Steering Committee

Paul Connolly

Paul is Professor of Education at Queen’s University Belfast and also holds the position of the Donad Dewar Visiting Chair in Social Justice and Public Policy at the University of Glasgow. He is Director of the Centre for Effective Education at Queen's University and also Founding Editor of the international journal Effective Education. Paul was also recently elected as Co-Chair of the Campbell Collaboration Education Coordinating Group.

He has researched and published extensively in the area of race, ethnicity and young children. Much of his research has been ethnographic and concerned with exploring young children’s experiences and perspectives and the ways in which race, ethnicity, gender and social class articulate with one another in young children’s lives. His books include: Racism, Gender Identities and Young Children (1998, Routledge); Researching Racism in Education (with Barry Troyna, 1998, Open University Press); and Boys and Schooling in the Early Years (2004, Routledge). Paul is also interested in the use of quantitative methods in research with young children and, particularly, the use of experimental and quasi-experimental designs in the evaluation of early childhood programs.

Further information on his research and publications can be found at: http://www.paulconnolly.net

Tony Gallagher

Tony is Pro-Vice Chancellor at Queen's University Belfast and was previously Professor of Education and Head of the School of Education at Queen's. He previously worked in the Centre for the Study of Conflict at the University of Ulster and is Editor of the international journal Education, Citizenship and Social Justice (Sage).

His main research interest lies in the role of education in divided societies, the title of his book published in 2004 by Palgrave/Macmillan. Although his main focus is in Northern Ireland, where his work in education specifically seeks to promote the on-going peace process, he has worked for a number of international organisations. These include the British Council, Council of Europe, UNICEF, European Commission and the United States Institute of Peace. In recent years he has run workshops for educators in Israel/Palestine, the Philippines (Mindinao) and Macedonia. In addition he has provided civic engagement training for university students in Turkey and has been invited on a number of occasions to give presentations on related themes to conferences and seminars in the United States.

Mercy Musomi

Mercy is the Executive Director of Child Girl Network, Kenya, and has worked in civil society organizations influencing policies and legislations for the last 25 years. She has advocated for girls and women in particular issues relating to gender based violence. Specifically, Mercy's advocacy work has been around issues of child marriages and female genital mutilation. She has been successful at identifying advocacy issues that others have fear to address, for instance, initiating a campaign to mobilize and provide girls with sanitary towels to be able to remain in school throughout the month and to be able to perform as well as boys. 

A powerful voice in girls’ issues in Kenya, Mercy has mobilized material and human resources, lobbied for issues that affect girls and women negatively and facilitated dialogue and empowerment of the youth with special emphasis on the girl child. She is a fully trained teacher and psychologist, with a diploma in counselling, and has four sons.

Beth Blue Swadener

Beth is professor and chair of Early Childhood Education and Professor of Policy Studies at Arizona State University, USA. Her research focuses on social policy, anti-oppressive/ally strategies in early childhood contexts, dual language programs, and child and family issues in sub-Saharan Africa. She has published eight books, including Reconceptualizing the Early Childhood Curriculum: Beginning the Dialogue; Children and Families “At Promise”: Deconstructing the Discourse of Risk; Does the Village Still Raise the Child?:  A Collaborative Study of Changing Childrearing and Early Education in Kenya, Decolonizing Research in Cross-Cultural Context and Power and Voice in Research with Children and numerous articles and book chapters. She is also active in a number of social justice and child advocacy projects including co-founding the Jirani Project (http://www.jiraniproject.org/), supporting AIDS orphans and street children in Kenya and Local to Global Justice (http://www.localtoglobal.org/), linking local issues to global struggles. Her current research is a collaborative, cross-national study of children’s rights and voice in policies affecting them.

Marta Arango

Marta was born in Colombia and educated there and in the United States, where she received a Ph.D. in Education from the University of California in Berkeley. With her husband, Glen Nimnicht, she founded CINDE, The International Center for Education and Human Development, a research and development institution, she still directs. CINDE focuses on the development of innovative programs for the healthy physical and psychological development of young children. Marta has become an international advocate of innovative programs for young children and excluded people.  In cooperation with several universities CINDE has Masters degree programs in Education and Social Development focused on ECCD and a Doctoral Program on Social Sciences Childhood and Youth. Marta has received a number of awards including the Simon Bolivar award, Colombian highest award for personal contribution to education and was honored by the Inter-American Bank in its 1999 for her contribution to early childhood in the region. She is active in several worldwide ECCD networks like the World Forum Foundation for ECCD, Childwatch International and the Consultative Group on ECCD.

Siobhan Fitzpatrick

Siobhan is Chief Executive of Early Years, formerly known as NIPPA, and has been in post since 1989, having worked previously for the statutory sector within Health and Social Services. Early Years is the largest group based early year’s organisation working in Northern Ireland, currently with 1,000 member groups including playgroups, parent & toddler groups, and day care groups, nursery schools, classes and after school provisions.

In her role as Chief Executive, Siobhan has responsibility for policy and long term strategic development, fund management, relationships with the Inter-departmental Group on Early Years, Childcare Partnerships, and Pre-school Education Advisory Groups. She is a member of the Regional Reference Group on the development of a 0-6 Strategy for Northern Ireland (UK), the Obesity Taskforce and the National Child Care Coordinating Committee in the Republic of Ireland. She also manages Cross Border relationships and International partnerships. Siobhan is the European representative on the World Forum Foundation for early years care and education, where she chairs the International Working Group on Peace Building, and is a Board member of International Step by Step Association, an organisation which supports the development of early year’s services across Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. 

Siobhan is married and has three grown up daughters.

