Being a teacher is not an act of transmission of knowledge, rather it implies motivating students to learn to learn, accompanying them in their learning process for life, for a good life, and exhorting them to be part of their own training. This is the fundamental element of vocation as an essential value in teaching professionals.
The vocation must be the guiding and unavoidable thread of the teaching action, vocation is the source that drives the creation of skills and attitudes to be a better educator, otherwise the teaching exercise will collide with exclusive preferences such as social and economic position, prestige, as well as the disadvantages of the prevailing socioeconomic system (limited resources for education), leading to teacher frustration and dissatisfaction.
Vocation is our dreams, our illusions, what inspires us, what we are passionate about, is the expression of our values. Therefore, professionals with a true vocation for education manage to open paths in the search for new educational paradigms that provide society with a significant change that motivates and induces the pleasure of guiding and creating conditions for learning, and sharing these experiences for their feedback and improvement.
Therefore, teachers need to regain the pleasure of learning, recover that spark that moves us to discover, create, invent, think, share, investigate, enjoy doing and being.
Many teachers today have fallen into the slumber of conformism, they have lost the sense of innovation, creativity and enthusiasm, which makes the classroom a boring, sometimes hostile place, perhaps due to the lack of recognition of their work already little motivation as a social subject.
But, how can we maintain that vocation for education?
Answering this question leads the teacher to formulate new challenges of struggle with himself, to internalize that without the willingness to personal change there will be no place for a work of cooperation and solidarity that generates new pedagogical contributions that contribute to keeping the passion for education alive, as manifested in the following thought:
"This Generation of knowledge is built on the principle of collaboration, cooperation and solidarity with the other and the other, not competition and predation." (Gutiérrez, 2006, p, 34).
Educators and educators by vocation are those who sow for themselves and for others. Although it arises as a special expression of rural education, where the teacher together with their students sow to reap, it is a way of expressing that the educator by vocation is capable of transforming himself and of motivating to transform.
Referring to vocation, makes me find meaning in the words of Gonzáles: " Information is, then, directly linked to our concepts of mind and consciousness " (González, 200, p.208), where consciousness is part of the energy of the teacher, since it makes teaching an enriching and noble profession, since part of the formation of the future of human beings is in their hands, and it is his or her mission to promote spaces to love and respect all that is in your enviroment.
Just as it is part of their responsibilities to promote values that induce life in harmony (personal, family, community and with nature), to achieve coexistence coherence. Otherwise, the fundamental role of the educator / educator will be limited to playing an alienating and alienating role, which will endanger the training and social and coexistence of their students.
Given the erroneous view that humanity has had of the world, educational processes have been influenced in practice with the transmission of knowledge in a mechanical way, lacking dynamic spaces that lead to the construction of it in a creative way and limiting the learners to listen without participating, to imitate and not create, cutting them off from thinking and analyzing.
Scheme that is reproduced in the workplace of teaching, when there are still professionals, in the character of bosses and authorities, that limit the teacher in achieving and advancing their professional improvement, creating frustrations that truncate their creativity and enthusiasm as a teacher..
We are promoters and promoters of education
Throughout history, male and female educators have played an important role in the development of humanity, a positive aspect on the one hand, but negative when the traditional way of learning has been based on repetition.
This formative limitation has not allowed development conditions with equal effectiveness between the different social groups, making it impossible to balance between people and their environment, and promoting a destructive struggle of nature.
The foregoing translates into the main challenge for educators: to begin to create spaces to learn to share, to converse, to think and work as a team. In this regard, Assmann tells us that “ isolated individual efforts do not create learning collectives ”. (Assmann, 2002: 89).
It is convenient for us to create new mental models that lead us to see a world of possibilities where we can learn collectively, which in turn will help to integrate humanity and its environment as a whole.
We need a different school, which takes into account that part of learning is to feel good, promote autonomy, learn for life and throughout life without avoiding climate change, economy, globalization and health.
" Man has always sought the mental, physical, social and individual totality ", says Bohm (Bohm, 2002, p.21).
Therefore, each teacher must begin to fight for their freedom, for their desire to be an active subject of social change, of the fascinating journey that the transformation of individuals into social beings implies.
New paradigms in education
The transformation of content is a key innovative element in the education process, currently new methodologies, technologies and paradigms demand different ways of organizing and demonstrating content.
Therefore, the reorganization of these contents must be done in a different way from the traditional, putting into practice new forms of participation that involve all the actors of the educational process and lead to a desired social development.
Capra (1998) considers the physical, psychological and spiritual integration of the subjects to be extremely necessary as a fundamental element to achieve a balance between themselves, and they with their environment.
In this regard, it is important to mention that part of this plan is to promote good nutrition to guarantee good physical health and to foster good communication relationships with others to achieve good mental and spiritual health. These are significant aspects that every educator must integrate into their teaching as a new way of learning, so that healthy people can be counted on for the progress and benefit of humanity.
Personally, my passion for education is to influence training with changes, changes that involve educational innovations and new, more dynamic and enjoyable ways of learning.
We need educational changes with the active and creative participation of everyone, where knowledge is generated that unites all the fragmented parts of the individual and their environment, as Bohm (2002) mentions: “… create a movement that flows to end the fragmentation and starting from experience to arrive at logical thinking ”.
How to maintain this motivation, without forgetting that the educator is also human?
I want to start with a thought by Arturo Guillaumin: "We must articulate the intellect, passion, emotions, to get closer to our true nature: that of homo-sapiens-demens " (Gutiérrez, 2006: 61).
However, I cannot help but reflect that despite the fact that each teacher is a thinking person with feelings, knowledge, emotions, illusions and sadness, they have been denied their autonomous social inclusion according to the educational environment in which they operate.
That is why I am going to allow myself to return to an assertion that alludes to the incredible capacity of the human brain to create mechanisms of resilience in these situations: “ when the environment changes, the brain shapes itself by responding to these changes. It is impossible to reduce it: on the contrary, the more it is used, the more effective it becomes (Capra, 1998: 158) ”.
Therefore, the negativity of the basic social conditions for living prevailing in the economic models of Latin America, become a great challenge for educators to maintain that motivation for the teaching vocation. Situation that forces them to work and fight hard to change their thoughts, their perception of life and the way of learning against an entire traditional system resistant to change.
His motivation will be to transform his own self, open himself to change, seek his own personal transformation and achieve that leap in consciousness, maintaining a firm fascination for education, being the person who lives and enjoys what he does, because when man or woman woman lives by doing what she likes, she is so happy that she manages to reach others.
The painter Gordon Onslow Ford once stated: " The mind is creative by nature, the more the depths of the mind are probed, the more abundant its creativity " (Capra, 1992: 161).
This statement makes me understand that we still have men and women working to achieve changes that involve educational innovations, more dynamic and enjoyable.
Finally, I want to express that the vocation for teaching gives us the interest to search for the answer to the question that Assmann asks us: "How can the deep experiences of the pleasure of learning be valued?" (Assmann, 2002: 89).
Bibliographic references
- Assmann (2002) Pleasure and Tenderness in Education. Editorial NARCEAS. A. Madrid.Capra (1998) The Crucial Point. Nascent Science, Society and Culture Editorial troquel SAGutiérrez, Francisco (2006). Doctorate in Education with an Emphasis on Pedagogical Mediation Bohm, David (2002). Wholeness and the implicate order. Editorial Kairós, González De Alba, Luis (2002). Sancho's Donkey and Shödinger's Cat. Editorial Paidó.
