Elevating the profession in latin america: early childhood teacher preparation standards in three countries

The purpose of this article is to describe the efforts of three Latin American countries (Chile, Colombia, and Dominican Republic) to develop their own early childhood teacher preparation standards. The authors explain the demographic and historical environmental conditions, the sociopolitical climate that gave impetus to the development of the standards, the existing teacher preparation systems, and their underlying processes and structures, the underlying beliefs implicit in the development of the standards, and the process of development of the early childhood teacher preparation standards. These countries vary in size, population, and history. As a result, they are in different stages of the process of full implementation of these standards. The article comparatively analyzes the facilitators for the development of the standards and the challenges which these countries encountered in their design and implementation.