Acción y Reflexión Educativa

Editorial

Abril Méndez — 2024-12-17

Pedagogy and cultural studies

Alejandro Vassiliades — 2024-12-17

The article reviews and critically analyzes a series of contributions that some conceptual movements based on cultural studies have made to the field of education, focusing on the theoretical and methodological consequences for the study of the regulations of teaching work. To do so, the paper performs a systematic analysis of a set of bibliographical sources of reference in the field of cultural studies in education, reconstructing the main theoretical categories that they deploy. The text focuses on the ways in which the open nature of the hegemonic, the complexity and heterogeneity of the processes linked to culture, and the active role posed in relation to the subjects, suppose destabilizations that interrupted the certainties of structural perspectives, while opening questions that would later be taken up by post structural approaches in the educational field. The text also analyses a series of contributions that perspectives framed in the field of cultural history have made to understand teaching work as part of the disputes around the ways of knowing and interpreting the processes of schooling. The analysis makes it possible to highlight the destabilizing role of cultural studies in relation to the construction of pedagogical approaches to teaching work, offering an overview of the main theoretical and epistemological effects of these movements.

Educational Evaluation Seen from Rationalism and Empiricism

Heidy Yojana González Pardo — 2024-12-17

This essay examines the influence of rationalism and empiricism on the acquisition of knowledge and educational evaluation, using a documentary review with emphasis on René Descartes and John Locke. Organized in four parts, it highlights the rationalist perspective on learning and Locke's empiricist opposition, highlighting sensory experience. The evaluation is explored from a historical and conceptual perspective, concluding on the importance of these currents in academic processes, especially in evaluation, where fundamental aspects such as the essence of being converge. It is argued that rationalism emphasizes reason and logic, while empiricism prioritizes sensory experience; underlining the importance of formative evaluation and feedback to improve learning, considering the student's prior knowledge and traceability. Finally, it highlights the need for a comprehensive evaluation that incorporates moral and ethical aspects to cultivate values and attitudes in the individual. This interaction between rationalism and empiricism enriches education by merging reflection and sensory experience.

Towards inclusive mathematics education

María Eugenia Quiñones Holguín — 2024-12-17

This article explores inclusive mathematics education for students with attention deficit at the secondary education level. The objective is to analyze strategies, challenges, and opportunities to achieve effective inclusion of these students in mathematics education. Through a review of recent literature (2019-2023), current perspectives on attention deficit in mathematics education, teacher training, adapted pedagogical strategies, curricular flexibility, and collaboration between educational actors are examined. The results reveal an evolution towards more humanizing approaches, recognizing these students as capable mathematical thinkers. The critical need for specialized teacher training and the implementation of pedagogical strategies that include technology, playful activities, and multisensory approaches is identified. Curricular flexibility and contextualization emerge as key elements for success. The importance of a collaborative approach involving teachers, families, and institutions is highlighted. Future research should address the effectiveness of specific strategies and explore innovative approaches. It is concluded that truly inclusive mathematics education requires a multifaceted effort that transforms not only pedagogical practices, but also conceptions about learning and the mathematical potential of all students.

Open-air education

Edgardo I. Garrido-Pérez — 2024-12-17

The Covid 19 pandemics expanded the interest towards outside-school education. This essay aims to generate reader’s attraction towards the efficient, fun, and cheap option of educating in the open air by using parks, forests, fields, farms, beeches, harbors, plazas, streets, and cities. Complex topics like the evolution by means of Natural Selection and the evolutionary phylogenies are smoothly explained by critically and participatory observing unharmful plants and animals (e.g. mollusks) freely available outdoors. History, Civility, Arts, and social behavior are learned in a constructive, transdisciplinary way in plazas or streets by observing buildings and other infrastructures. Open-air learning stimulates student’s hormones of pleasure facilitating them to enthusiastically read books and attending indoor classes related to the topics attended outdoors. Playful learning is not contradictory, but complementary to school’s rigor because every game follows rules and needs to be studied.

