At el Centro de Emprendizaje(CEM) in Southern Chile, relationships are an important part of the educational experience.
A newly published case study — co-authored by UEP Professor Lorlene Hoyt — explores the approach of the CEM at Valdivia’s Universidad Austral de Chile to integrate higher education with entrepreneurship and collaborative learning. The report, Emprendizaje: Higher Education for Entrepreneurship, Learning, and Collective Intelligence in Southern Chile seeks to flesh out the practical applications of “Emprendizaje,” a concept (emprender + aprendizaje) that the CEM faculty and staff try to live out daily.
This report began with Hoyt’s UEP graduate course, Community Development Planning and Policy, which examined alternative community development approaches that the Global North can draw from the Global South. For the course, students examined case studies from Mondragon, Spain to Lawrence, Massachusetts and conducted interviews with students, faculty, and staff at the CEM. Work on the report continued after the course through Tufts’ Talloires Network, the MIT Community Innovators Lab and the CEM.
The CEM draws from methodologies and theories such as Manfred Max-Neef’s Human Scale Development, which emphasizes greater self-reliance through satisfying human needs, and provides an alternative to neoliberal development approaches focusing on indicators such as Gross Domestic Product.
The CEM’s alternative pedagogical approaches can provide innovative solutions to the world’s crises and therefore worth delving into.