The teacher and midwife Alexandra Contreras was the protagonist of a gesture that moved all social networks and that also exposes an invisible situation within the university environment that is related to the fact that parenting and studying at the same time. This Monday, while the class of Maternal and Child Health of the Bachelor of Obstetrics at the Faculty of Medical Sciences of the UNLP, Alejandra He asked permission to pick up the baby of a student who was studying his subject. From that moment she gave the class with the baby in her armscalling the attention of the students who were in the amphitheater, who recorded it and viralized the images on the networks.
After the repercussion that the video had, the teacher spoke with 0221.com.ar and revealed the story behind something that goes beyond a simple gesture of tenderness, which she catalogs as “an act of love and empathy” to your student.
Alejandra took some time to talk while messages about the images that quickly circulated on the networks continue to arrive. She says that everything came up “accidentally cases”. “I am a teacher of one of the subjects called Maternal and Child Health and with the return to attendance, many students have had to attend class with their children. Yesterday -on Monday- particularly in the class there were more than six students who were with their other older children and just this little girl from the video comes to all the classes. When you start to get bored in two hours of theory, you always come to my feet. This time I asked permission to pick her up and entertain her for a little while so that her mom could be listening and head on in class “.
Her experience as a midwife, a militant of safe breastfeeding, and a professor of a chair that focuses on accompaniment and empathy, leads her to act under the same concepts that she learned when she was a student. “Today I am a teacher of a career in which when I was a student I was able to have people who accompanied me and facilitated my course during university life, so it would not occur to me that it would be otherwise, although this does not happen in other chairs”.
Her love for the profession led her to become related to hundreds of students who went through her subject with the same difficulty to be able to study: having to mother. In this context, he understands them and fights for the visibility of a situation that occurs throughout the university environment. “It’s quite a difficult situation. I am a teacher of the Bachelor of Obstetrics course, which is a highly feminized course; the vast majority of the students are women, many people raise, breastfeed and are even pregnant and that within the university environment is a complexity because there are not so many time slots. Something very crazy is happening and that is that this degree is taught in different locations, not only in the Faculty of Medical Sciences, but also in the university pavilion of the San Martín hospital and other subjects at the headquarters of 7 and 63; then it becomes very difficult for students to circulate with life itself“.
Alejandra understands the difficulties that exist within the university and manages to dimension the inequalities that exist in the students, especially for those who must constantly coexist with a creature by their side. For this reason, she decided to get more closely involved and today she is part of the Gender Department of Medical Sciences, from where she contributes her grain of sand to be able to offer a better coexistence during her course in the faculty to mothers who have the objective of receiving their university degree. .
“Strong work is being done from some lines within the Gender Directorate in the facu. These types of situations are beginning to be accompanied more and more, but it is necessary to make them visible since suddenly there are these enormous gender inequalities that have to be to do with being able to raise, breastfeed, gestate and at the same time study in a field that perhaps is not so designed for that. Many teachers and classmates even judge and others feel uncomfortable with the presence of children in the class”comments.
In this sense, Alejandra highlights her work and her struggle on a day-to-day basis to be able to correct the situation that her students go through every week in their classes. “It is about working on this with a legal perspective, understanding that if teachers are not able to accompany these situations, we are adding one more obstacle so that these people can achieve the objective they set for themselves, which in this case is to study”.