Carlos Man Ospina Nova
B. A Modern Languages
B. S Psychology
M.A Linguistics
Ph.D Education
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Sunday, 5 August 2012
Introductory course to the M.A in Didactics of English at Universidad de Caldas
Carlos Man Ospina Nova
B. A Modern Languages
B. S Psychology
M.A Linguistics
Ph.D Education
Drama and education
EDUCATION: A CRITICAL SYSTEM THAT NEEDS DRAMA
By
Olga Nancy Orozco Cañón
Caldas
University
No school without spectacular eccentrics
and crazy hearts is worth attending
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
Education is the performance of our life. Education in its
broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a
group of people get passed on from one generation to the next. Generally,
it occurs through any experience that has a
formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts. Drama is the
specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes
from a Greek word meaning
"action" (Classical
Greek: δρᾶμα, drama),
which is derived from "to do" or "to act" (Classical Greek: δράω, draō). This way, it is true that education
seems to be a current system where learners should be trained through dramatic
experiences; experiences that involve their life improvement.
During children's early years, we realize that students have different needs and we teachers should make their life better so that they make good decisions about what they can do and the way to do it. Our
main goal is letting students reach a comfortable life to become good human
beings; a life that allows them to be part of higher education. In most
developed countries a high proportion of the population now enters
higher education at some time in their lives. Higher education is therefore
very important to national economies, both as a significant
industry in its own right, and as a source of trained and educated personnel
for the rest of the economy.
We certainly know that great improvements have been achieved in the past
decade, yet a great deal still need to be reached . And it is time to change the
controversial theory that elite members have about education, as Thomas Frey
said in The Future of the Education: “They perpetuate the notion that only
doctors can understand medicine, only physics can understand how the universe
works, and only teachers know how to prepare students for the world to come”.
Education needs drama today. Teachers should realize that students need “action” to acquire knowledge. We need people with good ideas, with
excellent projects, with open minds to have inventions, experiments,
innovations and most importantly, people who can have fun and make the world a more pleasant place. Learning by doing must be our purpose as teachers today.
Friday, 3 August 2012
Changing the Future Education: an Old Fashioned Term
Jonathan Vela Saavedra
Changing the future of
education is a very popular and known phrase, nothing else than that, used by
thousands of people such as the government, education Ministers and even
professors who are about to retire. Future education is defined as the big
impact and change the teaching and learning process will have in our society in
the next coming years. Some time ago, government and education experts started
to worry about the low English levels students were graduating with after
school, so they began to come up with different ideas, methods and approaches
in order to change the future of education. Today, in most of the English
classrooms professors still think about changing the education, improving the
education, but classes are the same from that time ago with unmotivated
students, meaningless lessons and even worst teacher-centered classes. However, government official insist the education system has improved and English is taught
better than before. Education has to change now, this is the moment when teachers have to stop thinking and start acting in order to improve the
teaching-learning process, otherwise our education and the illustrious
“Bilingualism project” will always be a disaster in Colombia.
First, Language teachers
have to understand they are mediators between knowledge and students, that the
traditional methods, which make the English teacher an all-dominant
authority, are old-fashioned and must disappear now. Some time ago Dewey (1938) criticized
the spoon-feeding of knowledge, and highlighted the significance of
the learner as an active agent in his own learning process. Later on, he
suggested the celebrated term “learner-centeredness”
which today, about 75 years later, keeps being just a term since English teachers still plan classes without taking into account students’ needs. They
do not even think about the reasons why students are in the classroom or what
their purpose is to learn a second language. Sadly, the idea of future
education just remains in our minds and it will continue in the same condition
unless teachers change their way of thinking.
After the year 2000, the government got more
involved in the second language learning in Colombia, according to Jan Van De Putte, a British Council
Colombia and National Education Minister consultant, “due to economic interests
(because of opening process and globalization)” and they created a huge project
called “PROGRAMA NACIONAL DE BILINGUISMO. Colombia 2004-2019”. It basically
consists on the English proficiency in Colombia as a second language by 2019.
