Abstract:

In the last decades, University Students have been worried about the distance between their theoretical knowledge and the actual necessities of present-day society. That is why recent trends in Higher Education emphasize the need to develop learners’ competences. For this purpose, experiential learning is essential because it is based on the principle of learning-by-doing. The aforementioned circumstance is specially relevant in the Degree of Education: in the end, not only do graduates need to be well informed of different educational trends and/or methodologies, but they also must be able to face difficulties such as inequality, social exclusion, and discrimination.

In order to foster the students’ social and cultural competences, as well as to enhance social consciousness, we designed a project based on Service-Learning Methodology. The main goal was to guide our students in the design of different tools, activities, and resources to be displayed on Children’s Day (in Spanish “Día del Niño”), for fostering social inclusion and co-education. By using those tools or participating in those activities, youngsters become aware of the necessity to treat everyone equally and respectfully, rejecting discrimination based on sexual and/or cultural reasons. To carry out the project we counted on the collaboration of the NGO “Creo Desarrollo”.

The subjects chosen to develop the project were Library and Attention to Diversity. Students in these groups reflected on the implications of social exclusion and discrimination on children, especially when both occur at an early age. They concluded that, since people tend to normalize routines and habits they learn at a young age, it is mandatory to help children develop social awareness in terms of cultural toleration and coexistence, as well as gender equality. After that, during the last trimester of the academic year 2015/16, our pupils designed a workshop where children and families were meant to participate. In the first place, they created a Guess Who game in which different cultural identities were represented. Thus they would teach the children and the families the links between different cultures and the necessity to treat everyone respectfully, rejecting any kind of discrimination. In the second place, they encouraged the children to participate in a game in which they had to identify words of care and respect, posting them to the walls, so they developed the capacity to distinguish between good and bad expressions. Since the chosen words had gender implications, the game was a means of enhancing sexual equality between men and women.
After the workshop, we could count on two testimonies to evaluate our experience: on the one hand, the NGO “Creo Desarrollo” reported its good impression to us, highlighting the University students’ involvement, together with the participation of the children and families that attended the workshop; on the other hand, we organised different focus-groups that helped our students realize the necessity to help children participate in such learning dynamics, so they become responsible citizens. Moreover, they acknowledged that learning the teaching of values in front of a real public was much more useful than studying different theories about values in Primary School.

Keywords:

Competences, Education, Exclusion, Experiential-Learning, Inclusion, Inequality, Service-Learning, Social Consciousness.