Peru

2019 grantee

Master of Arts in Sociology of Education and International, Comparative and Development education from OISE at the University of Toronto

BA in Secondary Education from Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (PUCP)

Yina is part of the first generation in her family to have been born in Lima. Her grandmother taught in a rural school in Sierra Ancash and her mother taught at a public school. After getting her BA in Secondary Education from PUCP, she taught Spanish at schools in Peru and Holy Cross College in Massachusetts, through a Fulbright Teacher Exchange Scholarship. In her pursuit to teach Spanish at Peruvian rural schools with an intercultural focus, she studied a Master’s Degree in Education at the University of Toronto, thanks to a Rotary International scholarship. Her thesis presented the emergence of the Cajamarca Quechua Academy (Peru) and the path that the regional community members had to take in order to lead the institution, as well as their strategies to teach Quechua as a political act.

Back in Peru, she ventured into the field of educational policy, working as an advisor for the National Council of Education where she promoted an inter-institutional project for the formulation of national criteria for proficient teacher performance, as well as the design and implementation of a biannual national teacher survey. At the same time, she worked as a consultant for the Social Responsibility area of Pepsi & Co, designing and implementing a project to create a school system in an agricultural area in the Central Andes where the public educational system had no coverage. Upon the project’s completion, she continued working with the families and the school of Pichipampa, up to this day.

Currently, she is about to obtain a PhD in Anthropology of Education from the Andean Studies Program at PUCP, she works as a consultant for the Peruvian Ministry of Education and Unesco, and coordinates the implementation of a project on democracy, philosophy and education with teachers and children from a network of single-teacher rural schools, to which Pichipampa belongs. The latter has been made possible by the Federal Assistance Awards for Community Development Projects funded by the U.S. Embassy and Department of State.