núm. 53 (2009)

This paper will expound a general and consistent overview of teaching architectural design through workshop methodology, which was carried out in an academic micro setting at the Universidad de La Salle. Workshops are educational strategies traditionally used in teaching architectural designers. It creates opportunities to learn kinesthetically, learn about one’s self and apply the basic components of knowledge: theory and practice. The first leads to knowing by reflecting on the very act of designing itself. The second leads to doing through guided actions in the design process. When the two are joined together, creativity is manifested which is the essence of an architect’s “savoir faire”. Given the fact that the teaching of architectural design has not been examined in a critical way as well as the technical training architects receive, most architects who go on to be educators adapt a vocational teaching style instead of creating a space for academic thought. Consequently, it is important to examine teaching practices in design, theory and practice and the creative process. These are all important in creating successful architectural designers. Through reflection, the reasons stated above help identify design as a discipline which requires thought process. These reasons contribute to the solution of complex issues arising from a traditional and predisposed environment. Therefore, it can be concluded that architectural design is a complex cultural process from a collective and social consciousness which teaches thinking. Educators should find the balance between theoretical totalitarian view points and the practical challenges of designing, demonstrating to their students the thought processes behind the creative activity.

From the proposal made in order to investigate about Teaching strategies concerning to collaborative work, checking previous investigations and the bibliography, it is settle down the conceptual relationship between Collaborative Work, Cooperative Learning and Strategy of Teaching; concluding that Cooperative learning is understood like a teaching model that includes a group of strategies for the knowledge construction in a cooperative way; teaching strategies are process that require development moments in the planning, implementation, evaluation stages; and that the strategies of collaborative work make part of this teaching model. Starting from the previous understanding, with a qualitative focus and ethnographic method; the investigation characterizes the planning, implementation and evaluation stages of the Teaching strategies of Cooperative Learning in Higher Education in five Universities from Bogotá, having that the Cooperative Learning is configured from strategies which the teacher promotes the cooperation among equals to reach a learning goal, in three kinds of practical: Intentional practice on theoretical and conceptual of Cooperative Learning, Intentional practice in strategies of collaborative work and, intentional practice in group work without any explicit appropriation of cooperative learning theory.

This article presents the reading comprehension level of the students to enter at first semester to the degree in Native Language, English and French. This research used the cognitive linguistic perspective. The research results were obtained with the analysis of three levels of reading comprehension (literal, inferential and critical). After the level analysis the research explained a proposal of didactic intervention in order to improve the reading comprehension.

This text shows some of the research´s results “Representations in Bogota city of young university people”, financed by La Salle University. This research studied, from a semiotic- cognitive view, the ways of urban representations in forty young university people (Pedagógica University, Nacional University, Distrital Francisco José de Caldas University, south branch, Minuto de Dios University, and La Sabana University), who throw propositional and iconographic corpus, expose how they see Bogota city. In order to get it, we took as an explorer tool the use of a questionnaire (CTU) and an urban draw (APUJ), which answers revealed the youthful ways of mark out territorial tendencies of the spaces they used and lived. One of the most interested conclusions is the outline of a geo- poetic which stand out five metaphoric cities by those young urban people: the eliminated one, the wished one, the aggressive one, the closed one and the chaotic one.

According to the author`s experience as a literature and esthetic professor in two different places such as Bogota and the Caribbean Coast, Pabon establishes proximities and differences upon three parameters: the environmental scene, social context, and the city. The latest three elements are admitted as determinants variables attached to the professors in the two regions and the esthetic and literary languages. The article proposes the ecocriticism (literary approach which explains the dependency between nature and mankind) as a novelty didactic instrument that gives back the interest to the new generations on classic work or on literature in general. Ecocricticism also focuses on ethic issues, nature conservancy, planet deterioration, something that human beings must avoid regarding our intelligence and sensibility. The article establishes two inner texts: First, Garcia Marquez´s masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which demonstrates the students´ cosmovision in the Caribbean Coast, and on the other hand, Chaparro Madiedo´s work Opio en Las Nubes (Opium in the Clouds) the youth´s cosmovision in Bogota. The work Hundred Years of Solitude, clearly shows how the Caribbean region maintains and stretch relation with nature and mythic consciousness, while Chaparro Madiedo´s work demonstrates how the capital city of Bogota is an urban being, a tragic vision of some reality aspects. Finally, the article concludes some pedagogic contributions from the ecocriticism to the didactics of literature.

This article is the reflexive product of two parts: The firts place began elective course developed in the year 2007 and 2008 in the Faculty of Education of the University of the Salle. Secondly provided independent research, on the Santafé de Bogotá of the XVIII and XIXth century looked by Foreign Travelers. The article has the intention of understanding and reading the city of Bogotá from triads, by means of a trip for the Imaginary Triangle of the city. The tour will be done by San Victorino’s ancient neighborhoods, The Crosses of San Diego. Around iconographic available of material of the epoch. The pretext of this trip is to look the signs and the symbols of Santafé of Bogotá that was constructed, with imaginary unconscious triangle, wich they have allowed to develop to the conscious city.

The author states three types of narratives in this lecture: the narratives of the street voices, the ones of the mass media and the one built up by literature. He privileges along his text, the narrative of literature, not the one of the “great” literature, but the street daily literature almost anonymous that lets us recognize spaces and new characters in the city. He supports his statements on the readings taken from well-known authors such as: Calvino, Durell, Kavafis, etcetera, and others such as José Luis Granados, to argument his idea of discovering invisible cities which are hidden in any corner.

In this conference, the researcher approaches three scenes of reference. The city post industrialist, that city of the most developed countries considered starting this stage. The city people left behind, very next to us and the anonymous city, the city that is being invented and the three are going to take to us to the same conclusions.

In this conference, the researcher deals with the relationship between city and school from the concepts of “urbanism without city” (crossbeam cities) and “citizen urbanism” (from the point of view of art, media and technology). He presents his idea of “citizen files” in relation to community and private files, such as the family album, and he illustrates the main characteristics of Bogota’s imaginary from Mockus and Peñaloza’s administration in order to comprehend the contributions of his theory to the construction of city and urban imaginaries.