DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION AT UNIVERSITY LEVEL: AN ONGOING PROCESS SUPPORTED BY STRUCTURES. THE 25 YEARS EXPERIENCE IN ETEA AS A REFERENCE

No more than ten years ago, the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation published its first “Master Plan for Spanish development cooperation, 2001-2004”. It described development education as “a set of actions that public authorities, directly or in collaboration with NGOs and other actors in ODA, perform in order to promote activities that help to achieve a better perception of society towards the problems facing developing countries, and to encourage solidarity and cooperation with them”.

Thanks to the displayed academic reflection and practical knowledge accumulated by NGOs, only one decade later that concept seems to be largely overcome. Development education has broken away from the vague definition as a set of actions to be understood as an ongoing educational process. This idea was reflected in the “Development education strategy for Spanish cooperation”, fulfilled in 2007 based on the ideas of many contributors, among whom were Dr. Ortega Carpio and other ETEA’s researchers.

This strategy sees university as a main actor in development education. And not just in the traditional fields of investigation and postgraduate education, but in the whole process of training students in values, knowledge, skills and mind.

After 25 years of experience working on development education and awareness raising at university level, ETEA not only shares the ideas mentioned above, but also the need to go further: in order to monitor the adequacy of the process, different support structures are required. These structures should adapt their composition and operation to the needs of the phase of the process they’re coordinating, always performing a dual role: to assess the correct performance of their activities and, especially, to accompany the evolution of students during the entire process.

The experience of ETEA can be useful for other colleges and universities as a reference. In this paper the authors present the different support structures promoted by the institution, the programs and activities that they perform, and the channels of communication and coordination between them, facilitating development education at university level as an ongoing process.