Ileana Seda-Santana

Ileana obtained a PhD in Education at the University of Illinois, U.S.A, in 1988 and has been a school teacher and teacher educator. For more than 25 years she has been dedicated to research and teaching in higher education in Puerto Rico, the United States and México. Author and lecturer on topics of literacy, learning, instruction and assessment for different populations. Currently, professor in the Graduate Division of the School of Psychology of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her publications comprise book chapters including ‘Literacies Within Classrooms: Whose and for What Purpose?’ (in Understanding literacy development: A global view, LEA, 2006), ‘Literacy research in Latin America’ (in Handbook of Reading Research III, LEA, 2000) and edited books such as Comprender para Aprender (Castillo, 2007). She is a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers of the Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT), a University representative on various committees and councils of the Secretariat of Public Education in Mexico and an expert participant in The Instituto Nacional de Evaluación Educativa. She is also Member of the Grupo de Trabajo de Infancia Indígena y Educación and Project Director of Bridges to Grow: Strengthening the Care Environment of Children From Birth Through Eight Years Of Age, both sponsored by the Bernard van Leer Foundation.

Michel Vandenbroeck

Michel works at the Department of Social Welfare Studies, Ghent University, Belgium, where he teaches early childhood care and education and family pedagogy. He obtained his PhD in 2004 with a research on the societal functions of child care and a genealogical study of Belgian child care. He is president of the VBJK, Research and Resource Centre for Early Childhood Care and Education in Flanders. He was one of the founding members of the European DECET network (Diversity in Early Childhood Education and Training). He has published several articles and chapters on diversity and social inclusion in early childhood education, including The View of the Yeti (Van Leer Foundation, 2001), translated into Greek and French. Together with Gilles Brougère he has recently published Repenser l’éducation préscolaire (Peter Lang, 2007). Michel is a member of the editorial board of the European Early Childhood Education Research Journal and the International Journal of Educational Policy, Research and Practice: Reconceptualizing Childhood Studies.

Jacqueline Hayden

Jacqueline is Professor of Early Childhood and Social Inclusion at Macquarie University. She has a long history of involvement with programs for young children in diverse and conflict ridden environments. Some of her recent work involves program development for vulnerable and displaced children in Mauritius and in Rwandan refugee camps; researching young children who have been affected and infected by HIV/AIDS in Namibia; and consulting on early year school programs for indigenous children in Australia. Jacqueline has published widely. Titles include Landscapes in Early Childhood Education: Cross National Perspectives - A Guide for the New Millennium (Peter Lang), HIV/AIDS and the Young Child (University of Namibia Press) and From Conflict to Peace Building: The Power of Early Childhood Initiatives (with Paul Connolly and Diane Levin) (NAEYC). Jacqueline was previously Associate Professor of Education and Founding Director of the Healthy Childhood Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. Between 2006 and 2009 she was the Program Manager of Social Inclusion and Respect for Diversity for the Bernard van Leer Foundation.

Fernando Jiovani Arias

For more than 15 years as a Scientific Director of the  Fundación Dos Mundos, Jiovani  has develop a point of view from the psychosocial perspective in regards to the emotional implications of the human rights violations.  He have been working with families victims of serious violent acts in many regions of Colombia. Jiovani had the opportunity to explore systematically the differences of emotional impacts relative to the gender, age and ethnics.  Recently his work is related to emotional impacts of forced displacement at  early childhood. Some of his titles include School and Armed Conflict: From well protected a protective space, Forced Disappearance and exhumations, Psychosocial Guidelines for the protection of victims and officials.  Jiovani is currently working on an research of  emotional impacts from armed conflict and the duration of internal wars as a candidate for Political Sciences PHD at the Andes University.

Glenda MacNaughton

Glenda has worked in the early childhood field for nearly 30 years. Glenda is currently a Professor in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Australia, where she established and now directs the research Centre for Equity and Innovation in Early Childhood. Her years in early childhood have included work across all sectors as a practitioner and a manager and she has been a senior policy advisor to government in the UK and Australia. Glenda has a passionate interest in social justice and equity issues in early childhood and has published widely nationally and internationally on these issues. She has been researching young children’s constructions of race, gender and class for 10 years.

Sri Marpinjun

Sri was one of the founders of LSPPA (or Institute for Women and Children's Studies and Development), a Yogyakarta based non-governmental organization working for justice for vulnerable groups, particularly women and children. She is an anthropologist who has a very big interest in women and child education developed since her student days.

Sri is currently a ECD Specialist of Plan Indonesia. Previously, and as Director of LSPPA, she had been leading her team to increase understanding of equity from the perspectives of Indonesian women and children, and to explore and develop innovative models of rights based learning in more than 30 Indonesian local kindergartens and 20 primary schools together with teachers.

Frances Aboud

Frances is a professor of Psychology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Over the years, she has studied the development of prejudice as well as programs to reduce it. In this context, she has also studied cross-ethnic friendship and ethnic identity, along with name-calling and other forms of inter-group bullying. A second line of research is on early childhood care and education in developing countries, particularly Bangladesh, where she has helped to improve and evaluate preschool and parenting programs for rural children. Frances has a number of publications on these topics along with two books.

Colin Tredoux

Colin is Professor, and Head of Psychology, at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.  His interests in Social Psychology include contact theory, and the micro-ecology of contact and segregation.  He has published in a range of journals, including American Psychologist, South African Journal of Psychology, and Psychological Science.  He is co-editor of a 2008 Blackwell monograph (with Wagner, Tropp and Finchilescu), Improving intergroup relations, and is guest co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Social Issues.  His collaborative work on the micro-ecology of contact, with John Dixon, Kevin Durrheim, and colleagues, is described in detail at www.contactecology.com