Franca Pinto Minerva
There was once a garden,
was the beautiful garden in which grew the tree of pedagogy. The roots of the teaching-compartment sink in humus-critical reflection of issues, from stem branched branches of knowledge and pedagogical practices of educational, branches laden with flowers and fruits. Wise gardeners ensured the luxuriance of the gar-dino by exchanging vital that was achieved between the whole and parts, soil, roots, stems and branches were not only essential elements of the garden but all feed on the lifeblood that flowed from the roots to the stem and from this to its most minute joints.
Our metaphor is clearly intended to indicate the branches of science education as general education (as a science and critical issues of human changeability and transformability of the socio-cultural). This metaphor, however, is not intended to characterize the teaching as a mere extrinsic support to its branches, the trunk is the origin of the branches as they are the offshoots of the stem itself. The pedagogy is therefore not articulated anything in relation to all sciences and education. With this - you notice - no intention to say that there would be a general education over and beyond individual human sciences and education and that there would be no need to preserve that field of research and teaching that we call general pedagogy (the trees) next to the multiple social sciences and education (the branches).
To avoid any misunderstanding, the meaning of our metaphor is therefore to be so stated. The general education, as we understand it, is the set of educational sciences, but certainly not restricted to their sum. The general education is not a simple introduction or summary of the human sciences and education, and it is not identifiable with today's social education. Its function is instead to problematize the assumptions, arguments, the results of all the human sciences (Including science education). The general education is not only an epistemology of human sciences: in fact problematizes not only these sciences, but also the ideologies, beliefs and perceptions (unscientific) that relate to the man and education. It analyzes and critically in the sense of family practices and institutions within which it constitutes and reproduces the human subjectivity. The critical function and problems of general education is then directed to the entire constellation of social factors that influence the subjective constitution of man. So we can summarize the meaning of our botanical metaphor in the following equation: the pedagogy is implemented through all human knowledge and training, but it is always the "excess" than the mere sum of these disciplines, this excess is precisely constituted the exercise of critical functions and reflective of our discipline. In other words - and still continue the metaphor - the pedagogy is the whole plant and training of human sciences, but this plant it constitutes a distinct and functionally independent: the stem exactly, that makes the sap and critical re- inflectional, liberating and intentionality, on the whole plant.
Gardeners senseless: the stem of the vital pedagogy can be demolished and turned into firewood? With
the development of science education begins the big misunderstanding that threatens to be fatal to the pe-pedagogy. Since then, many gardeners begin to act like gardeners senseless against our plan. Forgetting that the sap (spiritual reflection, criticism) comes from the branches of human sciences and pedagogical training through the trees, tear those branches from the tree, the illusion of being able to still enjoy their flowers for a long time (the knowledge) and their fruit (techniques). These gardeners therefore behave as if the stem of pedagogy were nothing more than an extrinsic support of its branches, without caring about the dialectical relationship that binds all the human sciences and sciences training in reflective practices and critical of general pedagogy. The severing of ties between the branches to non-disciplinary educational strategic plan, these gardeners insane and broke down the barrel of the general education and undermine the roots that bind him to the fertile humus of reflexivity and critical challenge.
All the garden plants are then broken up in the disciplinary branches, with different objects of study and specific methods of investigation. But in so doing, they also lose their relationship with their own disciplinary-matrix (both chronologically and in a logical sense). The human sciences and education lose their vital connection with the pedagogy. And if this is in some ways a good thing, since it the new di-disciplines have a degree of objectivity and precision, but also entails the risk that students of these disciplines to lose sight of the limits of their respective methodological approaches and bias the results, which conse-guono. Each approach corresponds to a particular point of view, because that takes some of it is up to the reality-investigated, they inevitably neglect of others. In addition, the termination of the links between individual sciences and their disciplinary matrix - that is, with regard to the human sciences and education, their separation from the general education - a risk that experts end up believing impro-position and idle any questions about the value and the aims of the research they carry out in specific subject areas. It is possible that scholars of human knowledge and training they turn their efforts toward inconsistent goals, which have no relation with the emancipatory goals of educational research. But if the specialist disciplines remain anchored to the critical and reflective view of their disciplinary matrix - that is, in our case, if the human sciences and education remain the vital link with a general critical pedagogy and reflective (not reduced to mere preparatory or recapitulation and even reduced to social education), their specific research objectives, their partial objects of study, their prospective approaches are back together in an overview of the complex (not syncretic, non-schematic, non-summary), a vision for the summary does not become all-encompassing, however, not scotomize that the contradictions and differences between the visions that you gather from different vertices disciplines.
