The UCM Student Observatory was born with the idea of obtaining an X-ray as accurate as possible of the profile and needs of students through analysis, reports, publications, and projects that ” promote initiatives based on the analysis of the student body, its active learning processes, and their interactions in the university environment”. On June 23, the Student Building hosted an interactive day in which the main results of the Observatory’s first call for projects were presented, while group work and debate dynamics were carried out and the staging of the project “Urgent scene: documentary theater to improve the university experience”, directed by Mélanie Werder Avilés and Elena Moncayola Santos.
Borja Manero, coordinator of the Student Observatory, explains that on this day both those responsible for the projects of the first call and those of the second call for this year 2022, which have not yet begun their realization, have met. In this way, they get to know each other, and synergies emerge that will allow the Complutense to be a university in which the interests of the students have more and more weight.
In total there have been eleven projects (plus the twelfth in the form of a theatrical performance), which have been presented very briefly, since each one had exactly three minutes to share with the audience the objectives of their work, as well as their methodology. and its results.
Three of the projects carried out have focused on the participation of students. The one entitled “Perceptions of participation in university classrooms from a gender and diversity approach”, by Irene Martínez Martín and Jon Sanz Landaluce, has been based on the results of 707 surveys, 473 of them women, and has had the collaboration of 31 professors from practically all the faculties of the UCM. Among the main results, according to Martínez Martín, is the fact that students perceive participation as something very directed by the teacher and that they would like a climate of more trust to be built in the classroom.
Anna Zlobina has presented the project that she has directed together with María Celeste Dávila, around the “Analysis of the practices and forms of active citizenship of the students of the UCM (ACTIVEU) ”. According to Zloblina, the data indicates that citizen participation is greater outside the campus, is aimed at civic claims rather than political, and is not linked to specific entities. Leading the interests of this participation are gender, the environment, and human rights. Of all the respondents, who were more than 4,000, it was seen that between 15-20% participate within the campus in mentoring, service-learning or in student representation, and they give a score of 2.65 out of 5 to their identification with the UCM.
The last of the projects presented related to participation has been “LUCE: Collection and analysis of the active participation of students in the UCM campuses applying blockchain”, directed by Marta Caro Martínez and Alejandro Romero Hernández. The latter has explained that the objective is to develop software that allows recording the activities carried out by students to better understand their tastes and needs., and so that from the Office of the Vice President for Students, policies more in line with what the people of Complutense want can be designed. While the development of the software is completed, with the inclusion of all the data, they have carried out surveys of more than 2,000 students and from them they have extracted that around 40% have participated at least once in some activity on campus. This figure is reduced when the number of activities asked about increases.
