COORDINATOR
Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology at the Autonomous University of Madrid.
Director of the UAM UNICEF University Institute for the Needs and Rights and Children and Adolescents (IUNDIA).
Member of the Board of UNICEF Spain Committee. Coordinator of the Consolidated Research Group of the Autonomous of Madrid on the Needs and Rights of Children and Adolescents (GINDIA). One of my lines of research is the protection, defense and guarantee of the “Rights to Education” both in the normal population and in those who find themselves in vulnerability situations.
In this respect, it is worth highlighting my interest in guaranteeing the right to education in the 0-3 age group. This interest is reflected in the report entitled “The right to education in the 0-3 age group: a necessary and sufficient investment” commissioned by UNICEF Spanish Committee, published in 2018. This work reviewed, for the first time in Spain, the situation of the first cycle of Infant Educations in the different Autonomous Communities, analyzing at a regulatory level.
The results were used to lobby all the Regional Ministries of Education in the seventeen Autonomous Communities, which has allowed some of them to adopt policies aimed at increasing the public supply of places at this stage, regulating its educational nature, as well as consolidating the admission criteria.
This initial work has continued to give rise, at present, to different studies in which an analysis is being made, as a matter of good practice, of how a universal model of infant education can be consolidated despite it not being a compulsory stage of the education system. As well as the content that should be included in the stage from a children’s rights approach.
The symposium includes a general presentation in which the situation of the right to education in the 0-3 age group in different educational systems, both European and Latin American, will be analysed.
Based on this analysis, which will be carried out using the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) as criteria, two papers will be presented in which different aspects of the right to education in the first cycle of early childhood education (0-3 years) will be reviewed.
The first paper will analyse the curriculum content, and the second will analyse how educational practices are organised in the classroom.
With regard to the curriculum content, the curriculum for this educational stage in Chile will be reviewed by way of example to verify how the focus on children’s rights is included in it.
With regard to the educational practices carried out in the classroom, the communication will focus on the resources and strategies that teachers and educators implement to deploy this approach.
Finally, the symposium includes two other communications which will present, as an example of good practice, the work carried out in the Balearic Islands to consolidate an educational model aimed at universalising the right to education in the first cycle of infant education, due to the undoubted advantages that this has, in an educational stage that is not compulsory.
Taking as a reference the work of awareness-raising and political advocacy carried out by the different agents that have participated in the process.