It is customary to remind students of the faculties of education, in the framework of training teleologies for teachers, the need to constantly reflect on future teaching practice, that is, to base their work as a teacher on the theorizing of practices and on the practice of theories. It is not a banal insistence. What teachers do at school, instead of being completely exhausted in despicable daily actions, may also be the input of a grounded pedagogical theory; This principle is also true for all university teachers. Certainly, despite so much argument against theories, they must be appealed to in order to construct unifying narratives that give unity of meaning to the processes of the current world (Melo 1991). So,in teaching practices they are not the material for exhibitionist erudition exercises but, on the contrary, the mechanism of the constant transformation of the same practice, of the subjectivity of the actors and, correlatively, of the environments, processes and relationships.
For the teacher educator, for the university teacher in general, who eloquently transmits this thought, it is not certain that his practice is the expression of the prescriptive discourse he reiterates, that is, the university teacher does not always seem to reflect on the meaning of his deforming role does not attempt to base this sense on consolidated or emerging theories. In the advising, in the direction and in the evaluation of the thesis, it seems that this reflection is less and, in multiple cases, this triad is assumed now as a subsidiary and superficial element, on the contrary, it turns those who exercise it into cancer keepers. ad hoc science and academic quality to the detriment of student training. This space of the Journal is a nod to dialogue amicably with university academics,with intellectuals, with master teachers or doctors in charge of teaching, advising and directing thesis. Dialogue around these functions, since they must entail and the perverse relationships that they sometimes generate.
This short text is, at the same time, on the one hand, a theorized practice: it is based on your own activity as advisor, director and thesis evaluator; and in the fact of having been advised, directed and evaluated in undergraduate, master's and doctorate; in addition, by the constant observation, in different educational settings, of the relationships between these three academic functions and the students in terms of greater or lesser degree of closeness, friendship or conflict, but always complex relationships; on the other hand, it is an invocation for theories to be practiced in the university in this always possible commission to direct and accompany degree projects, that is, an invitation to reflect so that directing and evaluating theses is a process based on principles, procedures and generalizable but continually perfectible attitudes.
Of thesis advisers
Advising a thesis in undergraduate or postgraduate (specialization, master's or doctorate) is not a simple thing and evaluating it, much less. Possessing a degree at any of these levels of training should not be a corsair patent for advising graduate theses. Advising is not an inherent quality of the title but a willingness and a constant effort to assume as a tutor. An activity with a deep pedagogical sense that can be explained from the notion of touch: conversation in which the guide, thanks to his piano tone, allows the voice of the other to be increasingly recognized until he finally prevails without conflict. It is true that the dizzying current academic rhythms that demand, as an indicator of quality, volume of graduates by programs are opposed to this pedagogical sense:implicit pact according to which the advisory is a formal figure for the obligation to approve the degree of the students. Based on this unavoidable evidence, in the first place some possible flaws of the advisor are pointed out and, later, these perverse behaviors are opposed by his virtuous antipodes.
A common flaw in advisers could be named as novel insecurity. This defect causes the novice advisor to try to present himself rigorously and forcefully: to show that for personal merit he is already what the advisor barely wants to become, and he is there to ensure that he does it with some effort and even with certainty. pain. The advice, in these cases, instead of clearly establishing some rules of the game to achieve objectives in a systematic way, is limited to a game of force that stifles the work and leads to reciprocal recriminations and even the possible breakdown of communication. Furthermore, this insecurity, translated into violence, often hides the unmentionable source of indecision: thematic and methodological ignorance to successfully guide the student towards the objective of preparing a thesis.In the framework of this ignorance, arguments arisen wrapped in the cloak of rigor, for example: responding to requests for help with exhortations to personal effort and student autonomy; sometimes, even, one comes to remember the prosaic evidence according to which: the thesis belongs to the student because the advisor has already made his own!
Another flaw is being an evaluating advisor. This way of advising is often linked to the status of a new advisor: a matter of a certain arrogant insecurity. However, it can also be linked with other beliefs of the academic: on the one hand, with the personal ego that has to obstruct the way on the other with the argument of its own sufferings; on the other, with some idea of the quality of the necessary academic work but in many cases excessive. This type of advisor becomes a vertical evaluator: always correct negative, nothing is as presented, requires general rework, and the student always lacks another detail, one more reading because I could not risk the value of his name in results mediocre. On many occasions, moreover,In perverse cases (it also happens that there is a positive side of these advisers), this adviser avoids the punctual, does not commit, helps and accompanies, but leaves the advice in general disqualifying but inaccessible. The students, faced with these consultancies, choose to move away from the adviser or, failing that, seek the help of an unassigned but willing collaborator.
