1. General characteristics of the learning subject
The object of study of this subject is primarily a human being, which as such constitutes a bio-psycho-social unit.
The bio (biological) part is considered related to the bodily, the psycho (psychic) part was considered for a long time as belonging to the soul, although it has also been considered as belonging to the mind. Within the mind are the faculties of memory, imagination, reasoning, etc.
These faculties are always present in man, but they can be developed through their exercise.
This determined that teaching, during the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth, had as its purpose the exercise of these powers.
But man also has a social dimension. To the finalistic biological and rational reasons for the division of labor, we must add above all that man is a social being because he needs society as a matrix that configures him as human. Your mind and brain are socially and culturally shaped. And for this to happen, nature has put in man an impulse that lies in a powerful need: the need of the other.
It is also noted that man is a being that:
- It develops although each man has his own characteristics that are different from the others, he also has characteristics of the species, influenced by the culture in which he lives and the historical period he is passing through (today postmodernity), which makes it possible to characterize him according to various stages of development. ability to learn
Man as a developing subject
- Man lives processes of change, of development. Development is not something exclusive to children and adolescents, as it was traditionally considered, it occurs throughout life. Evolutionary Psychology is the science that deals with the psychological development of the human being. Over the years, various explanatory models of development have appeared. Through education the aim is to make the person evolve, develop. Development involves the interaction of the hereditary (the genetic) with the acquired (the stimulation received from the environment).
We are going to define the concept of development, differentiating it in turn from the concepts of maturity and growth.
The concept of maturity refers to changes in the behavior of a subject, which occur as a result of genetic influence (which determines its maturational calendar) and incidental experience, excluding from this concept changes that take place as a result of specific practice, that is, learning.
On the other hand, the term growth is used to designate the relatively stable changes at the neuroanatomical and neurophysiological level that allow the development of behavior, that is, without taking into account whether it is attributable to maturation or learning.
On the other hand, the concept of development arises from the confluence of maturity and learning, from what is inherited and what is provided by the environment, a concept from which the enormous importance of formal education is deduced (on the side of learning) in the development of the human being.
In the opinion of the author of this work, for a teacher it is highly important to be very clear about the direct relationship between learning / education and development, to avoid the belief that the innate is the most important thing and to fall into the non-insistence on the culture of the effort for a student to overcome his congenital barriers, for example by rewarding achievement in class. It is also important to be very clear about this direct relationship so that teachers and directors reflect on the content to be taught (given the high impact of learning on the development of the person), in order to provide the school with truly relevant content for the student, and not of those that are little necessary and that only manage to bore them.Perhaps the school should be more clear that today the postmodern student captures a lot of information from the media and the street (that is, outside the school) that should be analyzed in specific curricular spaces within the school, in order to be filtered / moderated by teachers in order to guide students in this process of analysis and internalization, a task that parents should primarily do, who many times, due to lack of time, cannot.they can not.they can not.
2. Who is the current learning subject?
One of the most important questions that teachers must ask ourselves is who is the learning subject -child or adolescent- that we have in our classrooms and not start from assumptions based on data that we were offered in our teacher training or extracted from our personal experience during that stage of life.
Let us take the case of Argentine adolescents today, who develop their personal identity in the intersection of two cultures: Postmodern and Latin American Underdevelopment, which gives them certain particular characteristics, different from other contexts.
From the Postmodern they receive the influence of hedonism, incitement to consumption, individualism, the prevalence of computing, fragmentation, skepticism about discourses, indifference, the difficulty of loving and growing, etc. While from Underdevelopment, they inherit the lack of educational and work opportunities, economic instability with its corollary of difficulties in proposing goals that go beyond the immediate, the lack of resources to encourage talents and the unemployment or underemployment of those who perhaps dedicated years to your professional preparation.
Now, the question is how to relate these current Argentine adolescents with the pedagogical subjects that the schools produce?
Let's first define subject:
- The subject is constructed
There are no predetermined conditions that establish that one is what it is by the mere fact of existing. The subject is not the given, it is done.
- The constitution of the subjects implies, in a central way, the relationship between freedom and necessity, that is, we do not organize ourselves as we want but as we can.This identity that is built can be defined taking into account two aspects: what one is in itself and the place which deals.
When an adolescent student is called, the place he occupies in the institution prevails over what he is. This means that the didactics and the curriculum are for all adolescents of the same age. The case would be different if we could achieve individualized teaching, which defines the adolescent for what he is and not for the place he occupies.
- Subjects are constituted in experiences, among them school. When we refer to the subject as a network of experiences, we refer to this complex union between ways of seeing the world and ways of acting on it. According to Dewey, experience is not only empirical, there are conceptual elements that organize it, that is, there is a fundamental connection between doing and thinking Identities are attempts to organize our experiences that are not guaranteed to remain or to change suddenly.
And the educational subjects of today: what identities do they carry? What identities constitute them?
For two centuries, educational identities have been rich and varied, but they were marked by the force of the school culture since education was going to redeem or save the population from ignorance or barbarism; Social subjects - gauchos, workers, housewives, etc. - were asked to leave their culture at the door and attend precisely there to build their identity. Through school the pedagogical subject suppressed or dominated the social subject.
Today this has changed, it has been broken. The profound changes in the identities of adolescents leave schools powerless, which have difficulty finding "the attunement with the boys." School no longer promises better futures. Today it is observed that teachers work with adolescents (middle school, tertiary and universities) and are unaware of or devalue youth sociability and culture.
So these days the social subject has overwhelmed the pedagogical subject, and the school must consider this situation, knowing that both it and the culture provide completely different experiences and on opposite occasions. School is a place where knowledge (scientific knowledge) is passed through, but also all other cognitions that are not scientific, but that can be valid in these times. The challenge is to see if the school can provide and provide itself with experiences that enable it to achieve greater harmony between the school subject and the social subject.
3. Opinion from daily teaching practice
In the opinion of the author of this work, at the Polimodal level, greater attention should be paid to proposals such as “incorporating elements of youth culture into the content of the subjects”, for example:
• generating spaces for debate among students at school (coordinated by teachers specializing in social communication) about what is captured in the media (especially TV)
• incorporating postmodern content, for example in Literature, where children still read Quixote de la Mancha, there are so many postmodern novels of a good level with which students would perhaps feel more identified
• and in general, providing all the curricular spaces that allow it, with didactic elements and contents that promote student motivation (that students feel close to their codes); let us bear in mind that we have in front of us postmodern students who cannot be motivated with successful methods in other times.
For all the above, it is clear how important it is for teachers to know the characteristics of the learning subject that we have ahead, knowing that we are part of that network of experiences that constitutes it and not forgetting what society demands of us: subjects that do not freeze, with the ability to know, solve problems and also ask new questions.
Bibliography
1. Material prepared by the Chair Subjects of Learning, Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, UNCuyo, Mendoza.
There are several schools of thought that deal with the issue of development, some of them making a lot of emphasis that it would be little influenced by the context and very influenced by the hereditary, approaches not shared by the author of this work.
Professor in 2nd year of Polimodal and also at the Tertiary level.
In the bibliography provided by the chair, the child is also discussed, but here we are going to place more emphasis on the adolescent as the author of this work is a teacher at a multi-modal level.
Professor in 2nd year of Polimodal and also at the Tertiary level.
