Introduction
The 21st century requires professionals dedicated to teaching higher education to live up to the historical moment they have had to live. Going in search of new solutions to the problems of modern pedagogy is a truly heroic task when you have a legacy of such important pedagogues as José Martí, José de la Luz y Caballero, Félix Varela, etc.
His revolutionary ideals are materialized today in the new social transformations that Latin America is experiencing; within them education occupies a leading role. This implies not only changes in the order of the pedagogical sciences but also in other sciences, leading to the establishment of new social policies.
In this sense, Cuba is an example of a true educational revolution that had its origins in the heroic "Literacy Campaign" launched by our Commander in Chief as the genuine creator of these transformations and which today reaches the magnitude of "Universalization of Higher Education ”Based on the challenge of bringing the University to each Cuban in the most diverse municipalities in the country, relying on the use of New Information Technologies and professionals who, as part-time contracted professors, teach in the university headquarters. This implies the need for a capable and sufficient faculty to face teaching in these circumstances,Thus, the insufficiency of preparing in communicative terms emerges not only for the professor in his practice but also for working according to the training of university students as future Social Communicators in the municipal offices.
Communication is the very essence of life, at all levels, we cannot see it only verbally or extraverbally, but in the process of interaction with the surrounding environment.
Generally it is affirmed that education and communication are inseparable processes, seen from the conception that there is no educational fact without communicative action.
In the educational field, the term pedagogical (or educational) communication has also been gaining its own space, especially in America, by covering those interactive processes between educators and learners that promote the improvement of the training of both. However, this phenomenon is often undervalued in educational work or restricted to the official relationships established between teachers and students in the classroom.
The Cuban school, which is in line with the most advanced conceptions in Latin America, works hard for the contribution that the students go through the levels of assimilation, so that each teacher is engaged in raising their theoretical and methodological level for the most effective solution to the problems they face in their professional practice and the elevation of the quality of learning of their students for their adequate comprehensive training.
There are many studies carried out in the field of Communication in each of the specialties: Public Relations, Marketing, Advertising, Organizational Communication, Visual Communication, among others, but the sphere of educational communication has been the least addressed, although it is worth highlighting the studies carried out by various Cuban authors, who have offered important contributions with results in the, expanding knowledge from theoretical and practical approaches such as: V. Ojalvo, O. Kraftchenko, AM Fernández, E. Ortíz, among others.
In the case of the Social Communication degree, at the Municipal University Venue of Santa Clara it is found that educational communication is not in function of optimizing the quality of the teaching-learning process, considering insufficient teacher preparation as the cause of the greatest incidence. in this matter.
This reflection led us to pose the following scientific problem:
How to contribute to the preparation in educational communication of the professors of the Social Communication career?
From which it is defined as
Research Objective: The Professional Improvement of the professors of the Social Communication career.
Field of action: The preparation in educational communication of the professors of the Social Communication career.
General objective:
Propose a system of workshops that contributes to the preparation in educational communication of the teachers of the Social Communication career.
Development
1.- The universalization of higher education
The new career in Social Communication has its origins in the recommendations arising from the VII Congress of the Union of Journalists of Cuba that was held in April 1999, where a critical analysis was made of the need to open this specialty taking into account the demands of the journalistic profession.
The leadership of the Revolution, together with Fidel, made a critical analysis of the design of knowledge in order to find a correspondence between the contents of Social Communication and the most current trends in the world to meet the new social demands; Thus, on July 20, 2000, the career court of the Ministry of Higher Education, chaired by Dr. Mario Luís Rodríguez, ruled the approval of the specialty of Social Communication at the University of Havana.
In this same year with the establishment of the battle of ideas that our people are waging, the degree program was decentralized from the University of Havana, moving to the center of the country and with it to the municipal offices as an offer of continuity of studies for the graduates of the schools of the new programs of the revolution, whose objective was to reintegrate young people into society.
This social commission, as Carlos Álvarez de Zayas calls, in his book "The school in life" to the beautiful task of training new generations, has been a challenge and a necessity that the professors of the Communication career have so bravely assumed. Social at the university headquarters in Santa Clara, because without being graduates of the specialty of social communication, they maintain a high level of preparation in each of the specialties they have taken on, with postgraduate improvement being the main tool to face such heroic work.
The educational transformations that are carried out in Cuban Higher Education with the aim of increasing access and equity at this level of education are based on the accumulated achievements in education in all the years of the Revolution, occupying a privileged position in the Model of Universalization of Higher Education, for being part of the Battle of Ideas program that our people wage.
One of the greatest challenges of universalization in this new stage is to achieve the permanence and completion of studies of its students, who in the vast majority synchronize it with work. In this sense, a pedagogical model has been designed that allows vocational training aspirations to be directed, supported on the basis of flexibility as opposed to the conception of a rigid curriculum that, with its advantages and disadvantages, does not meet the requirements of training of young people who face the double condition of students and workers.
