núm. 48 (2006)

This reflective paper looks at the need for us, English teachers, to consider the theories, processes, per-ceptions, values, interests and purposes we hold in order to understand why and how we can do research and produce knowledge from our teaching practices. Action Research (AR) is proposed not just as a tool to systematically observe and investigate issues or problems we confront in our classes but more impor-tantly as a way to understand knowledge and research as a transformational event that deals with different interests in human experience and that ultimately can enable us to explore and share our common humanity. It highlights and exemplifies Whitehead’s (1993) Action Planning as organizing principles and methodology for our action reflection process

The production process in written communication is understood as the process of passing from ideas (abstract) to the discourse or communicative realization (concrete). A step among a series of stages showing the particular development in such a process, specifically one of its results: the writing. The stages considered in this research are: cognitive, linguistic and communicative. The purpose was to describe its state in the production of narrative stages, starting from the analysis of linguistic and textual structures or levels. The first stage shows that students do not plan what they write, based on the global coherence of their writings. The second stage showed the difficulty in keeping topic progression and the lack of efficient contribution of markers and connectors in the structural organization of the written ideas. The third stage showed the ignorance of the writing super structural organization. Data show that students do not have a conceptual, relational and academic consideration of the effect of the three stages in the process to produce a written text.

This report has its origin in the research project: «Characterization of the student-teachers conceptions on the natural number concept», done at Universidad de La Salle in Bogotá. The project’s goal is to characterize the conceptions the students in the BA have on that mathematical topic. To inquiry about the mathematical conceptions of the students allows us to know about the mistakes they make, either in problem solving and mathematical exercises or when they have to defend procedures, algorithms and theoretical aspects linked even with practical problems. The research project this article is based on, belongs to the qualitative methodological perspective, with a descriptive type design, it is also a basic, microsocial and sectional work (Sierra, 2001). As a result, the students of the BA in Teaching Mathematics and Computing Sciences have the following conceptions of the natural numbers: «the natural numbers as representation of quantities» and «the natural numbers with field structure». Although, these conceptions are not correct since they do not correspond to any definition formally established in mathematics for the set of natural numbers, they show the ideas that the students have about this mathematical topic.

This article aims at establishing the teaching subjectivity and the sensitive possibilities as creation, as alternatives towards cultural resistance before the imposition, misuse and domain of the agenda of a society of control, depicted in the opinions and parameters as well as in the actions stated by the government in regards to educational policies that describe the teachers as a straightforward knowledge reproducers. Sensitive possibility as creation emerges before the instrumentalism protected by technocratic and proficient interest grounded on an intentional subjectivity also based on the historical conscious able to seize an emancipatory interest in which the most important choice is the society, the culture and the world of the life.

This inquiry has to do with some informal procedures implemented in classroom research aimed to the identification of useful strategies to enhance the students’ autonomous learning in English within the credit system at the Bachelor’s Degree in Spanish, English and French at La Universidad de La Salle. The ideas presented are just a compilation of starting points on a literature review done by a group of English teachers1 who have voluntarily joined since last semester in order to share and discuss views, ideas and thoughts about students’ independent learning. The initiative of starting to implement a proposal in this area arises because the current tendencies of education are oriented to encourage the learners’ capabilities to acquire knowledge on their own and to develop communicative, interactive and working competences which are going to be used in different fields of action they are regularly engaged. Likewise, in the local context, and due to the policies stated by Colombian credit system it is also significant to put in action student-centered methodologies that promote new learning styles and help students recognize new ways of constructing knowledge, getting meaningful learning experiences, and learning independently both inside and outside the classroom. As the topic autonomous learning entails a lot of theoretical issues, this study is focused to determine EFL learning strategies to fulfill the purposes above stated. The theoretical principles that empower us as teachers to reflect on our daily practice and in consequence to implement practical actions in favor of the students’ independent learning are going to be revised.

In the present article, we introduce some approaches to the text «Christian Schools Guidelines» (1903) from Michel Foucault’s genealogy perspective. This text, spread throughout Colombia, was used in catholic schools as a Pedagogy handbook to guide the teaching practices at that time. From a Genealogy perspective, we made an analysis about the way in which the student is objectified as a subject, from a series of concepts and power technologies such as emulation, perfection, religiosity and the academic spatial partitioning regulation and surveillance. These articulated elements build normalizing pedagogical dispositives from which subjectivities emerge, according to the central principles and postulates of disciplinary societies.

This article presents the research I am developing within the team of the line called «Values, Citizenship and Popular Education». It is understood that to construct democratic culture, that is, an ethics of living together to educate children and youngsters, it is essential to favor necessary arrangements to construct the following dimensions: life project, identity-inner being and social commitment. This research has worked the life project construction for citizenship from the participative perspective, stating that citizen education must be made up by participative mediations that develop the critic and reflexive capacity in favor of the construction of the life project dimension within the theoretical framework Profile of the mediator teacher published in 2003 by Loernzo Tébar Belmonte. Both the life project and the above mentioned dimensions are part of the research proposal called «Mediation Pedagogic Practices in a proposal to create citizenship in children and youngsters». The dimension presented here, proposes an ethnographic research methodology which wants to find the sense of categories such as attitude, desire, preconventional morality, conventional morality, and postconventional morality, the establishment of priorities, objectives and goals for the service of children and young people registered in basic education in the Liceo Hermano Miguel de la Salle in Bogotá. They are a sample population of 30 3-4 strata students, who together with 4 undergraduate students from the School of Education at Universidad de La Salle, work in six workshops in the life project dimension to develop citizenship; these are strategic instruments to contact the population and they make possible to create a realistic and faithful image of the group and its unit regarding the construction of the life project for citizenship.

Starting from a state of the art made in 2004 about qualitative research in Colombian youth for the period 1985-2003, a reflection is proposed about specialized knowledge production. This discourse gives shape to notions of youth and also constructs young problems from the topics it questions. Some of the most recurrent representations of young people are presented in Colombian researches, as well as four of the principal topics the studies have focused on. This article exemplifies how concern and interest in specific social authorities, creates researches in country’s particular times and contexts.

This article shows the approach and the archeological and methodological structure of the research from a Foucault position as a possibility to make an inquiry on the concept of pedagogic-educational practice. First of all, a theoretical context on the pedagogic practice is presented within the framework of the historic reflection proposed by Foucault. On the other hand, a description of the problem is presented highlighting the concept of «possibility conditions» as a transversal axis of the Foucault research proposal. Then, the urgent need to qualify educational pedagogic practices in the Schools of Education is presented. It also precise what the objectives are from the nature and characteristics of the archeological road in order to turn the practice documents into monuments, that is, into transforming pedagogic devices.