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.
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