The Academic Program for the Professional Development of Teachers PADEP: 15 years after its founding

Abstract

This paper attempts to give a brief historical account of the events that gave life to the Academic Program for the Professional Development of Teachers (PADEP/D). This program has the virtue of having been a collective construction, product of the initiative of Dr. Oscar Hugo López Rivas, who had the idea of developing a series of basic agreements with the teachers' leadership in order to advance in the transformation of teacher training in Guatemala, thus establishing the basis for the creation of a new teacher training system for the country. These agreements have facilitated the implementation of several actions, the most solid so far is the Academic Program for the Professional Development of Teachers -ADPEP/d-, a program that has been implemented for 15 years and has transcended six governments, in a country where every 4 years new history is written, as new governments leave behind what the previous one implemented and new programs are started. In the country there is a lack of State policies, government policies are regularly substituted by others, not necessarily better. After 15 years of operation, the university has graduated 37,129 students at the undergraduate level and 7039 at the primary and elementary level, as well as 480 at the high school level.