Graciela Borja earned a degree in sociology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1976 and a master’s degree, also in sociology, from the New School for Social Research in New York City in 1981. She served for fifteen years as a professor-researcher at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana–Xochimilco in the Division of Social Sciences.
For more than twenty-seven years, her focus has been on young children and preschool education. In 1997, she earned a diploma in the HighScope Preschool Curriculum. While pursuing this diploma, she worked as a second adult at the Anton S. Makarenko Kindergarten(Mexican Public-School SEP). Graciela later completed her training as a certified HighScope Curriculum trainer (preschool) at the HighScope Educational Research Foundation in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Since 2003, she has served as a certified trainer of the HighScope Curriculum for Preschool Education and has maintained her certification through regular updates. In 2015, she was designated a “reliable observer” for the Child Observation Record: COR Advantage (2014).
Graciela Borja was the founder and director of the kindergarten “La Rueda. HighScope Approach,” as well as the “Learning Center for Human Development A.C.”. She participated in the restructuring of the New HighScope Institute and became an associate in 2005. She worked with HighScope institute associates, training approximately one thousand workshop leaders from the SaludArte Ministry of Public Education of México City program on HighScope’s participatory active learning.
In recent years, Graciela has been engaged in the observation and evaluation of schools as well as the application of the HighScope Quality Assessment of Educational Programs (PQA) tool, both in schools that implement the HighScope Curriculum at the preschool level and in other educational programs aligned with children’s developmental needs. She has also worked for other organizations, including Work Family Directions and IBM.
In 2019, she certified the David P. Weikart Bilingual School in the Port of Veracruz as the First Accredited HighScope Program in Mexico, a long and successful four-year process.
