Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) are working on a major innovative effort that aims to improve the quality of early childhood education and children´s health initiatives in Chile with collaboration of DRCLAS.

UBC with the Chilean ministries of Education and Health and other local institutions hopes to make a major contribution to the development, implementation and evaluation of successful early education interventions for children from low income families. The main focus  is language and literacy skills, with an emphasis on parental involvement and child health. The project is developing education and health component modules to provide skills training for teachers from 3-6 years old.

The interdisciplinary collaborative project builds on a successful July 2006 conference on “Enhancing the Quality of Early Education” held in Santiago, that was co-sponsored by the Fundación Educacional Oportunidad, DRCLAS, HGSE, and the Chilean Ministry of Education.

UBC  has brought together national and international actors from the public and private sectors, among them Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, Medical School and DRCLAS, the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, Fundación Educacional Oportunidad, Universidad Diego Portales, the Junta Nacional de Jardines Infantiles (JUNJI), Fundación Integra, Hogar de Cristo, Municipalidad de Peñalolén, Worldbank and  Unicef.

Through continual generous funding and leadership from Andrónico Luksic´s Fundación Educacional Oportunidad, the project aspires to develop a groundbreaking initiative – one that holds the promise to place Chile at the vanguard of successful early childhood education throughout the world.  

UBC uses a multi-faceted approach to enhance the development, education, health and growth of underserved children.  It  is a project of systematic intervention within the educational establishments,  focused to the teacher training, to improve capabilities, competences and abilities, from educators as well as technicians, specifically in language, detection, management of health problems, socio-emotional development and the incorporation of the families to their children’s education. 

The project started in 2007 with four demonstration sites within the Municipality of Peñalolén, betting to a model of professional teaching development, and in 2008 UBC will continue working in Peñalolén with a total of six schools. By 2011, the project proposes to involve 60 municipal schools, and eventually serve as a model for national and international replication. Numerous senior Harvard faculty members have visited Chile since the project began, including early education specialist and HGSE Dean Kathleen McCartney, HGSE Co-principal Investigators Catherine Snow and Hiro Yoshikawa, as well as early childhood specialist Cathy Ayoub, and childhood health expert, Judith Palfrey.     

In 2008-2009 with support from a DRCLAS Collaborative Research Grant lead dy Dr. Judith Palfrey, Dr. Mary Catherine Arbour, and Hirokazu  Yoshikawa, will be developing the health component for UBC, Health prevention to promote school attendance, learning and healthy development.       

Participating Harvard Faculty: Catherine Snow, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education;  Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Professor, Graduate School of Education;  Cathy Ayoub, Research Associate; Associate Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry; Judith Palfrey, T. Berry Brazelton Professor of Pediatrics, Professor in the Department of Maternal and Child Health in the Faculty of Public Health;  Kathleen McCartney, Gerald S. Lesser Professorship in Early Childhood Development.; Dean Graduate School of Education  and Dr. Mary Catherine Arbour, /Senior Resident, Howard Hiatt Global Health Equity Residency in Internal Medicine, Brigham and Women´s Hospital, Harvard University.

Collaborating Institutions: Fundación Educacional Oportunidad; Ministry of Education;  Hogar de Cristo;  JUNJI, INTEGRA, Ministry of Health, Universidad Diego Portales, World Bank; and UNICEF.

Recent Publicity:

El Mercurio

Harvard Gazette