Today, we are about 7 years away from the deadline and students are still
graduating from high schools with Basic English levels, A1 According to the
Common European Framework. So, what
are language teachers doing at school? Are they implementing new technologies in order to improve the English
levels? The answer to both questions relies on the conditions schools work with
and the communication breakdowns between government and professors.
Finally, It is
necessary to say that “the chalk and cement board are behind” as Diana Carolina
Cantillo says in her article “la educacion del futuro”. Nowadays, we have a lot
of different materials to enhance the English teaching-learning process, to go
out of the classroom and to have motivated students like technology which gives
Language students thousands of tools to “touch” the language, to have contact with
culture, to work and learn meaningfully.
Education has to
change today, Colombian teachers have to modify their mind and stop
complaining about “the situation”, you are the ones who make the difference;
you are not the centre of the class. Take into account the Humanistic Approach
developed during the half of the 20th century or the Communicative
Language Teaching from the 60s, the internet possibilities and how useful it may
be for your meaningful lessons, change your perception classes are
students-centered and nowadays students’ needs are different, the world is
different, so the future is what you are doing right now inside the classroom,
and only in that way the Bilingualism project and the English teaching-
learning process will be completely successful in our country.
Automation of Higher Education, the matrix needed by the market
Rosario Rivera Quintero
The increased use of technology in
education is more evident nowadays than before. Universities and educational
institutions are investing and rushing trying to implement virtual courses and
offering tuition in which technology plays a supreme role. Consequently universities are going to disappear in
the future or at least they will be no
longer as we know them today.
It is marvelous how we can have
unlimited access to any kind of information or products through internet.
People can learn, buy or sell, be connected with other people around the world,
know many cultures, work or be entertained through it. We are potential
consumers of whatever it comes through it.
Using Internet to have access to any
service or information, where people can buy or obtain unlimited services, why
not offer tuition this way? Education becomes then a very interesting product
to be sold. Education is seen as merchandise and a very profitable land
for investors and private companies who count on and have a vast target community
of consumers worldwide.
If universities tend to disappear in
the future as we know them today under the premise that virtual education is a
must, so universities have to be ready and start to create the necessary
infrastructure, otherwise they will be left behind. They have to be
competitive, they have to create a large range of courseware enough competitive
to be in force in the market.
And who is behind all this? At the
end of the day who is receiving the profits and benefits? Few courseware
producers, coordinators, deans, consortiums, hackers, IBM, cable companies,
Microsoft? Who is going to control it or regulate it? What is going to happen
with intellectual property? Who is going to have the monopoly? What is the role
of the State? What is the role of teachers and students? Can everybody have
access to it? In this new era, you’d better become an expert creating effective
courseware or you will be no longer in the market. Universities had better
enroll the best marketing chains or they will die.
It is hard for me to imagine a
university interested in only making money, it is hard for me to visualize it
virtual, not as a land where people can converge, discuss, argue and create
knowledge. It was within a community of philosophers, mathematicians,
engineers, musicians, actors who came together and from whom I got a minimum
sense of life.
It was there where I could feel
them, smell them, touch them, laugh and perhaps share a coffee. Some would say,
well you can do the same in a virtual community, or people will find the way,
well, for me it is not the same. It was there where I started to be conscious
about the others, we looked for changes, we were interested in human beings and
values rather than in making money. Universities and we teachers can benefit
from the technology in all its forms, but we cannot forget our role in forming
human beings whose ultimate goal cannot be making money.English changes your students´ lives
Sandra Liliana Ramos Aristizabal
For many years English has been seen as a
barrier. Many people thought it was difficult to learn this language and they did not
consider it important in their lives. But the process of globalization, the new
technologies, the world of information and the entertainment have urged
people to learn English as a second language and to get involved in its culture.
