MSCA- Postdoctoral Fellowship: Inclusive Education, Diversity, Higher Education, Social Responsibility, Institutionalization, Program Evaluation

The Pablo de Olavide University in Seville offers positions for researchers willing to implement a 2-3 years project based in Spain within the framework of the Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska Curie postdoctoral fellowships programme (MSCA-PF-2021). All top candidates having the approval of a supervisor at UPO will have the possibility of receiving specialized training in writing a successful proposal for the next MSCA-PF call. You can apply if at the time of the call deadline for the submission of MSCA-PF proposals (September, 2021): 1) you are in the possession of a PhD and you have not obtained your PhD more than 8 years ago; 2) you comply with the mobility rule of the MSCA; 3) you choose the Pablo de Olavide University as your Host Institution. We will be happy to support highly qualified candidates who are interested in any area of our research and are eligible for the MSCA funding. Please contact us by email to get all the details about available scientific supervisors and the procedure to benefit from the training on proposal writing

Brief description of the Centre / Research Group:

The University Pablo de Olavide (UPO, Seville) is a public University committed to offer high quality education. UPO is located in a single campus equipped with the latest technologies. In its 140 hectares it combines teaching, research, and social and sport activities, which makes it a different alternative. To this end the University provides the latest technologies and personnel. Likewise, a successful research and teaching cooperation has been developed together with Latin American Universities and European Universities. Furthermore, our strategic location, as a bridge between Europe and Africa, has favoured the development of tight links not only with Moroccan Institutions but also with other African countries.

On the other hand, UPO is fully committed to the implementation of a inclusive and committed university at every level, thus most of the projects are carried out together with different stakeholders.

The team members who support this proposal are strongly committed to quality in education and social justice.

Some work in intercultural education, rights with persons with disabilities, combating early school leaving, and

Inclusive education. Therefore, it is a team that has professional, teacher and research experience in the work of education and social sciences in general.

TEAM INVOLVED IN THE PROJECT:

The team coordinator, ROSA MARÍA RODRÍGUEZ-IZQUIERDO, holds a PhD in Education (University of Seville). She also earned a Master's degree in Intercultural Teaching and Inclusive Education. She is currently a full professor at Pablo de Olavide University (Seville, Spain). She has worked at the Universidad Autónoma (Madrid, Spain).

She has been a visiting Fulbright scholar at Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and a visiting researcher in the department of Sociology at Harvard University, in Australia (Sydney University, Melbourne University and Brisbane University), and in several European (Finland, Italy, Lithuania, etc,) and Latin American Universities (Peru, Chile, Colombia). She is a research fellow of the Real Colegio Complutense (RCC) in Harvard since 2005.

Trained as an educationalist, her work has focused on inclusive education, citizenship and multicultural education, curriculum reform, teacher’s attitudes toward relevant practices, and the relationship between quality teaching, school’s improvement, and social inequality. She is particularly interested in studying the relationship between societal changes, particularly migratory flows occurring with globalization, and schooling and the achievement gap on immigrant children (first and second generation). Particularly she is interested in how to bridge the gap between schools and parents, teacher’s attitudes towards these children and their parents, and by and large, how to support quality teaching in systems where access to schooling has expanded rapidly particularly in processes mediated by technology. In brief, how to make schools a relevant place for all from a multicultural/inclusive perspective.

How She has written numerous articles on these themes. Along this path she has taught more than thirty courses and seminars in various government agencies and universities, and pronounced fifty scientific conferences, at the national and the international level in universities, such as, Stanford, Harvard, Florida State University, North Florida University and the University of Technology of Sydney.

She has been invited to teach courses in the following universities: Católica Pontificia de Perú, Católica Universidad de Uruguay, Universidad Veracruzana, Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo and Universidad del Atlántico (Colombia). Within the Socrates-Erasmus and Comenius program she has been at: the University of Aplied Sciences in Finland (three times), the University of Copenhagen, the University of Berlin, the University of Baden, the University of Belfast, the University of Norway, the University of Athens, the University of Kaunas.

