March 1, 2009

Connections Across Continents

How the Santiago project came to be

From The March-April 2009 Issue

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The Developing Child

A classroom in Peñalolén (a neighborhood of Santiago, Chile) where "Un Buen Comienzo" is being implemented

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A teacher and student work together on a writing exercise. Chilean schools typically don't begin to teach reading until the first grade; UBC gives teachers strategies for introducing the alphabet and building early literacy with four- and five-year-olds.

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UBC focuses on classroom design and organization as well as lesson content. The program teaches that something as simple as keeping books readily accessible to children, rather than locked away in a cupboard, encourages early engagement with reading.

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Teacher Patricia Pérez reads to her students, using the method she learned in UBC: stopping to ask the students questions about the plot, and focusing on new vocabulary at the end.

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Children in a Peñalolén school that received the less intensive UBC intervention—fewer donated books and less involved teacher workshops.

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Children perform "cuecas," a Chilean traditional dance, for visitors including Harvard professors who helped design UBC.

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Children in a UBC classroom display a writing exercise on which they've been working.

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A close-up of a child's drawing depicting a scene from a book the child had read with a parent or teacher. These drawings, displayed outside a classroom at a UBC school, show the type of engagement with books the program tries to cultivate in students.

The existence of a Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) project in Santiago represents a serendipitous alignment of circumstances. In early 2006, Chile’s newly elected president, Michelle Bachelet—herself a pediatrician—vowed to widen access to preschool, making it free for the poorest 40 percent of the populace. She announced an initial goal of opening 800 new preschool centers in the first year and 3,500 new preschools (with a total of 70,000 slots) in four years. At the same time, the government was becoming interested in how to improve the quality, as well as the quantity, of preschool education, says Steve Reifenberg, director of the Santiago office of Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. The traditional model had by and large been “to take care of kids while their parents are working so they don’t hurt themselves,” says Reifenberg, “rather than something more stimulating.”

Around that time, Chilean businessman Andrónico Luksic Craig was eager to add education to his portfolio of philanthropic activities. He mentioned this desire to Reifenberg, who, in turn, invited a handful of Harvard scholars—HGSE dean Kathleen McCartney and Harvard Medical School’s Brazelton professor of pediatrics Judith Palfrey and associate professor of psychology Catherine Ayoub—to Santiago for a seminar with Luksic and Chilean education officials…and UBC was born.

At the same time, Andrea Rolla, who had experience designing and evaluating early-childhood education initiatives in Costa Rica and El Salvador, had completed her Ed.D. and moved to Santiago. She would become UBC project director. Elisabeth Farrelly, a Yale M.B.A. who had worked for an educational nonprofit in New York and then moved to Santiago with her Chilean husband, was available to become general manager of Luksic’s educational enterprise, Fundación Educacional Oportunidad. And another HGSE graduate, Ernesto Treviño, Ed.D. ’07 (a Mexican national married to a Chilean), completed his degree just in time to direct the evaluation in his new post as a professor of education at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago.