Developing Joint Culturally Relevant Curricula for School Children, Methodology and Lessons Learned: The Cases of Castro-Chiloé and San Bernardo-Santiago, Chile

Developing joint culturally relevant curricula is one of the great challenges in early childhood education today. This new approach focuses on offering effective community participation so area representatives may make... [ view full abstract ]

Developing joint culturally relevant curricula is one of the great challenges in early childhood education today. This new approach focuses on offering effective community participation so area representatives may make decisions as to what aspects of their culture must be incorporated into the educational curricula.

The phases of this process focus on community meetings by the local educational community who validate each proposal, as well as by the children, families and the community at large, followed by a period of observation of said proposals.   

For this project, we worked with people representing the local community, educational agents and families, who identified, selected and agreed on which values and traditions should be instilled into the students by the schools in the area.

To achieve this, it was necessary to provide training, analyze data and to accompany the educators at different stages offering support and systematizing the progress and difficulties inherent to the implementation of the project.

This presentation will show the cases of the cities of Castro (located in the Chiloe region of southern Chile) and of San Bernardo (a suburb of Santiago, the country’s capital) and the activities that were implemented as well as the lessons learned during the development of the project.