University of Antioquia-School of Languages

DIDACTICS 1
Teacher: Javier Alexander Rivera
Reflection Paper 1(5%)
Marta Cecilia Arnedo Ortiz
Conceptualizing Teaching Acts
Reflective Task 1.1
In our current educative context, it has been very common to meet an education
focus on educating people to have them participating actively into the economic
system. To do that, our educational system has provided teachers who play the
role of passive technicians that is, teachers who transmit a specific knowledge
needed to fulfill the needs and demands of the nowadays global market. The
advantages of such as role of teachers as passive technicians is that they
provide learners with the experience they require to get a job and through it
supply daily needs like paying the rent, buy food, pay social security and health
in order to have what we call a good living. But this role also implicates certain
disadvantages: on the one hand, this kind of teachers used to focus their daily
practices on content-based activities where students play a passive role and in
the other they are not encouraged to think critically. It makes me think about the
kind of education I received and it is very visible I was educated under this
educational guidelines. In high school I had teachers who were very good at
their subjects and taught me enough to have the information I needed to face
specific tests such as the ICFES and tests I had to take to pass at the
university. They were very worried about giving me the tools to incorporate
appropriately into the system after I graduated from high school. But they did
not encourage me to think about what was going on around: the social and
economic problems that were affecting our families and neighbors and the
violence generated by the lack of education and work opportunities. I was
always regardless of these social issues because my teachers never talked
about it in their classes and did not make us to reflect and discuss about these
situations.
Now that I have the opportunity to work as a teacher I think it is still important to
take into account some aspects of the technicist orientation like promote

student comprehension of knowledge but it has to be related to the context and

students needs. It is essential to help our students to reflect on what is
happening in their social context, to make them think critically about the
problematic of our current society and show them how they can act as change
agents to improve their lives and impact positively others.
Reflective task 1.2
Being a reflective practitioner in a learning or teaching context presents several
obstacles when doing so. In first place, schools are most of the time scenarios
where some principals and teachers are dedicated to implement programs that
allow students to learn content knowledge without thinking about what that
knowledge is for and how he/she can use that knowledge to transform their
society and his/her own life. Then reflective teachers are meeting every day
students who are not used to think critically because they havent been
encouraged to do it and the challenge of making those learners to be aware of
problems they and their families are going to encounter in the current society.
In second place, educational policies are still pushing schools all around to
compete for getting the highest scores in quality which leaves aside important
roles of the school like socialization and acquisition of values, factors that help
students understand

differences among individuals and

accept those

deviations.
To overcome such difficulties, it is necessary that our educational system start
implementing changes in terms of education politics that advocate for learning
environments in which administrators worry less about obtaining high scores in
standardized tests and stuff related to standards of quality. Instead, it would be
very interesting having principals and teachers encouraging students to
participate actively in spaces where social and cultural issues were discussed.
In those debates, students could be inspired to think about how they can
contribute to improve the quality of education and play active roles as social
change agents.

Reflective task 1.5

For a long time, we have been told to implement in our practices principles that
come from outside experts and exercises designed by textbook writers.
Sometimes for teachers it has been an inconvenient to apply and work with
these frameworks coming from countries with such different cultural, social and
economic systems. What has been successful in those contexts do not always
suit the special conditions and needs of our social and educative context. If we
teachers were given the opportunity to construct our own theory, we would have
the opportunity to start producing ideas of how education can enrich our social
and cultural context and would generate possible solutions to problems our
society is facing today. It also will encourage teachers to reflect on the
approaches or methodologies that best suit their students needs. But when
trying to do it, we would face the following obstacle: we teachers are not
accustomed to do research and it is fundamental to do it if we want to theorize
from our experience and practice. To fight this obstacle, we should start
operating changes in our conceptions about our roles. We need to jump from
our role as passive teachers to active researchers. This change is going to help
us to understand our current education system lacks and from that to
reformulate the way things have been done until now and operate the changes
needed.