Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Teacher training in primary education takes place both in teachers’ college classrooms and in elementary schools. Future teachers are gradually inserted in the practice of teaching during the eight semesters of the major. In the first semester they visit elementary schools in order to learn about the real conditions in which the children are educated, but mainly in order to raise awareness of the complexity of the teaching profession. Students visit different elementary schools and analyze critically the challenges they will have to face in their career path. Their first impressions are important because they awaken in them the concern to intervene and start doing something to contribute to the education of children and the fulfillment of the right to education, an issue addressed in this article through the students’ impressions after a visit to the schools’ restrooms.

There are now fewer and fewer non-designed spaces where children can play. They move from closed spaces to others equally limited and controlled as devices and strategies for the domestication of contemporary childhood. The street is seen as dangerous and risky, so it should be avoided at all costs. The only people we “accept” on the street are street dwellers, a situation that creates a gap between the bonds and meanings that children construct from, with and on the street when they live in the street, as opposed to when they habitually traverse it or only occasionally inhabit it. Through interviews, games and narratives of 5 to 12 year old children, reflections are made about the configuration and representation which, according to their daily practices, these children construct of the street space, playing, training, buying and selling.

The socio-environmental crisis, intensified by an extractive inflexion in Latin America, has led to the emergence of the community school as a new social actor in the mapping of local resistance in the indigenous region of México’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca. Both Critical Pedagogy and Political Ecology provide a theoretical framework for reshaping emancipatory educational practices in contexts of territorial dispute, where the continuity of life itself is at risk. In this paper we use ethnographic research to analyze the persistent tensions between the political-pedagogical action in a community institution and the constraints that the State imposes through the official educational system, which endorses predatory initiatives of transnational capital. The case study of Preparatoria por Cooperación “José Martí” shows how transgressions to the ethos of schooling encourage new identity reconfigurations in students, who are mobilized into the socio-environmental movement through the radical pedagogy of the community school.

This paper presents the results of a Master’s degree thesis entitled “Social representations of African descent in the formation of teachers in the School of Education of the University of Antioquia, 2012-2013”. The aim of the paper is to analyze social representations of African descent in the formation of teachers in the School of Education of the University of Antioquia, Colombia. The research followed the qualitative paradigm with a socio-critical, descriptive-explicative approach, using the methodology of theory based on data and critical discourse analysis and conducting three focal discussions groups with students and seventeen semi-structured interviews with twelve teachers and five school officials. Social representations of African descent can be either ascending or descending. The descending ones are linked to hegemonic, racialized and racializing social representations that resist placing African descent as a meaningful epistemological foundation in the teachers’ formation. They are expressed as the accommodation of continuity of the “unison of knowledge”, an uncontrolled equality, and the indigenous-multiculturalist excuse. Ascending social representations arise from the wiggling and agency that encourage pedagogical practices, relationships and discourses aimed at the positioning of de-colonializing, intercultural pedagogies within the framework of the Afro-ethno-educational viewpoint.

This paper could be considered as a microhistory of El Peñol town, since there was a research, about the elements that have left a mark in it, such as monuments, memories, papers and even, about some matters that seem to be unrelated to the main topic. Besides, some issues like the geography and the territorial contrasts were also appointed. In order to understand the purpose of this research, it is necessary to know the recent events in the region, which include the industrial boom of the capital city (Medellín) as well as of the Aburrá Valley, sites that have been causing since 1926, everyone to place all of the expectations for electricity supply, in the Nare River basin. The hydroelectric project of the Empresas Públicas de Medellín (Colombia), consisted of many changes, not only physical, but also economic and social in the population of El Peñol, nevertheless, its people have struggled and negotiated moving to a new municipal capital.

Any element used in a pedagogical work is important as long as it points towards innovating and improving educational practices, as well as motivating children and young adults in their academic formation. This paper shows the scope of a pedagogical experience with the secondary and middle school students of the “Nuestra Señora del Pilar” School of the municipality of Guatapé, Colombia, which used the zócalo, a representative element of its culture, as a didactic tool in the teaching of social science that can motivate learning and generate in students an interest in investigative thought.

When a child imagines a joyful and free school, it is because his school denies him freedom and joy.Paulo Freire

This issue of Diálogos sobre Educación publicizes the accomplishments and areas of opportunity of diverse initiatives to complement traditional education styles, contributing to the critical analysis of the role of education “beyond the classroom”.