The conceived model responds to certain characteristics:
- Flexible in that it admits its adaptation to a concrete reality, in correspondence with the current state of the problem and the systemic interrelation of the elements that make up its structure. Participatory given by the very conception of direction in which it operates. Democratic due to the opportunities it offers the management style and the purposes of cooperative learning. Transformer for the purposes of learning and self-improvement of the practice of management. Critical as an analysis, continuous and cooperative assessment of the current level in relation to the desired state in the search for self-improvement. Enriching because it allows improving the communicative process and learning in that practice in the practice-learning unit.
Within this context, the logic of the teacher's intervention must improve its preparation with a view to making better use of the areas of proximal development, defined by Vigosky from the different systems of relationships established in the professional training process for future students. social communicators.
For their part, the professionals who assume the teaching of the specialty act in relation to the needs of social practice to transfer the experience to the content taught.
There is no doubt that these arguments clearly explain the importance of developing this process of universalization, seen for its human and viable significance, which will become a point of reference for the educational community and as a political agenda to promote the development of a sustainable society that offers education for all.
2. The permanent improvement of teachers
In the 21st century, several international organizations point to the advent of a "knowledge society" or "information society" that will transform the current world scene into the so-called "blue planet", whose main catalyst is the technological revolution taking place in our times, especially in the field of information and communications; where it is expected that by the year 2020, of a population of 8,000 billion inhabitants, close to a billion will be able to communicate with each other instantly. Being the problem of knowledge, of learning that has to take place for it in the different alternatives when forming new meanings, to process information,it forces the Pedagogical Sciences and the teaching protagonists (teachers and students) to rethink the teaching-learning process.
In this sense, the existence of a new world order in education is required, since complex scenarios are drawn according to the postulates of the United Nations Organization such as:
- A close link between educational institutions and the productive and social effort in the generation of goods and jobs. Supervision of the professional quality of graduates of educational institutions. The improvement of international levels of quality and competitiveness of education without losing sight of the national identity.
Among the forms of improvement most used in the last period are self-improvement and improvement from jobs, which are combined with face-to-face meeting.
In developed research, Dr. Josefa Lorences and cited by Adriana Casadevall, exposes the fundamental models to which professional improvement has been assigned, among which we can highlight:
The academicist training model: focused on updating the contents, understood in its restricted and decontextualized conception.
The utilitarian training model: which responds to technical approaches to teaching in which teachers have the function of applying programs and strategies that external experts have decided and developed to obtain maximum efficiency in achieving certain objectives.
The classroom-centered training model: which has been imposed in recent years and which encourages the development of programs from the very design and operation of the school, involves it as an organization and facilitates its transformation as a whole by creating conditions Organizational, participatory management, the promotion of collective work aimed at solving practical problems.
The decentralized training model: in which the improvement system is developed based on the needs and demands of the socio-cultural development of each territory in correspondence with the general objectives of education, through the use of different technologies in certain conditions, territories and institutions, which adopt their own particularities depending on which they establish demands and levels of aspiration for the achievement of professional development.
Following Cazau (Quoted by Gallardo 2004), adult learning is based on:
- Learn to know: develop the skills that allow you to acquire the tools of understanding as a means to understand the world, communicate and value the importance of knowledge and research. Learn to learn: develop skills that allow you to acquire and create methods, procedures and learning and study techniques as a tool to continue learning throughout life.Learning to do: develop your abilities to innovate, create strategies, means and tools that make it possible to combine theoretical and practical knowledge with sociocultural behavior, develop skills for group work, the capacity for initiative and risk-taking. Learning to be: development of physical, intellectual, emotional and social integrity, taking into account relations with the work and social environment.
When considering these characteristics, and placing ourselves in our field of action, we value the need to design the teacher's improvement, based on a viable, flexible and quality proposal that allows greater adaptation and speed of response to the needs of change that the new pedagogical model, also referring to what Álvarez de Zayas stated when he recognizes that the improvement program constitutes the projection that plans and organizes the execution of the teaching process, specified in a determined period of time, with the aim of achieving the purposes proposed.
1.3 A contemporary approach to Educational Communication.
If the etymological definition of communicating is taken as a starting point, it is found that the term comes from the Latin communicare, which means: to establish something in common with someone, to share some information, ideas, etc. This definition underlines the co-participatory nature of the action, and the term is not exclusive to a particular social science, but has connotations from the social sciences in question for what is considered a polysemantic category.
The theoretical and methodological study of communication has contributed not only the philosophers, but also the contributions made by theologians, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, mathematicians, physicists and cyberneticists occupy an essential place. In this way, Dr. Victoria Ojalvo, in her studies on the subject, refers to the development of three fundamental sources in the emergence of communication:
Ojalvo 95] points to two levels in this analysis: Non-purpose level. It is inherent in every human relationship, any educational act being a relationship of individuals who enter into interaction. In fact, a communicational dimension is implicit, where messages are exchanged, although this objective is not conscious for some of those involved.
