The current reform of the basic education system in Mexico is permeated by what has been generically called didactic approach by competences, with which a utilitarian sense of learning is promoted.
Thus, the quality of education is conceived as the degree to which students put what they have learned into play to solve hypothetical problems, which are supposed to be found in life. A good student, from this perspective, is one who is able to demonstrate that they can mobilize what they have learned in typical situations, called “Projects”. In short, education is reduced to complex training for the social-labor insertion of the new generations.
This change in perspective in the curricular design of basic education breaks with a line of public policy that had been brewing since 1992, with the signing of the National Agreement for the Modernization of Basic Education and which had allowed the changes not to originate. to respond to six-year fads.
The institutional argumentation that the federal public authorities use in the case of the reform of primary education, reveals the theoretical and practical vulnerability of this curriculum design and warns about the real possibility of its cancellation at the end of this administration. I present an example of the weakness of the justifying framework of this government decision, although of course there are other indicators located in the definition of the purposes of basic education, the didactic model, the evaluation of learning and accreditation that could also be addressed to demonstrate how chaotic this model is.
It is proposed in the courses for in-service teachers, that the constructivist pedagogical approach is changed to one focused on competences because reality has become complex (communication technologies or the so-called knowledge society is mentioned - although its treatment it is reduced to the information society-, as examples of this fact) and even that world educational models are tending and recognizing it as the ideal model and Mexico cannot remain out of this inertia. What is not said in these courses is that the competency-focused model is beginning to be applied in higher education to respond to the problem of the relationship between university or technological training with the labor market.Faced with this relationship problem, it was suggested that potential employers of graduates of different degrees or engineering should participate in the design of graduation profiles and therefore reconfigure the meaning of professional practices or so-called social services, which is logical.
In basic education, an argumentative weakness when proposing the change to a competency-focused model, is that the “employer” of the graduates of basic education is conceived, as the world, which is characterized as a competitive and complex market. Therefore, graduation profiles try to respond to the requirements of this large employer (the market), forgetting that basic education must provide new generations with elements to dialogue with realities, conceiving them not as given issues, but as a result of actions of man. From the didactic approach by competences, the formal codes of communication and interpretation of the world are not acquired to appropriate it, but to insert itself into what is given and be able to compete,Nor is a position towards the world created that allows new generations to dream and build alternative realities.
In the face of this chaos, the hope to form generations of Mexicans capable of transforming the lacerating reality that we have had to live, rests with the group teachers, technical supports, supervisors and heads of the sector, who can add critical elements to this reductionist curriculum design. to look at realities with a sense of future. For example, it is not valid to see poverty as something natural or as a product of realities or international trends, it is necessary to point out in classes, which is a consequence of the greed and corruption of characters with names and surnames, of perfectly identified alliances, therefore We would not have to “reach competencies” not to be poor, but to analyze this fact as something undesirable and commit ourselves in our groups to design alternative lines of action.
Thus, the school should help parents to answer questions, such as the one that my first-grade daughter asked me yesterday, when listening to a family conversation What are taxes? What's wrong with increasing them? Isn't it to support the poor? Although also another solution would be, as a former president recommended, not to read the newspapers, not to see the news and let our children only see Ben10, The Island of Drama, Pucca, Naruto or the Avatar.
It was argued regarding institutional motivations to propose a curriculum model focused on competencies. We will focus on elucidating three categories that seem to be confused in the pedagogical approach of the federal authority: the monitoring, evaluation and accreditation of learning.
In the framework of a pedagogical model focused on competencies, monitoring is a process that allows teachers to summarize evidence of student progress in order to intervene in a timely manner when someone is not achieving, in the expected time, the expected learning.
In this sense, the follow-up is not a moment of evaluation in the strict sense (later this category is developed), since a standard value is not assigned in relation to a reference (expected learning) in a specific cut of time (two-month periods).). However, the evaluations made by teachers are based on personal criteria fed by their experience, there is no formal process for assigning weights based on a base measure of each object that is summarized, in the so-called evidence portfolios.
Therefore, in a pedagogical model focused on competencies, monitoring is a thermometer of the level of expected learning achievement, which tells the student and the teacher when it is necessary to step up. In contrast, in the constructivist model the weight of the evaluation rested on this process (initial and process evaluation) since it allowed, when observing the “learning products”, to assign values related to the progress of the students taking their knowledge as a reference previous and their zones of proximal development. Thus, in the constructivist model, the reference framework for making the evaluation judgment was the student himself, his first “works” were compared with the last ones and emphasis was placed on qualitative leaps, his arguments were recognized and they were taken as valid.The contents were the maps that students and teachers had to travel to acquire a basic education.
Out of fear or irresponsibility, the authorities in charge of designing and implementing the current reform of primary education continue to manage the constructivist discourse of evaluation, although in the framework of the competency model what they refer to when they speak of evaluation is the “monitoring” of student learning process. Let's see some examples of sixth grade of primary: in Spanish, in the field of language training and communication, they propose a "formative evaluation", which is taken as a synonym of "qualitative evaluation"; in mathematics "the evaluation that is proposed in this curriculum points to the three fundamental elements of the didactic process: the teacher, the study activities and the students"; in science the evaluation that is proposed is of a formative nature;the case of geography is to attract attention since it raises "change the vision of qualification for that of process" (then, are we not in a model focused on competencies? Was this not raised in the 1993 plan?) and places the three classic moments of diagnostic, formative and cumulative evaluation; in history, formative evaluation as well as in civic and ethical training, and in arts education there is no specific approach on this topic.
The only case that outlines what should be the evaluation from the competence approach is the physical education program that points out, without going into ramblings “it allows us… to verify the learning obtained (through) the indicators that demonstrate mastery or acquisition of the competences ”, in this sense evaluation is not confused with monitoring, evaluation with moments of evaluation or evaluation with perspectives of evaluation (qualitative or quantitative).
For space, in the next article we will discuss evaluation from a curricular approach focused on competencies and the confusions that the federal authorities hint at in the treatment of this topic, which outlines at least, a half-hearted reform, which implies indefiniteness, confusion and negative impacts for the formation of the new generations of Mexicans.