According to an article (taken from http://cedsgt.com/teamblog/education/4-good-reasons-to-make-english-your-second-language/ ) there are four reasons why people
should learn English: scope, communication, availability and
simplicity. Most of the information in internet is in English, it is the second
language spoken in the world, you can practice it everywhere and it has clear
grammar patterns compared with other languages. If you think about this you will
start learning English now.
Although in a country like Colombia there
are many factors that can hamper this process, we can make our
students think differently and show them the great opportunities English can
give them. I have met many people who have
traveled abroad to get an excellent job, better payment and a new life. English
can also be the key to find new friends anywhere, as well as it is the best way
to feel more connected with the world because most of the information is in
English. In fact, in this moment it is necessary to pass an English exam to
get graduated from most universities.
WHAT IS LOVE? BABY DON’T HURT ME
Teaching to love goes first before learning can take place
Lexis Johana Urueña Leon
Love is
one of the most important things in our life. We need love to live; our
existence was created by
love but we have a wrong idea about what love is. Usually we think when we are in
love the other person lives just because of us, we are everything for them;
and we think we really love someone when we spend our life trying to make the
other one happy.
We
need to think who we are, what is that we really want, how we can make us
happy. We need to realize that our life does not depend of the others, I am
important just because I am, I have to love myself to get anybody else to love me and
I have to love even if nobody else does. When
we can teach this to he students, when our students understand it and live
according with this reflection we might say we have changed the world.
Technology: a Mixed Blessing in Education
Technology has played an important role in
the learning system, but it can also be detrimental to education. At first sight, web-based resources open the door to further education
for many individuals who lack the conditions to do it any other way allowing
people to gain a degree while still working full-time. However, when people
decide to get enrolled in some virtual graduate or undergraduate programs, they
miss the chance to interact face to face with others.
Supporters of virtual education argue
that online learning may be more student centered and it can accommodate
different learning styles. To a certain extent they are right since studying in
this way represents self-paced learning,
while reducing the travel, time and cost for attending face to face instruction. However, this type of
learning may represent loss of
motivation and high rate of failures and drop-outs, because there is not direct
interaction with the professor and other students.
Dzakiria (2005) reveals that one of the greatest problems
experienced by distance learners is feelings of isolation, which makes the
possibility of a trusting relationship between the learners with the teachers
and with other learners difficult. Such evidence is parallel to Walker’s (in
Vrasidas & Glass, 2002) discussion of his paper entitled “Is anybody there?
The Embodiment of Knowledge in Virtual Environments”, a plea not just for
information but also for contact, for human presence... Such isolation
according to Simpson (2002) must inhibit, if not prevent “any possibility of
dialogue” in learning, and interferes with the learning process.
Opponents of traditional learning-enforced in
the classroom- argue that virtual education allows students to easily manage
their assignments and assessment submissions, and evaluate their performance. However;
the learning process requires not only the acquisition and management of new
information, but also the communication and interaction with others. At this
point is important to emphasize the findings of some constructivists such as Vygotsky
and Maria Montessori. They stressed
the importance of the nature of the learner's social interaction with
knowledgeable members of the society. They also stated that without the social
interaction with other more knowledgeable people, it is impossible to acquire
social meaning of important symbol systems and learn how to utilize them in an
appropriate way. Actually, the students can enhance their learning in a classroom, where
they get involved in cooperative tasks. Furthermore, they can enrich their
knowledge or sort out their doubts with the help of somebody else. Some constructivist scholars agree with this and
emphasize that individuals make meanings through the interactions with each
other and with the environment they live in.
Interaction is
what makes people better communicators , especially in the academic field
because they have the chance to strengthen their personal characteristics such
as patience, respect for others, self awareness, kindness, intelligence,
tolerance and sociability. Nevertheless, if technology empowers of education,
its social emphasis will turn into a more mechanical process and the social
dimension will be shifted away.
