1st International Claretian Encounter on Distance Education

It was held in Batatais, Brazil, at the beginning of April. Fr. Paco Carin,CMF attended the encounter and he tells us:

“The encounter was quite interesting, mostly, because it was the first one and it offered an opportunity for us to come together and share the different approaches and experiences on distance education in Claretian setting. Except for me, coming from East Asia, the rest of the participants were from South America, representing CEFIT (Argentina) ECCLA (Chile), FUCLA (Colombia) and the host, CLARETIANO of Batatais (Brazil).

“For us/me, East Asia, it was an eye-opener. Here in China, education is still a forbidden fruit in the government tree. Private institutions are allowed to start educational institutions (usually for the elite, as they are completely private), but the Church is not allowed to.

“For foreigners there is no such restriction, that’s why we hope we can start a high education center for foreigners in China, starting by first offering semester/year long immersion courses in China, moving to graduate and post-graduate (master/PhD) courses and finally to full college undergraduate studies.

“This encounter helped me to see the possibilities of distance education, and its complexity. Distance Education is not simply to publish/offer educational/academic contents in the Internet. Distance education requires a complete pedagogical/academic setup aimed at providing and facilitating education to students who experience obstacles more than “presencial” students, who can exclusively dedicate financial resources and time to this purpose.

“One way of make use of the benefits of distance education is to implement courses for lay, religious, and priests, for their initial and ongoing formation in Chinese. This setup can be done using the academic/faculty resources of already-existing educational institutions in Hong Kong and/or Taiwan. As long as we don’t expect these courses to be officially recognized in China, probably there would not be any problem in implementing them. Nevertheless, it will need a thorough study to see the pros and cons.

“The second way is the possibility of offering a course like a “Bridge Course in Theological English / Basic Theology Studies” in English… My experience in ICLA and in China and according to some priests and sisters who had studied abroad is that for many of them (mostly those who lacked/lack a strong foundation in English), most of the course contents were “lost in translation”…

“As we can see, this is not (and cannot) be a Claretian-alone enterprise, as we lack the manpower, educational knowhow, faculty resources and financial back up for such an enterprise. Nevertheless, we can try to be the catalyst to bring together many different and distant institutions toward a common goal: the betterment of the Chinese Catholic Church.”

Francisco Carin (second from left, front row)
with the participants to the

1st International Claretian Encounter
on Distance Education