Carlos Enrique Sánchez Santamaría

Carlos and his students use newspapers and international trips to challenge the stigma that his town carries from when many people in it suffered form leprosy. Seventeen years ago he and his students created a newspaper called Periodecimo. At that time it was a huge undertaking involving everyone in the school. Using whatever ICT was available, Carlos crated a “newsroom” for his tenth-grade pupils. Each student proposes ideas for the stories they want to develop and the other students add in their own ideas to develop it. The students conduct research after school and later in the classroom, Carlos helps them digitise it, print and proceed to sale. A treasurer is appointed from among the students. Their job is to collect the money, with the profits being reinvested in new educational materials.

The work is self-evaluated and co-evaluated, and Carlos is always looking for ways to improve. Recently Carlos helped his students begin producing a monthly TV show. These educational practices can easily be replicated in different schools, and in different subjects – from Spanish to social science or mathematics. Through the Sharing Foundation, Entrepreneurs for Education and the Salesian Society, Carlos had the opportunity to share their experience – “ICT, an opportunity to see us, learn from history, discover our own and connect with the world” – in several Colombian cities.

During 2017, Carlos proposed turning his home town into the first historical-cultural park of the world. The Sasakawa Memorial Health Foundation in Japan were very excited about the idea. They invited him to Setouchi, Okayama, Japan to present the idea at the International Symposium on Hansen’s Disease History of Heritage of Humanity to 16 countries that have also suffered the scourge of leprosy.