In relation to teacher training, it is necessary, in addition to criticism, to have a discourse on its meaning and purpose and, from now on, to open windows to possibilities and hope. In this era of changes in training plans, which give rise to new expectations, doubts and criticisms, a number of considerations arise. This concerns initial training (childhood and primary and secondary masters) and forgotten continuing training. It is not a question of going further than a few partial and telegraphic notes, organized in three points.
Firstly, it is practical that the training is inserted under the auspices of someone. framework of meaning and purpose. With a certain osadía and perhaps a certain radicality, it is about placing emphasis on the central and vertebral core of formation; This deserves a discussion that is still unfinished and could perhaps avoid any confusion. If it occurs to me that a relevant discourse can emphasize its connection, in turn, to the school teaching with which it should reasonably connect and serve.
So that, if in any authentic democracy, education is defined by consensus as an essential right that must be firmly and effectively guaranteed by relying on the participation of all people in this community, the training of teachers (and other agents concerned) is called and committed to making a fundamental and decisive contribution, even if it is not sufficient exclusively.
The notion of education as a common education requires “here and now and the “foreseeable future”? » to move towards the horizon of full citizenship. In terms of school education, the objective is to produce people who are solidly equipped with the best cultural heritage inherited and recreated. As a teacher, this corresponds to believing and committing to the condition of an active and decisive agent in a passionate task: forming good heads, not full heads, cultivating hearts turned inward, inhabited by good feelings, empathy, altruism and solidarity with others. Likewise, being a witness and promoter of values and principles in accordance with an authentic democracy, betting on a citizenship of rights and responsibilities, for responsible, critical and constructive subjects and communities in the different spheres of personal, social and environmental life.
Taken as a framework of meaning and purpose for teaching and training, what has just been established can generate a vision, a model, certain decisions and actions relating to the trade and the profession. Through an illustrated reason, the necessary emotion and the ethical imperatives of the universal right to education, it was necessary to answer an essential question: what values and principles, dispositions, capacities and skills, responsibilities, commitments and practices, ways of being, of exercising, of training and learning the profession are those that we consider fundamental to guarantee it to all without letting it swim on their shores?
This way, perhaps, if you can talk, decide and confront ideas and practices on the ground trainingbut also exercise The teacher agrees with the aforementioned great imperative of education and those who work. A lot of attention, training and educational exercises are required to communicate with each other as adequately as possible. Both acquire meaning, purposes and strengths in the light of a perspective linked to the horizon of fair, equal and equitable quality education; and by implication, always just and equitable education and profession. Not out of taste or because things are less beautiful or easier than that, but through a question of values, principles, moral, social and cultural imperatives.
Teaching therefore deserves to be thought of, valued, respected, supported and demanded as an eminently human, cultural, social and ethical profession. Nothing of a banal training, empty of content, reduced to knowing how to play the “run of the potato” or other trifles. On the contrary, for reasons of rights and duties, solid and coherent, varied, interdisciplinary and in-depth cultural and disciplinary training is required. Created in such a way that it generates deep and multiple learning, higher order abilities and skills, which work reflectively and critically to cope with how it addresses the daily challenges of school teaching and learning.
It also consists of tact and sensitivity, recognition, support and generosity, which are the ingredients of an ethic of care. All this cognitive, emotional, practical and moral repertoire must be activated with greater finesse and commitment, if it adapts, wherever people find themselves in unusual contexts and adverse situations. We are well warned today that unless schools and teachers break the fatal cycle of poverty and exclusion, the lives of many children and young people will soon be cut short. From then on, training must no longer leave aside its social and community aspects. Being a teacher and practicing the profession is something joint and not solitary. These are essential words such as collegiality, authentic collaboration and democratic educational leadership within the centers and beyond their walls, creating synergies with families, communities, other social and health services and professionals.
Secondly, if we aspire to design this framework for initial and continuing training, it seems appropriate recognize and reconstruct what is happening. We need a diagnosis to build transit bridges between the past, the present and a better future to achieve.
Both in initial training and later, it will sometimes be necessary to break this spiral of studio projects which revolve around themselves, this tendency to create project after project which, in essence, are often the same as before or perhaps even worse. It is just as serious, but it remains true that, without much being known about it, continuing education for teachers has disappeared from the list of priorities, reduced to a series of background murmurs with dubious meaning and vague objectives. To avoid falling on the same stones, it may be advisable not to spend more time peacefully observing, questioning and answering questions such as what is good, what is wrong, how and why, what to keep because it is useful, what to remove because it is inconvenient. A framework like the proposal, another similar one, duly founded and argued, could be valid, perhaps, to answer justified questions and then make consistent, concerted and committed decisions.
Any diagnosis which must recognize what is happening and which has the desire to reconstruct it for the better would tend, in principle, to address more small groups and experts located at the forefront of progress; We need to bring together diverse and representative voices, and there will also be a choral approach to this task. It can offer greater credibility and better future prospects, supported by common understandings and decisions that can count on the support of many people. Asimismo, an idea that we must also question, relates to the extent to which teaching and training do not serve the great right to education as a common right and bet on the imperative horizon of not being left behind.
Thirdly, finally, the straight line risks being more difficult, creating proposals, conditions, processes and commitments of possibility.
We must now develop plans, but without falling into the hope that once legislated, promulgated or written, they will be sufficient in themselves to guarantee positive, transformative or beneficial change for the whole world. Plans should precisely generate meaning and purpose, but without prescribing routes or territories. If he does so, he will soon leave, among other things, to take with him a message of distrust, even contempt, towards his recipients. The idea that a study plan has several pages or that a study program at a certain educational level extends over more than five years does not guarantee “that we have good consistency” – nothing positive, quite the contrary: applying to teacher training.
Initial and continuing training cannot improve without particular attention to certain conditions that affect institutions and the trainers of future educators who have them in their hands. Without mobilizing the ethical imperatives which require it, in agreement with the unions and the inspection, by involving the management teams and all the teachers. Without a culture favorable to training linked to the guarantee of fair and equitable education, as an expression of professional ethics and overcoming the sterile dilemma between obligation and voluntary service, we will not go to any place of benefit: it applies to university professors in charge of initial training, to all teachers having the right to learn there and to learn continuing training there. This culture broth must therefore be prepared with care and preserved over time.
In other orders of things, where micro-politics of decision-making persist, inter- or intra-departmental confrontations, absence of strong and effective collaboration between the different fields of knowledge, no or insufficient coordination, tacit pleas for “each country in your region”, no plan is on the surface, in the meantime the bottom is flattening out. Continuing education is much more than taking courses. It cannot be a supermarket where everyone buys what they want: beware of digital technology which exacerbates the teaching of individualism. Continuing education is so important that many people are asking for projects in each center or faculty: there are countries with affordable education where teachers and others dedicate more than 10 hours a week, during working hours, to talk, analyze, reflect and decide how to improve, because of the how and manner of teaching and learning at school. It seems, asimismo of course, that without a certain institutional and educational culture of training, Good learning from teachers is unlikely, and so are students and centers that involve intelligent and ethical organizations. It must be part of processes of implementation and reflective and critical evaluation, which are keys to revitalizing and reconstructing plans or projects.
It is very possible that in addition to new projects, we really need to achieve new goals in the direction and purpose of teacher training, create favorable conditions and undertake essential processes in this matter.
About The Author
