided funds for approximately a thousand Panamanians to pursue graduate degrees abroad. These programs have often included funding for Panamanians to pursue graduate degrees in education; however, as of 2017, an additional call was made for Panamanians interested in pursuing master’s degrees in education fields abroad to increase their numbers. Current policy could include earmarking some of these funds for degrees in science education or for doctoral dissertations focused on the contextualization of science education. Unfortunately, applicants have been difficult to recruit for these scholarships, and available funds are currently underutilized. On the other hand, SENACYT scholarship programs also support national development at the institutional level by providing funds for local institutions to integrate graduates with doctoral degrees. However, thus far, this stipulation only applies to universities and research centers, as well as selected businesses and nonprofits, but not to government agencies themselves. For example, MEDUCA is not currently one of the institutions with a signed agreement with SENACYT to support SENACYT grantees to join MEDUCA after completion of their graduate degrees, thereby missing the opportunity to increase the government’s capacity to implement strategies such as those proposed in this book. Additionally, current hiring policies at MEDUCA, based on a point system, would present challenges to the insertion of SENACYT grantees.

Although global consensus indicates that contextualization of curricula, assessment, and instruction should be part of the foundational pedagogical knowledge teachers must develop early, the authors’ experience is that teacher education programs in Panama do not currently provide future teachers with sufficient instruction or practice in this area. No national policy is in place that would mandate teacher education programs or professional development for public school teachers to include training for the contextualization of science education. Furthermore, current policy does not clearly dictate any specific minimum subjects to be included in teacher education programs of study, nor does it closely supervise the implementation of such programs. MEDUCA offers week-long teacher development programs nationwide three times per year, but these programs do not include the contextualization of science education.

Making the contextualization of science education a common practice within the education system requires investments in teachers’ professional development. Problem-, project-, place-, and inquiry-based learning and other forms of science experiential learning are all pedagogical approaches that need to be better understood and implemented by Panamanian teachers in K-12 schools. To implement contextualized science education, teachers need to routinely gather information about their students’ lives and ideas and have high expectations of them. Looking at the study plans for teacher education programs at Panamanian universities, it is unclear whether such content is included to provide teachers with the tools to develop their own skills or to guide others through these processes. In fact, such plans are not easily accessible to the public or to stakeholders in the public education system, thereby further limiting informed policy dialogue. Panama’s Organic Law of Education would support required policy changes, because they state that MEDUCA is to coordinate and provide for regular professional development opportunities for in-service teachers; the requirements for teacher education faculty will be regulated through executive order; and teacher education institutions are to be supervised systematically and permanently, including annual evaluation of results.⁸ The decision-making related to such policies must be informed by the assessment of current teachers’ knowledge, skills, practices, and outcomes. However, access to available data from such evaluations is limited by policies that restrict access to teachers and students’ data.

In terms of the availability of funding, policy support, and logistic feasibility, Panama has recently implemented large-scale changes that could be applied to the improvement of science education. For example, Bilingual Panama⁹ is a particularly relevant case of ongoing educational policy at the national level. It is an effort initiated by the current government, established through a national law¹⁰ and supported by an investment of over US$80 million. The program features professional development for thousands of language teachers abroad and locally, including coaching; structural changes to the school curriculum; creation of an after-school program; establishment of a national office; and mechanisms for teacher certification, follow-up, and incentives. Although the program has not been without its challenges, it serves as a feasibility model for the large-scale nationwide implementation of reforms, such as those that may emerge from approaches to the contextualization of science education proposed in this book. This is not to suggest that the ideas proposed in this book would require as large an investment as Bilingual Panama but to highlight that Panama has access to the necessary funds for education initiatives considered as priorities, although no comparable investment has been made to improve science education to date.

6 Models and Opportunities for the Development of Contextualized STEM National Policies and Practices

Panamanian national policy in education has begun a long road toward contextualized instruction and assessment for science education. In general, the Panamanian public education system is not yet teaching or assessing in response to the students’ contexts, in science or in any other subjects. Fortunately, national policy on intercultural bilingual education for indigenous populations may provide a helpful starting point. Panama’s IBE efforts began in the 1980s and became national policy when a law was ratified in 2010 that required the government to provide K-12 education in all subjects in both Spanish and indigenous languages in schools serving indigenous communities, with a particular focus on the early grades, as requested by indigenous communities. The law also refers to identity, culture, and “the relationship with mother nature,” although implementation has so far been mostly focused on language. The law mandates the creation of a national IBE plan to be generated by the IBE staff in collaboration with MEDUCA (units on curriculum and the evaluation).

IBE law also mandates that MEDUCA provide resources for teacher education and professional development in IBE, approve related degree programs, and provide special incentives to IBE teachers “when they sufficiently master the indigenous language and know the customs and traditions of indigenous peoples, and have obtained a certification of language and cultural proficiency expedited by the National IBE Office.” Current policy dictates that teachers who speak the local indigenous language have priority in regard to placement in indigenous regions. Finally, the law created a special fund for indigenous peoples’ education with the goal of improving their access to education, which could be utilized to develop bilingual and/or bicultural materials, as has already been done in Panama, utilizing funds from international nongovernmental organizations. The law also mandated the creation of an IBE curriculum that should include the study of the “language, traditions, spirituality, worldview, culture, identity, history and customs” of each indigenous group. This curriculum was to be built as a product of research and collaboration with indigenous authorities (Asamblea Nacional 2010).