Disruptive university education

María Auxiliadora Campos Medina — 2024-12-17

University education is a platform that drives knowledge, transformation and innovation, called to accept the challenges of cybersociety. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence in universities requires an academic, from now on called a trans-advisor, capable of resizing the cognitive process, thus permeating adaptation skills to the dizzying social changes due to technological advances. Andragogy, a model of self-management strategies for the individual in adulthood, transcends towards a new approach called heutagogy, for self-determination and promotion of lifelong learning, framed in the disruption of Artificial Intelligence, illuminated by transcomplexity, a metamodel that urges to raise emerging positions to humanize the embrace of technology embedded in the multidiversity of knowledge. The intentional prism of this article is to reflect on the impact of Artificial Intelligence in universities from transcomplex ethics. The methodological support is embraced by reflexive hermeneutics. The theoretical foundation is based on the epistemology of transcomplexity. It is concluded that the trans-advisor is a lens that filters the integration of the man-technology-moral tripod in the light of transcomplex ethics.

Family and personal factors that generate school dropout in secondary schools in the metropolitan area of Jalisco

Catalina del Rosario Barrios Navarro — 2024-12-17

This article is part of a project aimed at improving the retention middle school students in Jalisco, Mexico, through artificial intelligence models and educational intervention. It forms part of the “School Dropout” initiative within fAIr LAC Jalisco, financed by the Inter-American Development Bank, Government of the State of Jalisco, and the Artificial Intelligence HUB of the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Guadalajara. This project was developed in collaboration with the State Commission for the Continuous Improvement of Education of the Jalisco Ministry of Education. To understand the complexity of systemic problems such as school retention and dropout in middle schools, this study was developed to identify and analyze critical factors related to family and social aspects of students that influence education dropout. This research uses a qualitative approach, complemented by quantitative instruments; Results confirm the interrelationship among the analyzed factors.

The resolution subprocesses in the Academic Aptitude Test of the University of Costa Rica

Diana Martínez Alpízar — 2024-12-17

This article is interested in the response processes of the Academic Aptitude Test of the University of Costa Rica (PAA). Specifically, it describes its subprocesses, as well as the ways in which they interact with each other. The research used a qualitative methodology. The interview of expert judges was used. Once the material was coded and analyzed, it was concluded that the subprocesses involve both the reorganization of information and the generation of new information, but sometimes it is difficult to establish which of the two has greater weight in the item. Regarding the interaction between categories, two of them were detected. The first, alternation, implies that the item can be solved through two different processes. The second is complementarity. In this case, the presence of two categories necessary to solve the item is detected.

Socio-emotional competencies in the school context of basic secondary education

Jazmín Andrea Gélvez-Pabón — 2024-12-17

Socio-emotional education is established as one of the main challenges of current education. From this perspective, the objective of this article is to identify the socio-emotional competencies of secondary school students that influence school coexistence. For this reason, the present qualitative work addresses a systematic review of the literature of the last 5 years, between 2020 and 2024, in empirical articles extracted from journals indexed in the ERIC, SCIELO, SCOPUS and REDALYC databases, according to the research question: what are the socio-emotional competencies of secondary school students that influence school coexistence? The analysis of the reviewed articles includes aspects such as: the identification of the emotional competencies of secondary school students, socio-emotional learning models and the importance of educational programs based on the development and strengthening of socio-emotional competencies for the optimization of the school climate. Among the main socio-emotional skills that influence school coexistence, there are: emotional awareness, social awareness, emotional regulation, self-control, responsible decision-making and the skills necessary to relate assertively with others; skills necessary to face the challenges of an educational and social context in constant transformation. Therefore, the relevance of training programs in socio-emotional skills aimed at both students and teachers arises.

Perception of virtual classes during COVID-19 in panamanian students with special educational needs

Fredy Hernán Tuñón Carbo — 2024-12-17

The use of technology in educational environments increased in the teaching and learning processes. This study plans to know the perception of virtual classes in Panamanian special students at the primary level during COVID-19, for which a questionnaire was designed and validated and applied to a total of 38 people who exercise leadership roles in the 19 headquarters of the Panamanian Institute for Special Education of the Republic of Panama and leadership in the Parents' Committees. The results show that the use of information and communication technologies for learning by the population with special educational needs is well accepted, since it provides the opportunity to reduce distances and the use of playful, adaptable and flexible pedagogical techniques.

Use of virtual worlds in the teaching-learning process at the higher education level

Cindy Esquivel — 2024-12-17

This research analyzes the potential of virtual worlds as training environments at the university level. The study focused on exploring the acceptance of this immersive tool and its ability to improve the teaching-learning process, highlighting the importance of social interaction in this context.