The advisor-author is also recognizable. For him the ideas of the students are a no-brainer daughter of inexperience. Theses must be an extension, without continuity solution, of your own thinking and work. Its idea is to impose theories and authors, that is, to make its most expensive authors read, sometimes without real and immediate relation to the proposed topic. He does not sit down to accompany with patience and listen carefully to the proposals of the pupils, but he himself speaks, explains, stops and demands tasks impossible to bring into the initial logic of the theses. These Frankenstein theses reach the juries alive but in pieces, which produces frustration in the students and, in the most expensive advisor, other recriminations because these students were never able, despite their constant effort, to understand their approaches.This advisor teaches at the counseling sessions and believes that his constant word, without interstices or doubts, would have to be the seamless material of a non plus ultra thesis, if it does not become so, it is due to the poor training of those advised, naturally. The author advisor exhibits himself and, if he is not applauded enough, he generates distance and tension because he does not try to understand the ideas and proposals of the students but to get them out of the fundamental error that leads them to have them.it generates distance and tensions because it does not try to understand the ideas and proposals of the students but to remove them from the fundamental error that leads them to have them.it generates distance and tensions because it does not try to understand the ideas and proposals of the students but to remove them from the fundamental error that leads them to have them.
The positive adviser, on the other hand, frequently encourages with a: let's go, go ahead! This consultant is contagious, and his mood is so intimidating that it is embarrassing to ask him to read or listen to something about the work because, perhaps, that request betrays that gratifying trust. Therefore, the adviser leaves alone, and, at a certain moment, after so much positive encouragement, the brake comes violently: in the end, when the deadlines are met and the processes reach an indefinite delivery, the smile avoids The positive advisor becomes a forceful evaluation: what he believed himself to have done, felt almost finished, crumbles into an uncritical criticism that leaves everything in limbo without movement: everything must be redone according to the advisor. The advised does not know what to do.There is no discussion possible because academic evaluation is pertinent and adjusted, as it should have been from the beginning, but, at this point, he does not know how to argue that academic advice was allowed to change, as in the hands of a conjurer, by an annoying cordiality.
The intense advisor is no less troublesome. He wants to sit for hours with the students, suddenly they are not going to do silly things alone, he has to say everything, cover the details, check if each word, each text, each recommendation was strictly followed. The latter does not consent that his advises talk to other people, they feel questioned, they require gestures of constant adherence and loyalty. For this consultant his work is a distressing responsibility. Anguish whose source is not the gesture of seeing a work developing in a logic of decanting and progress, but the unconfessed fear of failure. The intense advisor is responsible and diligent, he does not always know enough but in his eagerness to do things well, he turns a conversation into an obsession and believes that the advisers are doing less for the thesis than himself.
The symbolic adviser is another troublesome but not always negative figure. This is not really an advisor. He is a character who, due to his personal prestige and charisma, sponsors certain theses with his name and has a positive symbolic effect on them: he powers them and marks them without knowing them more than superficially. This symbolic figure can be both negative and positive. Negative when he uses his prestige to not fulfill the commitments he charges: to avoid the student and, also, embarrass him for insisting on being advised. Positive when the student, by the intangible influence of his figure, advances the process as if he were the continuator of an invaluable legacy. It is an effective but contactless advice. Many times the result is positive and everyone wins; however, when it is not so much, the only loser is the student.
From thesis evaluators
The academic advisory and evaluation functions, although they are independent assignments in institutional terms, are inextricably linked pedagogically speaking. To put it bluntly: they are part of the same training function, which is why, in the same way as advising, evaluating should not be a natural condition inherent in the academic degree that is carried: the evaluator must have particular pedagogical qualities, must have a pedagogical touch because although the evaluation guarantees the academic and scientific rigor of the degree projects, this guarantee does not have to mean aggressiveness, violence or neglect of the work received.
