Getting to Know Your International Contacts – Part 2

Last week, I wrote about millions of unsupervised children migrating from Mexico to other unfamiliar places (UNICEF, 2016)—one of them being the United States and I confirmed what I had learned about under-aged kids leaving Mexico. This week, my ear caught a news report of two teenaged Mexican boys with a large travel bag strapped over their shoulders as they were caught on video climbing over a 20-foot wall and landing safely on the ground. Now, as they were cautiously walking to cross the border, they suddenly spotted the video camera taping their every move. Within minutes, the boys quickly and ran back towards the wall and like a deer running for its life, they rapidly climbed back-up the wall and landed back-down in Mexico. My heart raced as they were headed back because I did not want them to caught but something tells me they will be trying to cross the border one day soon, again.  

Today, I am learning about The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University and its Innovational Clusters project in Mexico. I learned what an Innovation Cluster is and how it operates. The Innovation Clusters are a cross-network of collaboration between researchers, model developers and site leaders and its goal is to co-design new strategies for addressing a specific unmet need within a population—an unmet need such as increasing the executive function skills in adult caregivers.  The new strategies are then tested at diverse pilot sites and the findings are shared across the innovation cluster to support each other’s work (Center, 2010).

The ongoing interaction between researchers and sites in an innovation cluste is now highly dynamic. Under the old conventional approach, reasearchers devoted considerable time and resources to proving that a single program is effective and they did not share the findings until after publication but the innovative cluster model allows researchers and practitioners to actively collaborate, continuously and data is shared right away in order to identify opportunities for immediate changes. In addition, the project team members work together to understand the implications of what they are learning work to understand who the intervention is working for and who it is not and why (Center, 2010).

I also learned why these Cluster are important to the field of Science. Clusters evolve, improve and build on one another’s findings over time—no two clusters look alike but most have multiple intervention pilot programs and have an interactive model that supports the design, implementation and evaluation of it’s multiple science-based ideas (Center, 2010).  

With what I’ve learned today, I am impressed by the concept of Innovation Clusters, its complexity and purpose in Mexico (Center, 2010). I am also fascinated by the question of who is funders this project and my hope is that their findings help other countries, including America. to gain more insight into helping all children succeed in school and in life in the near future.

References

Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. (2010). Global children's initiative. Retrieved from http://developingchild.harvard.edu/about/what-we-do/global-work/  

http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/media_68584.html