What do gardeners instead of our insane metaphor? They tore the branches of science-teaching training from the stem. Undermine, therefore, the roots that bind the stem to the fertile humus of teaching critical-thinking problems, and let it dry out (ie leave that discussion to degenerate into mere rhetoric-mind about the purposes and principles of education or which is capped at the banality of certain social pedagogy) waiting to finally be able to reduce to ashes (when you can come to finally eliminate the general education curriculum by university and high school courses).
But soon they realize, our gardeners insane - or so we would like to continue nuasse the story - of having committed a folly. Their disciplinary branches, far from continuing to flourish, de-perish too quickly, as the stem from which pedagogical. Crowded together in the great but little boy, on whose facade dominates the writing faculty of Education, transplanted into narrow vases filled with soil, deprived of their lifeblood - or the critical thinking, analysis, genealogical, exploration of the historical and the utopian, as well as ethics and politics of that passion that should always animate (not less scrupulous of cold scientific) research on man and his training - this is that the branches of these fields of research are transformed little by little in a tangle of arid scrub. And not only the separation from the stem and humus critical pedagogy is ruinous to health sciences education, but also the separation of brothers from the branches of the more complex system of man and life sciences. Consider, in this regard, the development models of human neural networks, the differences between man and that of orality and writing in general influence that the media exert on human intelligence, the many forms in which the production and circulation of culture affects our subjectivity, relational and cultural dynamics within which they develop gender differences, object relations within which are formed personality structures, and then to the various emergencies caused by today's educational opportunities to manipulate the genome, the ability to automate processes and intellectual life and the possibility of changing the biosphere itself.
If we let wither on the stalk of the general education, what subjects will allow us to take account of all this complexity issue, which is certainly rich in implications relating to the formation of human subjectivity? What framework will allow us to go beyond the narrow limits of so-called visual science education? The philosophy has much to do with the endless traps of language (Wittgenstein) and the fundamental problems of the History of Being (Heidegger). Then tap the general education deal in global terms, but still problematic - in the sense that Giovanni Maria Bertin gave to this word - and with precise references to objective reality represented by the positive sciences, the topics of training in the Age of Man Technology. It is for the pedagogical thinking to keep open the overview and critique of subjectivity human, that vision without which all knowledge of local expires in myopia.
What happens when the gardeners leave senseless waste away the stem of pedagogy and are ina-fault branches of science education? It happens that some thoughtless
first visitors of the garden (they are called ministers of education, exp-ti disciplinary, technical school, managers, managers, teachers) delude themselves into thinking they can nourish the fruits that grow on other plants in the garden: they think that the disciplinary knowledge that is the staple food intake (if not sufficient) for the development of pedagogical skills and in particular for the development of profes-sional teacher. It happens also that these same carefree visitors think that the teacher's teacher to complete the diet is sufficient to integrate the nutrition of these fruits disciplinary with some of those fruits that grow in the narrow vessels in which the gardener has transplanted insane science of training: that is, consider that a good teacher can integrate content with the disciplinary authority with the psychological and relational. This sad conclusion of the story is exemplified by the type of initial teacher training designed by our Minister of Education.
The objectives of the initial training of teachers therefore included, first, the acquisition of disciplinary skills, psycho-pedagogical methodological-didactic, organizational and social skills necessary to meet the learning outcomes of students. Our discipline appears here in close association with psychology: the wording of this objective refers to the pedagogical skills (not the teacher training) of teachers. It therefore seems that to be good teachers is sufficient to know the laws of learning and the principles of effective teaching, as if it were only to reaches students determined results (perhaps formalized in terms of expected responses). Here stands the so-lita picture reductive pedagogy. This is understood as a mere tool of efficiency and effectiveness of teaching, and not as knowledge - Problematic and critical - of the cultural context in which literacy practices are inscribed.
