Getting to Know Your International Contacts—Part 2

Susan Lyon

Susan Lyon was intrigued by a small child’s conception of the word “city”, and began pondering how children think, eventually visiting Reggio Emilia and then bringing the “100 Languages of Children” exhibit to the San Francisco Bay area.  She founded Innovative Teacher Project: ITP strives to create a culture of dialogue and research in Northern California that promotes the pleasure of inquiry among children and adults. The cornerstone of the Reggio philosophy is an image of the child as competent, strong, inventive and full of potential – subjects with rights instead of need.

Like Ms. Lyon, I have a new way of looking at young children. I would like to learn to see into the window of children’s mind and to see how they see their world.

The Hundred Languages of Children is a continuously updated traveling exhibition that, translated into various languages, has been telling the story of the Reggio educational experience worldwide to thousands of visitors for over 25 years (Autumn 1981-Spring 2008).

  

 

Harvard University’s “Global Children’s Initiative

The Center's Global Children’s Initiative has begun to build a portfolio of activities in three domains: early childhood development; mental health; and children in crisis and conflict situations. Each of these domains is being guided by a faculty working group that will facilitate continuing cross-disciplinary collaboration; design and implement new projects; and engage additional faculty, students, and collaborators beyond the Harvard community.

UN BUEN COMIENZO

Un Buen Comienzo (UBC), “A Good Start,” is a collaborative project in Santiago, Chile, to improve early childhood education through teacher professional development. The idea is to improve the quality of educational offerings for four-to-six-year-olds, particularly in the area of language development. This project is also designed to intervene in critical health areas that improve school attendance as well as socioemotional development, and it seeks to involve the children's families in their education.

UBC, which has received some funding from the Center on the Developing Child, is an example of the kind of integrated child development work that is central to the Center’s mission.

The project, which began in 2007 with four demonstration sites, will eventually encompass 60 schools. National and international actors from both the public and private sectors are participating in the effort, which involves two years of intervention for each site.

UBC also incorporates a comprehensive evaluation: a cluster-randomized experiment in all 60 schools. This type of longitudinal evaluation in early education has not been carried out in any other country in Latin America and will place Chile at the forefront of demonstrating the impact of a high-quality early education.

As part of its Global Children’s Initiative, the Center is launching Núcleo Ciência Pela Infância, its first major programmatic effort outside the United States. In collaboration with local experts, this project aims to use the science of child health and development to guide stronger policies and larger investments to benefit young children and their families in Brazil.

 

 APPLYING THE SCIENCE OF EARLY CHILDHOOD IN BRAZIL

Núcleo Ciência Pela Infância is a collaboration between the Center, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, Fundação Maria Cecilia Souto Vidigal, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of São Paulo, and Insper. This project represents a unique opportunity for the Center to work with Brazilian scholars, policymakers, and civil society leaders to adapt the Center’s programmatic model for the local context in order to catalyze more effective policies and programs that will, ultimately, foster a more prosperous, sustainable, and equitable society.

 Together, these organizations will engage in the following activities:

 •Building a scientific agenda and community of scholars around early childhood development;

 •Synthesizing and translating scientific knowledge for application to social policy. This will include working with the Center’s longtime partner organization, Frameworks Institute, to effectively communicate the science of child development in the Brazilian cultural context;

 •Strengthening leadership around early childhood development through an executive leadership course for policymakers;

 •Translating and adapting the Center’s existing print and multimedia resources for a Brazilian audience.

ZAMBIAN EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT PROJECT

While a large number of studies have investigated the impact of early childhood experiences on children’s developmental, health, and educational outcomes in developed countries, relatively little evidence is available on early childhood development in sub-Saharan Africa. To address this knowledge gap, the Zambian Ministry of Education, the Examination Council of Zambia, UNICEF, the University of Zambia, and the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University launched the Zambian Early Childhood Development Project (ZECDP) in 2009, a collaborative effort to measure the effects of an ongoing anti-malaria initiative on children’s development in Zambia.

In order to measure the full impact of the anti-malaria campaign on Zambia’s human capital development, the ZECDP created a new comprehensive instrument for assessing children’s physical, socio-emotional, and cognitive development before and throughout their schooling careers—the first assessment tool of its kind in Zambia. Completed in May 2010, the Zambian Child Assessment Test (ZamCAT) combines existing child development measures with newly developed items in order to provide a broad assessment of children of preschool age in the Zambian context.

After careful calibration of the new survey tool through two rounds of piloting, a first cohort of 1,686 children born in 2004 was assessed between July and December 2010. In 2011, successful follow-up occurred with 1,250 of those children, and an additional follow-up is planned for June-August 2012. The early stages of the project demonstrate that comprehensive child assessments are feasible within standard population-based household surveys.

Reference:

http://www.innovativeteacherproject.org/

http://developingchild.harvard.edu/activities/global_initiative/

http://worldforumfoundation.org/wf/wp/current-work/world-forum-radio/