To sum up, technology can enhance
traditional methods of learning but cannot replace the human touch. Although
internet offers many opportunities to succeed in the academic process; the
energy and spontaneity of discussion among people sitting together in a small
room cannot be replicated by electronic exchanges. People should think about
education as a more valuable experience if it is developed in a communicative
context.
REFERENCES
·
Dzakiria,
Hisham. The Role of Learning
Support in Open & Distance Learning: Learners’ experiences and
perspectives. Malaysia ,University Utara Malaysia: 2005.
·
Turkish Online Journal of Distance
Education-TOJDE April 2005 ISSN 1302-6488 Volume :6 Number: 2
· Walker, R. (2002) Is there anyone there? The
embodiment of knowledge in virtual environments. In C. Vraasidas & G. Glass
(eds.), Distance education and
distributed learning (pp.99-114),
Greenwich , Connecticut : Information Age Publishing
·
Simpson, O. (2002).
Supporting Students in Online, Open and Distance Learning (2 nd edition),
London : Kogan Page.
·
McLeod, S. A. (2010). Zone of Proximal Development. Retrieved
from http://www.simplypsychology.org/Zone-of-Proximal-Development.html
·
Abrahamson, C. E. (1998) Issues in interactive
communication in distance education, College Student
Journal, 32(1), 33–43.
THE CHALLENGES OF AN INCLUSION POLICY
Paula Andrea Pelaez Velasquez
TO:
Principals, directors, coordinators and teachers
The word inclusion is
an attitude that involves listening, speaking, participating, accepting and
cooperative skills. Fulvia Cedeño Ángel
To be included in a group means that a person
is accepted by others, of course having in mind he/she has duties and rights to
fulfill. The main objective of the Inclusion Policy is that all
kinds of students have the possibility to attend, participate, learn and develop their
knowledge in a common environment. This process is to be accomplished with good
practices in the art of teaching and excellence in the outcome of competences
in every student. Inclusion has turned classrooms into spaces that are rich in
tolerance towards diversity and equitable in understanding and learning
processes. According to social perspectives we notice that inclusion also looks
for accepting and valuing cultural characteristics. Different
contexts and students’ interests are considered in order to satisfy needs of a community, whereas
teachers have the role of being motivators and facilitators that must generate
changes in cognitive and social development.
Something demanding in today’s education is to
have students with special qualities gathered all together in the same room,
sometimes making extra efforts when trying to become more effective (accomplish
a purpose) and efficient (accomplish the purpose the best one can and with the
least waste of time and effort). Consequently the process of a meaningful
teaching and learning becomes a challenge for public schools teachers, one of them being able to identify students’ abilities and difficulties. Those with exceptional abilities can help others in a cooperative model
and those with some limitations can experiment challenges when reaching some
goals. They also will improve values of respect, tolerance, and social
responsibility, reasons that will help them to build their self esteem and
confidence.
According to Koïchiro Matsuura General Director
of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization)
1999-2009, by the time education systems are developed and improved, they must
have to deal to complex and specific problems. They have to accept the facts
that the number of students is exponentially growing and that diversity in
communities is enormous and is worldly recognized and defended.
In order to be optimistic and have good results
with our Inclusion Policy, institutions have to modify curriculum structures
from a traditional to a creative, experimental and constructive one, pay
special attention to practices in the classroom, research, innovate, train
teachers to be able to manage heterogeneous classes and making parents part of
their children’s education.
Paula Andrea Peláez Velásquez
Master’s Degree Student
University of Caldas
The importance of interaction in the classroom in the future education.
Johanna
Munoz Pineda.
The importance of interaction in the classroom in the
future education.
The
purpose of education has changed dramatically in the last decades. In a global
world where technology has become a major tool and communication is
fundamental, interaction plays a major role in the classrooms, transforming our
schools and the way we learn and teach. The main purpose of education is to
prepare students for the future challenges of the real world. Teachers play an important
role influencing and facilitating students’ academic achievement and preparing
them for these challenges.