Purpose level. There is an express intention to carry out certain communication processes such as transmitting, informing, sharing, debating, with the explicit purpose of exercising an educational influence, for example: the family, the school.
1.-Education model that emphasizes content
It is characterized by an emphasis on the transmission of information, the teacher assuming the leading role, trying to inculcate notions and introduce it into the memory of the students, conceiving it as a receptacle and repository of knowledge, it has predominance in the formal educational system, it is a vertical education, paternal and authoritarian.
It supports its influence on the phonological communicative model, based on the basic existence of an Emitter and a Receiver, it is characterized by being unidirectional, so it does not establish a true communication process since the student's participation in this model refers to reproduction of words from the text or from the teacher, the central axes being the text and the teacher.
However, a broad concept of the term education implies that process oriented to personal development, where "the student simultaneously builds knowledge and develops on different levels as a person" (González Rey, 1995). The education process requires the interrelation between the assimilation of knowledge and the development of personality.
2.- Education model that emphasizes the effects
This one surpasses the previous one because, because it attaches great importance to motivation and sets as its objective “the change of attitudes”, it has its origins in the Second World War in the United States, it is based on behavioral theory, it grants a certain participation to the student to Through exercises or tasks, this model corresponds to persuasive communication where the Issuer (teacher) continues to play a leading role and the Receiver (student) remains subordinate, a new element is added Feedback that acts as a return response, useful to verify if the information was received as scheduled.
Despite the limitations that this model has had, it has allowed the enrichment of its instrumental dimension both in the direct relationship with the student and in distance education using technical means.
In recent decades, as a response to the behavioral technicality, conditioned by the influence of humanistic approaches in Psychology and Pedagogy that highlight the importance of communication and interpersonal relationship in education (as well as sociological approaches given by the needs of democratization and participation in the social context) a trend towards an educational model focused on the learning process itself was emerging, which highlights the role of dialogue and advocates non-directivity, the need for true communication among its participants.
3.- Education model that emphasizes the process
It is a model developed in Latin America, whose main exponent is Paolo Freire from Brazil, since he conceives education as praxis, reflection and action of man on the world to transform it, another prominent author is the Argentine Enrique Pichón Riviere as he has systematized the close relationship between communication and education. This conception adopts different variants emphasizing the transforming process of people, their personal and professional development in the group context and their dialectical interaction with reality.
It is a self-managed, democratic model, focused on dialogue participation opening multiple channels and communication networks, a true learning is only conceived when there is self-management of the students, basing its essence on the interrelation of the subject with the social environment.
In it, the student is taken as the center and the teacher only leads, facilitates his own construction of knowledge, needing interactivity, true participation, which implies going to the human, subjective dimension of those involved in the process. and the competence of the educator in establishing the human relations that it implies, for which we consider this model the most successful in the process of universalization of the career of social communication.
The term system (from the lat. Systēma, and this from the gr. Σύστημα) refers to the notion of set (example set of rules or principles on a matter rationally linked to each other, set of things that related to each other orderly contribute to a certain object, a set of organs that intervene in some of the main vegetative functions, a structured set of interrelated units that are defined by opposition.
Qualities of the workshop system
It is considered the need to direct from a contextualized perspective actions aimed at solving the problems detected in the activity of teachers with a system approach that relates the elements that act within it and their relationships with the environment, we propose to provide a scientific solution to the contradiction created through this approach, in which coordination relationships predominate, although subordination and dependency relationships are still present.
The change focus in the permanent orientation towards the continuous improvement of the teachers' preparation, and through the systemic approach that guarantees an attitude in them, outgoing, voluntarist, anticipated, critical and open to change.
In order to transform the way of conducting the teaching-learning process, in such a way that teachers are a model to be imitated by future social communicators and possess a deep command of the content they teach, think positively and feel satisfaction of doing it correctly.
Elements that make it up
- The teacher: Teachers play a leading role in the transformations of society. To raise your self-esteem and professional development, you need the recognition that is made socially of the importance of your profession, which leads to reaching its fullness to the extent that they feel pleasure in overcoming, that they experience satisfaction in perfecting their knowledge to contribute to preparing for the life of their learners.
Graphic representation of the proposal
"System of workshops in educational communication for teachers of the Social Communication degree".
Conclusions
• There are insufficiencies in the improvement in educational communication of the professors of the Social Communication career at the municipal university headquarters of Santa Clara, to optimize the teaching-learning process.
• The proposed workshop system is characterized by its flexible, participatory nature, which enables teachers to improve their educational communication preparation in order to optimize the activities they must carry out in the teaching-learning process.