The results indicate that virtual worlds can constitute a valuable teaching resource in university education. Its application has the potential to promote the development of digital skills, teamwork, critical thinking and problem solving. However, its success will depend on careful planning and adaptation of the study plans. Teacher training, the design of innovative pedagogical activities and the evaluation of the impact on student learning are recommended.

Challenges for inclusion in the classroom

Sergio Hugo Hernández Belmonte — 2024-12-17

This research aims to identify the challenges that teachers in training faced in developing an inclusive practice in the classroom during their teaching practicum. It is a phenomenological study, which, through a semi-structured interview, recollects the experiences of six teachers in training who completed the fourth year of the Bachelor's Degree in Primary Education at the Benemérita Escuela Nacional de Maestros, during the 2022-2023 school year. Based on a sensitizing, synthetic and analytical categorization exercise, three challenges were found that future teachers face during their professional practices: the lack of a culture of inclusion in the school environment, a situation that complicates their teaching performance; the identification of gaps in initial training, despite having received courses related to educational inclusion; finally, the understanding that inclusion in the classroom is a slow process of paradigm shift. The study concludes that normal school students, having a closer contact with reality, identify a contrast between theory and school reality; finding areas of opportunity which they are responsible for consolidating during their continuing education.

Visual arts students' perception of their profession

Félix A. González Sanjur — 2024-12-17

The Visual Arts degree has a series of job opportunities that may not be noticed. It is thought that the study of visual arts has as a single goal “becoming an artist”, which results in a bias regarding the possibilities in the labor field. University education has the goal of professionalizing the student, which implies that whoever studies visual arts should be trained as a professional in this discipline. The above is not exclusive or exclusive of the possibility of developing as an artist. In order to understand the perception that students of the Visual Arts program at the University of Panama have about their profession, their study plan was analyzed to obtain a curricular overview of the profession; an instrument with a scale of attitudes and opinions was applied to a focus group of students from all levels and shifts. In this way, the extent to which students consider the scope of their university preparation to aid them develop as professionals was examined; significant limitations were found regarding the workspaces that they consider they could perform in.

Vulnerability to climate change from the perspective of the Kusapín indigenous children in Ngäbe Buglé ethnic region

Lucía Cristina Torres Méndez — 2024-12-17

Like the rest of the countries in the world, the Republic of Panama faces the challenge of climate change. This national problem has a greater impact in indigenous areas, characterized by extreme poverty and high climate vulnerability, such as in the case of the district of Kusapín - Comarca Ngäbe Buglé, an area where situations of extreme poverty converge, on the one hand, of the order of 0.6296% (according to the multidimensional poverty index); and a high vulnerability to climate change, with impacts on the availability of water, biodiversity and rising sea levels. The purpose of this study is to understand the perception of the problem of climate change from the perspective of children. For this purpose, a sample of 50 sixth grade students from two schools in the Kusapín District was selected. They were given a survey instrument with 17 questions (closed and open) considering the criteria of: knowledge, perception, measures to combat and adapt to climate change and education on climate change. It is concluded that children show a lack of knowledge about the concepts of climate change, vulnerability, its causes and effects and how this phenomenon is expressed in the community context in which they operate. This alerts us to the need to intervene from the educational field, implementing concrete actions from the curricular, teacher training and parent participation, guaranteeing inclusive environmental education.

Classroom Interactional Competence in English as a Second Language Classes through The Zoom Synchronous Platform

Rafael Cárdenas — 2024-12-17

This article addresses classroom interactional competence in the context of real-time synchronous classes, using learning platforms, at the university level. In this modality, it is important to know if the objectives of the classes proposed for in-person classes are met, specifically those related to the facilitation of teacher-student communication, negotiation of meanings, and learning of formulaic language and routines. This is critical for a better understanding of the dynamics of the virtual English classroom from the students´ side since there are doubts regarding the quality of the virtual versions compared to in-person classes. For this study, a sample of 100 university students from the School of English was used, to whom a 10-question survey with a Likert scale was applied. The results reveal awareness of the classroom dynamics and aspects of communication necessary for positive and constructive communication in the English classroom in the student population. The implications indicate the possibility of analyzing virtual classroom discourse through transcriptions of what was expressed and discussed in the session. Likewise, the collection and study of transcriptions would allow future comparative studies with respect to face-to-face classes. These results would help to argue with evidence for or against virtual English classes for students of the specialty at the University of Panama.