Argentina

Bringing Preschool Education to the Slums
Maricel Drazer
BUENOS AIRES, Jan 31
(IPS) -

Almost half of all children in Argentina between the ages of three and five are not enrolled in any preschool programme. The Oscarcito Project was conceived to help fill the gap and provide an early boost to the linguistic and cognitive development of children living in extreme poverty.

The Oscarcito preschool teaching programme was developed by a team of researchers at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) in Argentina.

"Children growing up in poverty lack certain opportunities," said teacher and researcher Beatriz Diuk. "For instance, these children have no books, so they don't absorb the language forms transmitted through books that other children do, because their parents can't afford things like that,"

Diuk, who is one of the creators of the programme, told IPS. "Children raised in cities, even very young ones, know what a chicken looks like even if they've never seen one, because they have books which show chickens and dinosaurs and crocodiles. But children without access to books miss out on that kind of knowledge," she added.

"It has been estimated that average middle class children will have stories read to them around 6,000 times before entering primary school, while the children targeted by this programme have heard none," said Celia Rosemberg, an education specialist who also helped create the project.

The Oscarcito initiative is aimed at reaching children who do not attend preschool as well as those who do, but are unable to reach their learning potential due to the "opportunity deficit", they explained.

In Argentina, 55 percent of children under 14 live below the poverty line. But according to the latest official figures for the first half of 2005, that proportion rises to 60 percent in the outlying areas of greater Buenos Aires, and to more than 70 percent in the northeastern region of the country. Differences in opportunities at an early age are a source of inequality, said the researchers.

The project thus designs and distributes books, provides notebooks and coloured pencils, and puppets and games, as well as teacher training and family orientation. In sum, the project promotes quality of education, but using a non-traditional methodology. In fact, it has produced its own reading material.

"In Oscarcito's House" is the title of the series of publications produced by the CONICET team, specially designed on the basis of ethnographic techniques, which involve studying the behaviour of people in their natural environment. Dozens of children were filmed on video at their normal activities over several days, in and outside of their homes. Twelve hours of recordings per child per week were analysed before the texts were developed.

"We want the children to expand their language repertoire, but by building on their own vocabulary, rather than denying it," linguist Ana María Borzone, the director of the project, told IPS.

"We think it is very important for the children to see in print the words they normally use, and the material they read should be about a reality familiar to them. The children can identify with Oscarcito, and that is positive from both the cognitive and affective points of view," she said.

So Oscarcito, the main character in the texts, and the title of the eponymous programme, can be seen playing in rainwater puddles in the alleyways between houses - a characteristic feature of slum neighbourhoods - or playing football in an empty lot, or even running around among chickens.

Since the programme began to be implemented two years ago, nearly 300 children from Buenos Aires slums, known in Argentina as "villa miseria", have participated. The Oscarcito programme is applied in two different places: the children's homes, and community childcare centres. The pillars of the programme are the teachers and the neighbourhood women without formal teaching qualifications who look after and educate the children in the childcare centres, and the families in their homes.

Elena, the mother of five-year-old Maribel, is an enthusiastic participant. Her daughter does not attend preschool, so she feels the programme is "an opportunity for her to learn," she told IPS. Proudly she said that Maribel "draws, paints, writes her name, and mine too." Beside her, the little girl showed off her latest work: a drawing of the five members of her family. "There's nothing else like this in our country. There aren't any other programmes that involve the families. We work with them, showing them ways of promoting language development in their children, offering them materials and showing them how to use them," Rosemberg explained.

Highlighting the special features of the project, Borzone added: "This way of working connects educational research and development, and promotes cooperation between research centres and social organisations, which is very different from the way things are usually done."

"In the long term, we hope that these children will be able to defend their rights, and be able to play a full part in a society that sets extremely high literacy standards. This is the first step along the way," Diuk commented.

Implementation of the programme was made possible by a German couple, Horst Schroth, a well-known actor, and Elke Rottgardt, a psychologist, who have a special interest in Latin America. So far they have donated 49,000 euros (60,000 dollars) of their own money and funds raised among their friends, and have promised another 30,000 (37,000 dollars) for this year.

"We have no children to save for, so we can afford to spend the money on projects that we think are important," Rottgardt told IPS by telephone from Germany. There are plans for designing a programme that can be used, in future, in other poor regions of Argentina. "The situation in Argentina is extremely serious. High levels of poverty are strongly associated with a lack of proper learning opportunities," Diuk underlined.