The absence of such tact, as in the case of counseling, reproduces some disturbances when evaluating a thesis. In the first place, and it is not a minor thing, membership in academic tribes forces positions that often exalt the deficit and undervalue the innovative. It is the proven vice of continuing academic grudges by other means. This nefarious defect is not only expressed as hatred among colleagues that persists in their students, but also reaches the tragicomic extreme of hating a thesis work, and of undervaluing it, due to the theoretical approach that it uses, therefore, according to the best criteria of the evaluator, are authors sent to collect. Thus, a thesis, for example with a hypothetically wrong Foucault theoretical approach with a recalcitrant evaluator, has to strive to demonstrate its relevance before its quality, because,according to the immovable criteria of this evaluator, the basic conceptual and theoretical error disqualifies it from the outset.
The recalcitrant evaluator, is another danger of the validity of the works of degree and the projects. Evaluators only capable of looking at the student's academic production from the limits of understanding their own knowledge and, therefore, unable to place themselves in the argumentative perspective of the work and, sharing it or not, empowering it to give it the possibility of effective development. To this recalcitrance the evaluator comes, generally, from the stigmatizations with which he relates to the students: teacher unable to recognize that precisely his work is the process to turn the other into a valid, legitimate interlocutor and, even, some times superior to the master. These teachers try to demonstrate, sometimes unconsciously, that they continue one step ahead of the students because they,Despite opting for degrees at different levels of education, they will always be students and must be evaluated according to the logic of this deficit category.
The evaluator of the I do not see, the blind, perverse relative of the recalcitrant, never reads in the key of what exists, of what is proposed as purpose and objective, avoids the explicit signs and the necessary delimitations. Your interest is not what you see but what you say you don't see. This evaluator, despite the clarity around the interests, limits, objectives and scope of the work, reiterates in the style of a crippling chant: I do not see such a thing. And, faced with the renewed explanation, it will always have one last sentence that predicts the final position: however, I must insist that I do not see…! The last attempt to point out that his point would take the thesis to a completely different side will be worthless. He does not see, of course, is a problem of formative optics: the physical impossibility of seeing others.Defect of the pedagogical vision that is developed, in some cases, by deficiencies in the training itself and, in others, by the abnormal itch of academic exhibitionism.
There is another evaluator, antipode to the previous one, for which everything is absolutely and decidedly excellent. Every lack turns it into abundance, every mistake into possibility. She does not do it out of carelessness, to get out of trouble or not to get into explanations and enmities. Her academic eyes have the blinders of good. Sometimes, in the same thesis, it is impressive to recognize that the blind and the positive meet and evaluate at the poles of excellence without appeal and absolute lack. Both cases are the neglect of the training that, on the one hand, forces the tax to be braked to avoid collisions with serious consequences and, on the other, ponders in the key to benefit the student by pointing out the powers of the deficit and the true scope of promising.
On advising and evaluating in a formative sense
The idea of advising thesis works is formative. Advisor is the person who remains with the other to guide without pretending to excel by himself. Etymologically, advisor comes from the Latin verb assidere,which means sitting next to you, a posture more prone to advice and a quiet message. The etymology translates the current intention: to sit next to the other with a common objective: to advise without distorting, to be able to convert a mistake into a power and a power in the investigative concretions of the person being advised. The advisor listens, sees and feels the students in their particularities and recognizes that they are the ones who have the obligation to do a thesis, that is, they carry the desire (and fear) to do something important and their own. This recognition makes it possible not to base its role on constant challenge but on the ability to turn proposals and even misunderstandings into real possibilities for academic work. To do this, you must be sitting next to you, patient,conversing in a piano tone to make the adviser's voice heard.
Advising, much more in education, but it is fulfilled in any science, discipline or knowledge, is not only a problem of erudition, methods, theories or procedures, it is a problem of pedagogical tact, because counseling is a constituent element of training. Touch is, as has been said, the ability to sustain a low, receptive tone, that recognizes the other, that gives him a voice, an authority, a restlessness and a potential fallibility of learning and construction. Whoever advises with tact shows the security of those who know but not in a tone of competition, exhibitionism, complex or indifference, but a knowledge and science that guarantees confidence, and, at the same time, postpones their own securities to give possibility to doubts and the scores of the other.
