Abstract:

The early pregnancy involves health risks for teens and her babies, psychological disorders, and also has social, economic and educational implications. The most serious consequences for the teenager pregnant or mother are scholar dropouts, parental rejection, high rate of abortions and organ damage. This fact increases the risk of social exclusion of this particular collective. Social factors are the main responsible, mainly the lack of resources and information or education, as well as the exclusion that cause poor nutrition, and insufficient or no prenatal care among others. There is evidence that when proper prenatal care and social support is given, positive results are achieved for both the teen and her baby. There is also evidence of the effectiveness of programs designed to minimize these negative effects by early incorporation into pregnancy monitoring programs, as well as educational and social inclusion. The main problem of these programs is that they are in-person, and there is a need of anonymity in these situations.

Moreover, while the number of births in Spain has fallen by 18.1% since 2008 (according to data from the Spanish National Institute of Statistics, 2014), the teenage pregnancy remains a public health problem. At the same time, the age of first sexual intercourse continues dropping. The current situation of economic crisis has caused the loss of resources to help this group. According to research from the CSIC (Spanish National Research Council) there is evidence that teenage mothers drop out their studies before, accessed later to his first job, and not usually achieve stable employment throughout her life story. Other countries have implemented effectively inter-sectorial actions in which educators, social workers and health personnel have participated with a complementary role. As a result, doctors, psychologists, social workers and educators believe in the need to strengthen support to this population with comprehensive measures in order to improve the chances of access to better care, combating social exclusion and school failure, and improving the employability, so they can access to stable employment.

Universidad Europea has signed an agreement with Fundación Madrina, a NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) focused on social and psychological support for young pregnant women at risk of social exclusion. In this collaboration several initiatives are being launched. The first one is to support from the perspective of technology and education the current NGO projects. It consists of providing the basic technologies to pave the way for further common development. The final goal is to develop a comprehensive educational platform to inform and train users in the 3 identified areas: health, psychology-social work, and education-employability. This platform will be supervised by professionals from various aspects: obstetricians, obstetric-gynecologic nurse (midwife), psychologists, social workers, and specialized trainers.

In this paper, we focus on the work that is now done with that NGO. How the collaboration was organized, how we have involved students through project-based learning, the results obtained, and the future work will be explained in detail.

Keywords:

Project-based learning, Ethical values.