Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Ladies and gentlemen, educators good morning.
This joy, this relaxation might be set a little aside
but we manage to restore it later.
More laboratories, less auditoriums.
Schools have traditionally privileged some verbs
and verbs define actions
and the verbs schools privilege are "to copy" and "to repeat".
Technologies are changed computers are put inside the schools
but people keep on copying and repeating repeating and copying.
Students learn so fast this dynamics
that, when a task is assigned they go straight to copy and paste.
They cut and paste.
They came to a point where they do not even repeat
they just deliver it for the teacher to repeat.
It takes only a quick look on the works of two authors
Piaget and Freire
to find highly significant verbs
that surpass it all
and that are not so recent
such as "to interact", "to inquire" "to experiment"
"to test", "to feel", "to cooperate" "to discover", "to exceed"
People talk so much about imposing limits.
Why don't they talks about exceeding limits?
"To dialogue", "to intervene" "to be aware", "to question"
There are classrooms in which not even questions are welcome.
"To think over", "to construct" "to comprehend", "to transform", "to invent"
Piaget said that the problem that is necessary to explain the cognitive development
is the problem of invention, not the simple copy.
Inventing, not just copying.
Invention is something hard to do inside a classroom as we understand it.
We do it in laboratories.
A lab can have multiple ways of being understood.
For instance, a math workshop a reading or literature workshop.
The human mammal is the only animal
capable of converting its actions into language
by organizing its thoughts logically.
The human animal is the only one capable of catching a hold on its past
and planning the future.
It is the only one capable of making science and being conscious of itself.
At least the autobiographical self
that neuroscientist Antonio Damasio talks about
or the reflective self Piaget talks about in his works
reflecting abstraction
Then we ask why are humans taught as they were any other animals to be tamed?
Among so many possibilities we reduce it all to copying and repeating.
Then the inevitable question comes.
How can someone teach scientific knowledge
if this teacher continues to profess common sense epistemology?
What is common sense epistemology?
Common sense epistemology are conceptions we all have
because we live in a society inside a culture
but we never stop to think
what it means and its impact in our lives and our knowledge capacity.
Common sense epistemology are the concepts of knowledge we have
before we stop to think about them.
And there are three basic epistemological models we can use to analyze it.
The first model appears like this.
"That person is intelligent, has talent and was born this way"
Epistemologically, it is the Aprioristic model. It is based on birth.
It means, fundamentally believing the child is born
with all the requirements for knowledge and it is all there
only waiting for a maturation process that will inevitably arise
and this knowledge will follow that person for their entire life
How does it reflect on pedagogy?
With spontaneism, because the teacher says
I don't have the means to modify this.
My teaching won't do anything about it.
The child is born either talented or dumb what can I do?
So I will simply try and find a way for the child to absorb some content well enough
How does it appear in teachers' speeches in our researches?
I have been conducting one hour interviews with more than 50 teachers
which are already published
Where does a child's capacity to comprehend the notion of quantity comes from?
I asked it to a High School teacher and he replied
Intelligence is born with the person I guess
I think some are born with more others with less intelligence
It can be developed but I guess we are already born with it
I guess we are already born with it
And another teacher continues
I think it is an innate condition
Gifted children are already born with a talent, but not all children
There are the privileged ones and the not so much
And this math teacher
a PhD in pure mathematics of an important foreign university
who teaches undergraduate and post graduate students, said
Mathematical knowledge is very hard to teach Just a few people actually manage to do it
My opinion is that one can teach if the person has talent.
To want to form loads of good quality mathematicians
simply by thinking it is a matter of teaching math for loads of people
is no good politics. It is useless
And he, on the heights of his epistemological knowledge
gives a pedagogical prescription
He says there are three ways to learn mathematics
To solve exercises, lots of them
Second, to solve more exercises, many more
Third, to solve even more exercises until you fall out on the floor
In other words, to learn is to suffer. A lot
even more if you go through pure mathematics
You don't date anymore, there are no movies. It is only suffering.
