Social problems in initial teacher education: Syrian refugee children as problematic

Abstract

This paper presents a project, conceived as action research, which has been implemented within the framework of teacher training, specifically, in the second year of the Degree in Primary Education of the University of Almeria. The main objective is to develop professional competences in future teachers, who provide them with the necessary strategies to train “global” citizens, capable of understanding their world and engage with it. The project has focused on a relevant social problem such as the situation of Syrian refugee children, a subject that, unfortunately, is very topical in our days. The objectives that we set out have their origin in the model of teacher we want to train. Related to this, we asked ourselves if competences offered by the framework of the European Higher Education Area are sufficient to turn our university students into professionals with critical, social, ethical and democratic thinking through working with relevant social problems. It was important to develop a critical training model with the intention that students will realize the need to transform Social Sciences into an instrument that makes possible, from the school, the social change.

We also wanted to overcome prejudices in the students about the possibilities that offer the curriculum design to work on these topics, and show them that curricular contents should be put at the service of education to transform citizenship and commit to action. In this paper we advance the theoretical foundation on which the project is based, as well as the phases in which it has been organized for its development. Although we are in an initial phase of analysis of results, we can establish some first conclusions that reveal the positive impact of the project.