It is more, a knowledge that is capable of presenting, as an informed guide, a diversity of paths and possibilities to the almost certainly aubergine of the student's initial approaches. The obligation of thesis in a master and doctorate is like being, from one moment to another, in front of a vast, barren and dangerous territory: desert in which the oasis of securities must be found. Therefore, the advisor is nomadic, he knows that the references that were on one day have disappeared for the next with the same fickleness of the dunes but instead of despair, gathering reproaches and threatening to abort the trip, he welcomes in the store and provides hospitality. Allow the other to rest, redo the itineraries and tell him that this is precisely the characteristic of the itineraries: planning with contingent results. To advise is to understand,initially, the initial perspectives of the gaze. What is territory without borders for some is a buzzing habitat of possibilities. The counselor's job is to teach to see and teach to inhabit.
The advisor is the one who, with the first sessions, with the state of the arguments and the writing, is able to weigh the student's needs, define the scope of the tasks, propose theoretical and methodological solutions and remember that the thesis is the work of the student and the student their educational purpose. Therefore, the first effort of the advisor is to help make effective the proposal presented to him and, if not possible, in academic terms, to propose issues close to the original project that allow the student to recognize the thesis as his own. In short, the role of the advisor goes more through the coordinates of the open alternatives, and less through blunt denials.
Because advising is a gesture of friendship and hospitality. Vital question for the other in its ethical and political dimensions. At the university there are different ways of becoming an advisor and an advisor: by elective affinities, by strategic needs, by assignment of academic work, by professional setting and job score, for example; But, no matter how it becomes, the fundamental thing is to assume the commitment as a banquet. That is, hospitably opening the house, inviting to the table, sitting next to each other while talking about the convening themes of the work in progress. It does not matter that this hospitality is in the security of the city house or in the aridity of the desert, but rather to make the other feel that he is welcomed and that shelter protects, demands and encourages.
There is advice if there is friendship and the former does not exist without the latter because there can be no friendship, hospitality or justice but where, although incalculable, the alterity of the other (as), infinite, absolute, irreducible (Derrida) is taken into account., 1997). Indeed, advising as a gesture to share the table, to participate in the banquet, is to present a welcoming space, is to offer the word that empowers the other by recognizing it; advising how to be together is the possibility of thinking, saying and projecting the common work from their own, although also in the advice disagreements are shared in relation to the intellectual itineraries that individually commit friends.
To advise is to offer hospitality. Of course, as a welcome from abroad in the logic of friendship: sitting at the table and protecting it, welcoming it with the luggage it brings, even if it is considered, in principle, importunate, childish or superb. To advise is to show the other that he is welcomed, but not in terms of good feelings, because the welcome provided by the advisor has to do with the recognition of the other, with his otherness, that is, with the constant battle, the questioning, the friendly Intransigence, that is, welcoming, advising is messing with the other as a student in training, as an academic ad portas of official professionalism, messing with the other, it must be understood, is violating the other's budgets as a way of opening up to him, that is, messing with the other is evidence of a hospitable disposition.
And that hospitality, to appropriate notions of Lévinas and Derrida, makes the advisor become a hostage of his students. With the advisor friendship is formative and the question about formation includes friendship. Reception is, then, the first attitude of the advisor in one training process vis-à-vis the other, and that formative intention puts the advisor who welcomes in a hostage situation, because hosting, advising, constitutes a responsibility: commitment of the teacher who is responsible for an apprentice and that responsibility ties him to it. In short, hospitality is anything but easy and serene: whoever welcomes to train is a hostage, and whoever lends himself to an adviser must ensure that he knows it: that is the basis of the ethics of the formative relationship of advising on friendship and friendship. reception (Derrida, 1997). The advisor is hostage, finallybecause the guest claims the right, once inside the house, to take his things and to use his words, even, sometimes, in senses that can momentarily blush the house owner and the speaker.
Undergraduates, masters and doctorates have to train their teachers with tutorial provision. This provision is not an affectation of the academic character to disguise mediocrity and authorize medianships. The advisor recognizes the scope, capacities, abilities and demands of the degrees of training and, in this sense, demands with friendly intransigence that the goals established within each training level be achieved in relation to individual possibilities, conditions and the circumstances. It always drives to get more, but sometimes that more has nothing to do with the laurels to the thesis, but to bring the process to fruition.