The IBE national policy can be leveraged to support the inclusion of science education in efforts of curricular contextualization related to intercultural teaching and learning, including initial teacher education. All the approaches to the contextualization of science education presented in this volume seem like promising tools to improve teacher education and the teaching effectiveness of Panamanian educators, particularly IBE teachers. Given that the overall spirit of the IBE law is based on “the value of cultural diversity” and the rights of students to an education that responds to their cultural identity, when extended beyond indigenous groups exclusively, this law could serve as a basis to support the implementation of contextualized science education for all Panamanian students.

Another example of existing program that could be leveraged to support the implementation of contextualized science education is the program Maximum Learning. This program included nationwide census testing, teacher training for all 1st through 3rd grade teachers over a period of 2 years, and ongoing coaching for approximately one-third of participating teachers (those in schools with the most needs). Funding for Maximum Learning has been a mixture of local revenues and technical cooperation funds from IADB. Its application demonstrates the feasibility of implementing nationwide professional development efforts, which may be required for the national scaling of any of the initiatives proposed in this book. Maximum Learning also pioneered large-scale teacher coaching, a key aspect for teacher success that was absent from previous teacher professional development policies. Other past programs, such as Get Connected¹¹ and Amongst Peers,¹² involved investments surpassing $US30 million, successfully reaching thousands of Panamanian public school teachers and students, providing public schools with laptops and computer literacy training for up to 5 years. Although Amongst Peers reached most teachers nationwide, the program’s long-term impact has not been assessed.

Panamanian national policy on education includes stable funding for ongoing professional development for teachers. The strategies for the regulation and implementation of professional development for teachers are the subject of ongoing policy reviews, including a 2017 resolution that clarified certification processes for entities approved to provide such training (Ministerio de Educación 2017). Nonetheless, educational reform should be implemented through nationwide professional development of in-service teachers along with modifications to include contextualized science education within teacher education programs and to develop congruent policies regarding certification requirements.

Recent policy changes and the development of national standardized assessment practices have allowed for decisions regarding professional development needs to emerge from evaluation results. Additionally, a new integrated System for the Improvement of Educational Quality was established through an executive order in 2016 (Ministerio de Educación 2016). The approval of the program was associated with increases in the standard pay for teachers within the public school system, and it includes reporting and follow-up processes for academic and administrative improvement plans for each school. These changes have motivated efforts toward better integration between the offices currently responsible for evaluation, professional development, and curriculum, which would favor the implementation of contextualized science instruction at the multiple levels proposed in this book. An associated Program for the Improvement of Educational Quality has been rolled out across the country since 2017, which includes the expectation that education in general, including science education, should be better contextualized to the lives of Panamanian students.¹³

7 Further Challenges and Priorities for the Implementation of Contextualized STEM National Policies and Practices

Ultimately, the feasibility of the application of many of the models proposed in the chapters of this book depends on the teachers’ capacity to contextualize science education within each classroom and the facilitation of processes where teachers and students are learning from each other’s experiences. This paradigm requires particular pedagogical content knowledge which must be supported by national teacher education strategies, professional development policies, a flexible curriculum, and structural policies. Additionally, given Panama’s educational system’s current limitations, compared to other countries in the region,¹⁴ Panamanian educational policy should continue to build national learning standards, policies, and evaluation systems for science education while fostering and supporting contextualized instruction and assessment. At the same time, we need to inform our efforts with ongoing program and impact evaluations as well as classroom support and public progress reports.

Panama is currently experiencing a political moment in which increased public awareness of the critical situation of our education system has generated pressure for considerable reforms, thereby making them more politically viable. An important first outcome of this situation has been the approval in 2017 of a National Commitment for Education. This document was generated through a dialogue led by UNDP, which included parents, students, teacher and worker unions, the private sector, education NGOs, universities, and MEDUCA. It contains agreed-upon objectives, which include topics that would indirectly facilitate the implementation of the ideas presented in this book. In reference to the possibility of implementing the ideas proposed in Sánchez Tapia (Chap. 3), Delen (Chap. 4), and Brocos and Jimenez-Aleixandre’s (Chap. 1) work, the National Commitment for Education includes the creation of new requirements for teacher education programs, a national system for teacher professional development, and the updating of the national curriculum (including its relevance). In reference to the possibility of applying Härtig and Neumman’s ideas (Chap. 5), the National Commitment for Education also includes the creation of learning standards and the regular assessment of student achievement utilizing national and international parameters.

None of the aspirations described in these pages will be achieved without building awareness of the importance of contextualizing STEM education. Additionally, more needs to be done in terms of strengthening the capacity of the education system. MEDUCA should support teachers who are willing and able to utilize their local resources and their students’ socioculturally based knowledge and who contextualize their teaching accordingly. Additionally, curricular reform of teacher education programs must be advocated for to include these elements. This goal can only be achieved through national policies that embed support for contextualization of science education across teacher education and professional development, curriculum development, and assessment. Moreover, contextualization of science education at the national level requires administrative decentralization, as well as decentralization of knowledge. For example, along with national policies, we should invest in local diagnostics and specific regional solutions. In time, if we strengthen our national universities, as well as their regional branches and counterparts, they will continue to grow in their role as key players in the unceasing improvement of science education in the country.