Educational policies from the care approach for the inclusion of mother and father students of the University of Sonora

Abstract

The following reflection emerges from an ongoing investigation on the configuration of the academic trajectories of graduates belonging to the national postgraduate system (NPS) who exercised maternity or paternity during their training process in the four main higher education institutions (HEI) of Sonora. This text intends to contribute to the discussion by proposing the relevance of inclusive educational policies being observed from the perspective of care, taking the case of the University of Sonora since it recently included in its Institutional Development Plan (2021-2025) the commitment to create strategies that positively impact their mother and/or pregnant students, in a context where the perception of the student body regarding the progress in co-responsibility policies in this IES is 0.5 on a scale from 0 to 5 (ONIGIES, 2020). It was identified that care activities are understood as issues related to the private sphere and therefore feminine, which has implications for women from the admission process. Family support networks emerge as a determining factor in the configuration of academic trajectories and that made school achievement possible. The tensions of the mother/father-graduate student role are glimpsed in a scenario where few HEI have the institutional mechanisms that contemplate the sociocultural demands that are assigned to care in a differentiated way for men and women.