The second epistemological model is as such
"That child is intelligent. That child was stimulated"
See it on the media it is always stimulation
It solves it all. A stimulus is when you look to the object and not the subject.
When you look to the subject everything changes
Or even, as a teacher of the research says "it is all a matter of culture"
The person is the product of a culture and that's it
This is called Empiricism.
This is projected inside the classroom as a directivism
which means the teacher commands and the student obey, solely
One of the most beautiful descriptions about it
is in the first pages of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Well, how does it appear in teachers' speeches?
A Junior High teacher says
When you hug a tree
you have the perfect notion of
what will, in the future, be a cylinder a circumference
I believe a child can quite easily grasp math
when given experiences as such
I safeguard this last sentence
which I find impeccable
but I cannot agree with the first one
Let's compare a circumference in the mathematical representation sense
and a saw tree
A circumference, for a mathematician
is a geometrical figure with equidistant spots
coming from a central spot on a surface
There's a central spot
and the equidistance is the radius of the circle
Can you see it in the cut tree?
For the empiricist mathematics teacher
the idea of a circumference
comes from objects around us that indicate a circumference
In fact, the mathematician's idea
comes from an infinite mapping of situations
that is led to perfection in such a way
that there is no equivalent stimulus in nature
from which one can copy a circumference
What are the effects of a pedagogy based on common sense epistemology?
The teacher does not comprehend the relativeness of the knowledge he or she teaches
The student cannot comprehend what is taught
The eagerness to learn and the curiosity slowly fade away
The teacher feels incapable, hopeless
and refuges himself in a sterile destructive, sometimes cynical authority
Einstein, the great genius of the 20th century, said
There is no logical way to discover the elementary rules of the Universe
The only way is intuition
Is there a place in our classrooms and schools for intuition?
Is there a place for investigating questioning
conquering autonomy and awareness, discovering
dialoguing, interacting, thinking over, building, transforming, inventing?
Or is it only for copying and repeating?
Then a third model appears
"The child is intelligent, built something was challenged, acted and thought"
This model radically criticizes the previous ones
It is called Constructivism
It has an interactionist basis and can be projected in classrooms as a
Pedagogy of Relation
A teacher from a vocational school expresses this position
by the way, it is very difficult to find this kind of testimonial
If the student is exposed to interesting situations
if the person is involved and plays with you
if you can challenge and propose situations
the capacity to learn is inherent to the person
I learn when I'm aware when I know I have learned
If this is learning then anyone is able to learn
because anyone can be aware that they have learned
This is why I say
that the school needs to become every time more
like a laboratory and less like an auditorium
because it is in the labs that we exercise intuition and experimentation
questions and hypothesis emerge, awareness happens
dialogue and interaction happen
transformation, discovery and invention happen
knowledge is built.
The classroom as an auditorium tends to trite scientific methodologies
because it doesn't know how science produces new knowledge
and it thinks that everything is solved
Piaget emphasizes and states this as a fundamental idea
All the emphasis of my theory is put on the activities of the subject
I believe that, without this activity there is no possible didacticism or pedagogy
that significantly transform a person
This idea, therefore, profoundly modifies schools
A school that works with activities of the subject
Not a commanded activity but the spontaneous activity
a child or adolescent has outside the classroom
If the school cannot restore the dynamics of that activity
it does not understand what an active pedagogy is
and believes that action is a commanded action
There are certain things I feel
but I feel limited to say like I said in the beginning
at the end we loose up a bit
So I put it in the hands of the poet
This is the poet, everyone knows Mario Quintana, who says
"To feel first, to think after"
"To forgive first, to judge after"
"To love first, to educate after"
"To forget first, to learn after"
"To free first, to teach after"
"To feed first, to sing after"
"To hold first, to contemplate after"
"To act first, to judge after"
"To navigate first, to dock after"
"To live first, to die after"
Thank you very much.