She has been working for more than 20 years in related activities to European Programs (organizing and attending international meetings, acting as coordinator/ partner in several projects, delivering interim and final reports, conferences and stays in multiple countries). She is currently project's coordinator of two Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership programmes:

• Promoting Inclusion to Combat Early School Leaving (PICESL)(2019-1-ES01-KA201-065362):
• Breaking barriers and building bridges. Strengthening active citizenship competences and civic engagement skills among young adults with intellectual disabilities (B4) (2020-1-ES01-KA204-081996):

In teaching innovation, she has been particularly attentive to the evolution of the future of the school and the new student profiles. She has written numerous articles. book chapters and has presented papers at international and national conferences on these topics. She has also taught multiple courses at Teacher Training Centers at the national level and through the MECD. She has led projects on Inclusive Learning, Service Learning (SL) and co-teaching and collaborative teaching. It has mention of excellence in the DOCENTIA program.

Currently, she is the Academic Director of the degree program on Social education and the coordinator of the PhD programme on migratory studies. She can be contacted at rmrodizq@upo.es. More information:

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9432-1280

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rosa_Rodriguez_Izquierdo

Project description:

1)Together with member of other eight Spanish universities we participate in the I+D+I project Attention to diversity and inclusive education at the university. Diagnosis and evaluation of institutionalization indicators (I+D+i) (InclUni) (EDU2017-2862-R): http://www.uco.es/incluni/index.php/es/resultados

Most of the Universities in Spain and in other countries are currently in the process of implementing practices and policies related to the attention to diversity as part of its social responsibility. However, in an initial approximation, an inclusive approach that combines systemic and cultural elements could be barely attributed to them. Based on this assumption, this project is aimed at the devising of a proposal for the institutionalization of the attention to diversity, from an inclusive approach, in which all the different perspectives of the main actors such as the institutional leaders, University staff, students and other community agents can be brought together, by means of a dialogical and participative process. This process exceeds the current tendency that defends the attention to diversity and simultaneously contemplates the attention to all those groups who are disadvantaged –immigrants, ethnic and cultural minorities, people who are vulnerable due to their socio-economical situation, LGBTI collective and students with special education needs–.

To that end, in the methodological process, we analyze the situation in relation to nine key areas of the institutionalization process (access, participation and achievement; philosophy and politics; leadership; supportive services; evaluation, investigation and innovation; training; curriculum; climate and culture; and communitarian projection). Then, pilot actions have been planned and implemented in all these areas and subsequently there will be an evaluation of its transference and impact on the policies, practices and institutional culture. This validation will be accomplished from an action-oriented paradigm with a pragmatic approach. It is aimed at finding the best methodological answer to the objectives and hypotheses by means of 4 stages and 150 tasks scheduled. There will be an appropriate and relevant coordination of the methods and techniques of the quantitative approach (quasi-experimental studies, with structured measures and multivariate analysis) together with methods used in ethnography (descriptive studies with information gathering based on documentary analysis, personal interviews, discussion groups and interpretative analysis).

The final output, based upon the previous process of validation, will consist in the design of a complete proposal for the attention to diversity in Higher Education institutions. It will be offered to the organizations that are interested in its implementation (the 7 Universities to which the members of the team belong and 3 additional Universities, that have prior experience in attention to diversity). Together with this proposal of institutionalization, it will be developed a working guide to support the procedures related to the implementation of the validated interventions, as well as a training plan of inclusive attention to diversity addressed to those people who are responsible for training and to guidance counsellors, as the teachers and administration staff of the entities wishing to get involved.

KEY WORDS: Inclusive Education, Diversity, Higher Education, Social Responsibility, Institutionalization, Program Evaluation.

Applications: Documents to be submitted by applicants:

• CV
• Motivation letter
• Project proposal