Learning
in the classroom has changed, becoming a collaborative process in which
teachers bring their experience, knowledge, and expertise along with all
elements that students bring with them such as previous learning experiences,
cultures, and ideas. Many people agree with the idea that education is transforming along with the changes and demands of the new
global societies, making it way different than education in the past. The use
of modern technology as an important tool to facilitate learning shows this new
change. In addition, the increasing use of the internet sources, interactive
smart boards, and electronic tables along with electronic books and readers
provide an instant interface between classroom and cyberspace, allowing
teachers to transform classes, these gadgets evidence the impact to technology
in today’s learning process. Technology
has made learning more proactive and global shortening distances and giving
wide and more global perspectives of different issues.
On the
other hand, experts have found that eliminating
traditional classrooms in exchange for impersonal online classes would be the
biggest mistakes because they say that one of the most important aspects of
school life is the social interaction that comes with daily meetings among students.
It can be said that future education may have some negative impact on our
society since the use of technology is limiting the personal interaction in the
classroom. The lack of interaction with teachers and classmates may reduce the
opportunity of sharing different points of view in which students can actively
engage in the learning process. Moreover, interaction in the classroom is the
way teachers can identify different styles of learning,
implementing activities in which students would have opportunities of
developing their knowledge through the sharing of experiences.
Finally,
interaction plays an important role in today’s education since it provides
students elements to succeed academically and socially. Since teachers and
students are engaged in an active and interactive process of learning, new
classrooms are supposed to provide students with a new learning style through
the use of modern technology, working together in a classroom environment where
different learning methods and technology are adapted to meet the new
challenges of our global world.
English and Teenagers: The Dread of Many Second Language Teachers
Sandra Milena Marín Ríos
Nowadays,
teenagers seem have become a pain in the neck, not only for their parents but also
for their teachers. but, it is not a secret that at this age, they are neither
children nor adults; they are just finding their middle point. In the
teaching of second language teenagers are the dreads of many teachers because
in spite of all the teacher’s efforts, they seem not to want anything related
to learning, especially English for it demands a lot of dedication and
concentration from them.
In the
past, teachers had the chance to deal with a different kind of teenagers; more
obedient, judicious and a little more responsible individuals. Currently, our teenagers are
aggressive, irresponsible and they tend not like anything. They do not want to be
in class and often their minds can be on other things, or they are just playing
or listening to music with their cellphones, when teachers are giving an English
lesson.
However,
there are other reasons. The number of English classes, in our country, 3 hours
per week and the low possibilities in our schools to provide the adequate
language environment. That is why as teachers, we have to direct students to
the different resources for learning outside the classroom and maybe this way,
they could learn much more efficiently by themselves. According
to Anderson (2008), teachers should let students have more
choices and begin to take responsibility for their own learning. Harmer
(2003) states; “Get them to write the questions, cut up texts (a bit too
primary – like sometimes), write their own grammar exercises. I mean
somehow getting the ownership of the material over to them……put them in the
center of the frame”. Harris (1991) suggests many ways on how to get students
more “into the frame”. These include; giving them roles to help the teacher and
the class, highlighting students in a positive fashion and using rewards.
Taking
into account their age, teenagers usually want to get the control over the
learning situation. Usually in a classroom, one of them becomes the “leader” and
could help the teacher with some discipline problems, not with
aggression toward their partners, but also because that student is part of the
group and talk their own language. As a teacher, I have had that experience,
that allows that the student feels important, motivated
and in the same way he or she involves the others.
For
teenagers, on the other hand, to face a second language and the fact of
speaking it in public is so scary for them. So, maybe this could be a little demotivating
frustrating and traumatic. Maybe that is the reason why they act toward this
new learning like that. Besides teachers need to be more comprehensive and do
not demand from the teenagers knowledge that they have not provided.
Teachers need to ultimately reflect upon the activities they address in the
English class. They could be more sensitive and try to create a warm
atmosphere in the classroom, where the teenage students feel comfortable,
self-confident and where their social learning can be taken into account ,
and at the same time the dread of
teaching and learning will end up for
everyone.
