2010 Trudeau Scholar

adolfo.agundez@trudeaufoundation.net

Current Research

Biography

After earning a bachelor's degree in biology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain), Adolfo Agundez Rodriguez moved to the city of Cochabamba (Bolivia) from 1993 to 1999, lured by the desire to learn new ways of seeing life and the urge to share the reality of the impoversished. Taking up the cause of society's rejects is, in his words, "my main commitment as a citizen, besides my commitment as the father of three children who fill my life with childhood - that is, with wisdom, joy, magic and dreams." These commitments continue to guide his work as an educator, a consumer education researcher, and a writer in Bolivia, Spain and Canada, where he has lived for the past eight years.

As an educator, Adolfo Agundez Rodriguez has worked in both formal and informal settings, in a variety of educational projects and schools in Spain and Bolivia. His achievements include pedagogical work for the Yachay Tinkuy project, which trains teachers in rural and urban areas of Cochabamba province. He was also the co-founder and manager of the educational wing of CAIC, an organization in charge of education, nutrition and health care for the over 200 children who live with their parents in the Cochabamba prison.
His commitment to education led him to complete a degree in pedagogy at the Spain's distance-education university, UNED, and he followed this with a master's at the Université de Sherbrooke. His graduate research examined consumer education, a theme he is pursuing now at the doctoral level. The results of his four years of research have been recognized in several professional and learned publications, and earned the Acfas-Desjardins award in the doctoral research category.

Over the last ten years, Adolfo Agundez Rodriguez also developed a career as a writer. Several of his stories and his second novel have won awards in Spain. His work as a writer is directly related to his doctoral research, as the goal of the research is to develop stories about consumption for elementary school children and to evaluate their potential as teaching material.

Project Description

The development of higher order thinking related to consumerism among elementary school children: creation, implementation and evaluation of educational materials

Adolfo Agundez Rodriguez's research project attests to his main commitments: to the rights of all human beings (especially the least fortunate), to the environment, to childhood, to education as the driver of social change, to literature as the best way to narrate human experience, and to reflection as the indispensable tool for rethinking, rediscovering and recreating society and our world. His research project consists of developing, implementing and evaluating educational materials (children's stories) to provide consumer education in elementary schools and to help develop a complex understanding of consumerism, of the society it generates, and of consumer behaviour, not only from a socio-political and economic perspective but also and above all from an ethical perspective.

Trudeau Foundation Themes

Responsible Citizenship