This context is characterized by the confluence and conflict between the multiple forms of mediation experience (oral communication, writing, printing, new technologies of writing, multimedia and telematics policies) and between the different symbolic forms (science, philosophy, arts , ideologies, cultures and subcultures). So what is the specific function of the school, in an encounter and conflict between competing educational institutions (formal and informal) involved in the social system? As a mediator between orality, writing and new forms can play me-diatiche the educational institution? How to respond to the processes of deschooling advancing more or less surreptitiously in postmodern society? How to value the contribution that the institutions extrasco-school education can make to school? A similar question can not meet either the psychology or the psychology of cognitive processes. Questions like these are just purely pedagogical. If avoid-mo to address the problems posed by these questions, in an initial training course for teachers, each of the future teachers will respond in an unthinking and according to their personal idiosyncrasies. The task of the educational culture is rather to problematize those conceptions which tends to give to each educator Rates and tends to follow implicitly.
And among the ideas that should be problematized there are also those expressed by many psycho-gogisti. The framers of the ministerial project for the training of teachers assigned to psychology - probably without realizing it, and perhaps identified with the same education - the function of clarifying the conditions under which the encounter between disciplinary knowledge and the subjectivity of the pupil. The document read that ministerial student teachers in primary education need to acquire sound knowledge in all disciplines of teaching objects and the ability to propose the most appropriate way to the school level, age and culture students will be in contact with whom [sic! Close Encounters of the Third Kind - would be made to comment!]. Here then is the theme of human subjectivity that emerges in this book in only two keys: (1) the psychology of the learner, against which we must adapt the objectives, teaching methods and forms of communication, (2) the power of the relational teacher, who must be able to empathize with the student, to encourage and facilitate learning. We know, however multifaceted complexity that manifests the theme of subjectivity in the context of educational culture, because we realize that this issue can not be reduced in terms reductively psychological but should be viewed also in terms of a general education operating within a complex network of multidisciplinary feedback. Not to deny that the preparation of future teacher also passes through the acquisition of psychological knowledge and communication and interpersonal skills. But we want to remember that the good teacher is also the one who knows how to choose and adjust the goals of teaching, subject content and educational strategies, not only in relation to personal characteristics of the learner, but also in relation to emergencies in the socio- and socio-cultural anthropology in which it operates, including instances of emancipation and liberation which is the fundamental mission of the school.
But for that even the other three are not enough professional skills that the document requires the ministerial student teachers: the disciplinary authority, the methodology and the organization. This is, in hindsight, those flowers and fruits that - to pick up the thread of our narrative metaphor - you can co-lect on the other trees in the garden or transplanted into the narrow vessels in the branches of science education. The disciplinary authority is obtained by feeding the knowledge and techniques to be acquired by attending courses of various human and natural sciences. The teaching skills (communication skills in school education) and organizational (organization of the factors of education) can be obtained some mind-feeding of knowledge and techniques that can be acquired in courses in psychology and psycho-pedagogy. But - as we said - neither the one nor the other are sufficient to ensure that teaching becomes a fac-tor of emancipation and liberation.
Our opinion is especially strict about the educational profile of teachers of secondary school. The pedagogy seems to disperse, almost dissolving in a variety of in-regarded vocational disciplines, all (including education) for another grouped in a small number of credits. Neither the activity of specific training in the field that is in our opinion, to compensate for the deficiency of training teaching in a specific sense.
The meaning of our metaphor is further confirmed by the Ministerial Directions program-matic School of Human Sciences. The plant is almost completely as-curricular feels the general education to the extent that, on the one hand, it seems that we can study it in key historical exclusively as if it were a form of knowledge is now consigned to the past, a field disci -fication that can turn a merely retrospective look (for a family album featuring more conspicuous by absence). On the other hand, what is left of teaching is reduced to a series of psycho-pedagogical and social issues fragmented and less patchy.
Notes
a Draft Decree of the Minister of Education, University and Research on the regulation on "Defining the discipline of the requirements and procedures for initial training of teachers in the kindergarten, school primary and secondary school of first and second degree, pursuant to Article 2, paragraph 416, of Law December 24, 2007, No. 244 "
2 Ibid, Art. 2.
3 Ibid, Table 1 (Article 6) Bachelor of Science Degree in Primary Education Science.