Traditional education versus virtual education
Mauricio Andrés Manriquez
It has been proved that traditional education hasn’t
been very useful for most people, and the main reason is because the learning
process has taken place only in classrooms, and also because teachers have been
the center of the class.
According to Thomas Frey in his writing “The Future of
Education”, we as human beings learn since the moment we wake up and even learn
when we are asleep, so with this research we can say that a classroom centric
education is not necessary.
In the past the time used for learners to get
information was way too much compared with the time they spend now to get the
same information with a minimum of time. Also books are cheaper now than before
and are easy to get them. That is why many people in the past couldn´t have a good
education.
Nowadays education is changing. Learners have the opportunity to choose virtual
education which means that they can learn from the place they want and manage
their own time, too and a huge number of
the people in the world with access to the internet could benefit paying little
money if compared with traditional
education and in some cases virtual education that can be free.
A quality teacher or an entertaining one.
A Good Learning Process Depends on a Didactic Teacher,
not on an Entertainer
María Eugenia Guapacha Chamorro
Institución Educativa República de
Israel
Universidad del
Valle
Nowadays
the teaching process has been criticized by experts in education and even by
people who have no knowledge about this field. To come up with the fast-coming changes and
new trends, many (traditional) teachers resort to dynamic and fun activities to
make their lessons look more modern without changing deeply or modifying at all
their teaching and linguistic views. They
unwillingly fall into a trap, that of entertainment or show business in class. In this kind of attitude, making good lessons
and having the students enjoy seems to be sufficient, for the teachers feel
they have improved their teaching and that seems to be corroborated by the
students’ liking their lessons. It must
be understood that mere entertainment is not enough; teachers need a sound
didactic view to support what they do.
In ancient times, the teacher was considered a master, a person who
had all the knowledge related to his/her field. Students did not have many options to choose;
they were just limited to “swallow” what they got from their teachers. Other sources and materials were restricted as
well. Close relationships between
teachers and students were not necessary for each individual had his/her own
responsibility in each process; teachers in charge of their teaching and
students in charge of their learning. Classes were not supposed to be fun but
hard work; and this view worked well: the students learned. this poses a question: are
cognitive and affective aspects important in a teaching-learning process?
Being a teacher deals with several aspects that have to do with
education. A teacher should select an
appropriate approach method, and procedures in order to involve and engage
his/her students into their learning process. He/she should be skilled in managing the
didactics in his/her area that in this case is teaching a foreign language.
It is here where some confusion arises since many people confuse
didactics with dynamic or fun activities. A good teacher with a suitable didactics in
class chooses a set of techniques and develops a plan, contents and methodology
for his/her students to teach taking into account the theory and pedagogy. Dynamic activities have to do with movement
and they are close to games. Currently, with the influence of Pedagogy trends, schools and teachers
are required to offer a good atmosphere to their “clients” that involves
teachers to offer a good education and establish close relationships with
students and parents.
In my point of view, this affective component (emotional factors, social
relationships between teachers and students) helps learners feel comfortable when
studying and approaching teachers. These
affective factors are relevant to build a good relationship but they are not
mandatory; what really concerns teaching is the proper didactics, not just having
fun in class which is not conducive to learning.
Many teachers are being
forced to change their tendencies; of course if those tendencies are obsolete
they need to be updated. The point is
that teachers might be expected to become “clowns” in class, someone to
entertain students to make their learning process meaningful and funny. We do not need teachers dressed up like clowns
with a huge red nose, big colorful clothes and long shoes who make students
laugh all the time with a marvelous show. We need creative teachers giving magic classes
with new ideas and projects at school; a person who interacts with students and
makes their learning easier through activities and tasks for them to solve. We need teachers using technology in class and
really entertaining pupils with fantastic stories and readings and talking
about future and culture. We need
teachers who are updated in their field and are qualified to teach.
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