Where and How to introduce development education in education centres

Department Development Education of NGO Young people and Development.

Manuel de Castro Barco, President of the youth-orientated NGO Jóvenes y Desarrollo [young people and development] has recently published the book Dónde y Cómo Introducir la Educación para el Desarrollo en los Centros Educativos, with the publishing company CCS. This book, produced in collaboration with the Department of Education for Youth Education and Development, and with Trileema, a teaching innovation consultancy firm, could be of great use for education centres that are interested in incorporating the proposals of development education into their range of study programmes.

In addition to a solid theoretical foundation, the book offers practical proposals that can be implemented by teaching staff and that are already being used by the NGO Jóvenes y Desarrollo in the education programme AULAS EN ACCIÓN [classrooms in action], which is endorsed by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID in Spanish).

These practical proposals show how Development Education can be incorporated in the curricula in all education centres. However, this is not just a case of throwing in a series of awareness-raising activities over the course of the academic year: development education looks to establish this “concern” as a continuous and underlying concept that is at the heart of all educational targets set out in the Education Project. The introduction of this process into our education centres gives us the chance to rethink what kind of education we are providing, what type of people our students turn out to be and what kind of society we are helping to create.

Manuel de Castro Barco (Salamanca) is a member of the Salesian Society and a qualified primary school teacher, he holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Theology from the Pontifical University of Salamanca and a Master’s Degree in International Development Cooperation from Comillas University. With many years of experience as a school teacher and headmaster, he was General Secretary for the Catholic Schools of Madrid for eight years. He is the current president of the Jóvenes y Desarrollo foundation, a development-focused NGO that specialises in education. A regular columnist for the education-based newspaper “Escuela” [school] for over six years, this is his first published booked.