Abstract:

Experiential learning is essential to evaluate the development of competences by undergraduates, especially in university courses where students are required to show skills that will be tested in their professional career. This is the case of the Bachelor’s Degree in Education: pupils are supposed to learn concepts and topics related to school and classroom management, but it is difficult to know whether they will be good teachers or not until they get the chance to work in a school. During university years, practical training is supposed to foster those abilities, but it is not always a good setting for testing the undergraduates’ competences: sometimes there are not enough practical hours, and they need more time to find out about every controversial situation that might arise when they become teachers.

In the present study, we have focused on the importance of competences related to social responsibility. Our research is based on the conviction that social reality changes quickly, and Education must answer to changes and new challenges. Moreover, it needs to play a key role in the defence of children’s rights, since the protection of childhood is its main target. For this purpose, we decided to create a project that made it possible for students of the BSC Degree in Education, at the Universidad Europea de Madrid, to know about children’s demands and necessities all over the world. We have carried out the project during the second term of the academic year 2016/2017, in collaboration with the NGO “Save the Children”, which undertakes several actions to defend children’s rights. The “Solidary Race” is one of them. Spanish schools are provided with the necessary materials to organise the race, conceived as the terminating point of a broader didactic process in which pupils become aware of the children’s situation in the country to which they will be contributing with the money collected.

Our students have been studying Didactics of Spanish Language and Literature, as well as Didactics of Geography and History, during the second term. Therefore, we thought that they could apply theoretical concepts to practice, working in groups that would design different cross-curricular didactic proposals for the “Solidary Race”. We asked two workers from “Save the Children” to come to our class and evaluate them. So assessment of the project had three complementary parts: firstly, the teachers’ evaluation, from an academic point of view, considering whether undergraduates had assumed the theoretical concepts they had previously studied in class; in the second place, the NGO’s assessment, from the scope of social responsibility, as our collaborators were to determine to what extent their proposals matched the NGO’s goal to defend children’s rights; finally, we asked our pupils to co-evaluate themselves, including the achievement of the competence of teamwork, too.

Summing up, our final target is to determine whether our students were successful or not in developing an awareness of social responsibility towards children. We also consider how co-evaluation and external assessment have improved their academic achievement, as well as their compromise towards childhood. Finally, we wished to emphasize the concept of the school as a broad community where everyone (teachers, parents, and students) must collaborate.

Keywords:

Experiential Learning, Social Responsibility.