Abstract

CANOVAS MARMO, Célica Esther. Teaching in higher education today: complexity and critical positions in the solution of education’s contradictions. Rev. Actual. Investig. Educ [online]. 2013, vol.13, n.3, pp.536-563. ISSN 1409-4703.

This essay presents the current role higher education teachers in Latin America play, within a context of contradictions related to the different perspectives and understandings on the main objectives of Education. On one hand, there are the neoliberal and globalized perspectives where education should be aimed toward the training of the new worker; and on the other hand, the perspectives from the Critical Theory and the Theory of Complexity where education should be aimed toward the development of the new citizen of the world. The first perspective  promotes  individuals  focused  on  exacerbated  consumption,  instant  satisfaction,  subsumed  in  a chaotic society where communication technologies and information accessibility seem to be ends in themselves instead of means. The second perspective promotes an education engaged with the development of the human being as an intelligent, personal and social individual, one who cannot think lineally, as science multiplies his/her way of being aware, understand and explain reality, appealing to the construction of a different frame of mind. In this context, a question arises: How to teach? The answer to this lies in the heightened importance given to the teaching role, characterized by a critical position, promoting the selective use of information and complex thought, paying special attention to the common good. This will produce dialogic communities and their integration, where the teacher mediates and facilitates the construction of creative and purposeful minds that embrace change and the multiplicity of factors; and through which to build self-knowledge to promote their mediate and immediate coexistence: with others and within their own habitat.

Keywords : Higher education; Teacher; Complex thought; Critical perspective; Common good; Dialogic communities; Constructivism.

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