About theories
It has been said that advising and evaluating theses is a problem of practiced theories and theorized practices. The conceptual variables that make up the assessment and assessment are: training, friendship and conversation that come together in the idea of pedagogical tact. Despite the needs of basic and indeclinable scientific rigor, it is essential that advisers, directors and evaluators understand how the project they are exposed to is, first of all, a life project. Many people gamble entirely on those undergraduate jobs and not just in job prospecting. Intervention in them is not simply an academic protocol but a commitment to training in an integral sense. They are people in training exposed to our criteria and formative commitment. So,These works cannot be seen only as a format more or less faithful to the idea of science, quality and management.
In effect, the concept of training, intrinsically complex, is generally assumed from the precariousness of the educational teleologies of institutional educational proposals; however, it is necessary to keep it in mind when thinking about the activities of advising and evaluating graduate theses to avoid reducing it to the unavoidable consequence of the entire curricular process in which the thesis becomes the unquestioned proof that This de-formation process was fully carried out. Counseling and evaluation are constitutive elements of this training and not the scientific proof of its existence: in both cases it is accompanied, it is guided so that the other feels that he is capable of doing better and better what he has been preparing for.. Generally speaking, a graduate thesis does not represent the progress of science,but the progress of the subject in formation. That is the necessary project and, if that project goes well, surely your projects will be better for science.
Here, too, the theoretical object is not training, but the notion of tact that, we believe, is constitutive and essential to the academic processes that summon us; in other words, tact is the willingness and effort of advisers and evaluators to achieve better training processes. Touch is a quality or disposition in relationships that allows a person to behave with sensitivity and flexibility towards others to make the environment of interaction friendly. In educational and pedagogical settings, having a good tone describes the constant gesture, but without poses, of a reflection that leans towards others with adequate volumes and rhythms.
Tone is tact, that is, a human quality with a certain sensitivity and ability to perceive complex situations to adapt reactions, despite not having, in relation to them, any knowledge derived from general principles, but reactions that reflect “a way of knowing and a way of being ”(Gadamer, 1993 p. 45-46). In this sense, touch is essentially inexpressible and inexpressible, however, acting with tact means that confrontation is delicately avoided, something is silenced to avoid the crash and its consequences; its antipode, the lack of tact, is not being able to keep silent to avoid the obfuscations. Avoiding confrontations does not mean ignoring situations, but addressing them in a resolution key. Touch, thereby,it is a distance taking to avoid the imminent confrontation due to the excessive approach that violates the intimate sphere of the other (Gadamer, 1993, p.45).
Touch, then, refers to a way of relating to people and, in a pedagogical sense, it is necessarily interactive. In advisory and evaluation situations, academics can act in an authoritative, ironic and derogatory way, on the contrary, paternalistic and overprotective. This generates situations between teachers and students that are repeatedly approached in an improvised and inexperienced way when, on the contrary, they would need to be nuanced by reflective-pedagogical thinking. Precisely that reflective thought about action is pedagogical tact: gesture and language with which one responds to multiple situations of counseling and evaluation to avoid irreversible extremes.
Tact becomes visible in conversation: advising is talking and evaluating is proposing a conversation. And all conversation requires tact because conversation is the expedited means of learning. Conversing, then, has nothing to do with strategic positions that found authoritarianism, nor with an academic laisses faire that lets go and lets go, but with the friendly intransigence that is based on the ethical responsibility of teachers and students. To talk is to take into account, responsibly, that the interlocutor, located in his perspective, may be right and more reasons than ourselves.
In short, pedagogical tact is, in the framework of academic program communities, the concept that must be converted into a purpose of self-transformation and transformation of teachers, that is, an object of ethical reflection and self-reflection around what it means meddling with the other in the common purpose of concretizing a product as a pretext for general formation for life, society and science.
Bibliography
- Gadamer, G. (1993). Truth and method. Follow me Salamanca.Manen, Max (2013) Tact in teaching. The meaning of the pedagogic sensibility. Paidós. Barcelona, Derrida, J. (1997). About Hospitality. http://www.jacquesderrida.com.ar/textos/hospitalidad.htm. Consulted on 02/12/2014
The idea of pedagogical tact is a notion that I have been working within the framework of the doctorate in Education of the Faculty of Education, as a theoretical perspective of the PDS Group that is offered to the academic community to strengthen the training processes. (see: Manen, 2013)
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