1970s Teaching: Pedagogical Shifts & Core Dimensions

1970s Educational Landscape

The 1970s are known for the General Education Act of 1970 and its new teaching guidelines. The ministerial order of 1970 introduced these "New Teaching Guidelines," which echoed international trends. At the classroom practice level, a series of "pedagogical fads" emerged, with four major ideational cores spreading among the most active teaching staff:

• Globalization
• Environmental Research
• The Corporeal in School (Physicality in Education)
• Piagetian Psychology

As the decade progressed, teaching was conceived in two primary ways: traditional teaching and active teaching.

Traditional Teaching

Traditional teaching emphasized discipline and autonomous treatment with a fixed time for each subject area. It relied on textbook material and a singular program. The teacher was the center of the classroom. Methodologies were based on verbal explanations and schema-exercises. The classroom had a fixed spatial organization, with desks in rows.

Active Teaching

In active teaching, the school was conceived as an instrument of social transformation, rejecting a traditional role. It emphasized learning through experimentation, manipulation, and direct exposure, rather than relying solely on the teacher's oral presentations and schema-based exercises. The textbook became secondary or was eliminated. The spatial organization of the classroom was flexible.

Key Approaches to Teaching

Teaching as Cultural Transmission

The role of the school and the teacher's practice is to transmit to new generations the disciplinary bodies of knowledge that constitute our culture. The challenge lies in the differing nature of knowledge: the established knowledge within disciplines versus the emerging knowledge a child develops to interpret and meet everyday challenges.

Education and Skills Training

This involves training in formal skills, from simpler ones like reading, writing, and arithmetic, to more complex ones such as problem-solving, reflection, and evaluation. The challenge is the need to link skills training with content and the cultural context in which these skills and tasks acquire significance.

Teaching as Natural Development Promotion

This involves the pedagogy of non-intervention, which considers adult intervention and cultural influence as factors that distort and degrade the individual's natural and spontaneous development. The weakest point of this approach is its idealistic nature.

Teaching as Conceptual Change (Piaget)

Pioneered by Piaget, this approach posits that learning is a process of conceptual change rather than mere content accumulation. To facilitate this, the teacher must understand the student's current developmental state, including their concerns, interests, and comprehension capabilities. A problem arises when Piaget-supported didactic approaches overemphasize formal skill development, neglecting the crucial importance of cultural content.

Dimensions of Teaching Practice

The Practice of Teaching as a Technique

The objective is to achieve efficiency in action by regulating practice as a means of technological intervention based on scientific knowledge. From a technical perspective, didactic intervention is reduced to selecting and activating the means necessary to achieve predetermined external objectives.

The Heuristic Dimension in School Practices

Key proponents include Elliot Eisner, Philip W. Jackson, and Lawrence Stenhouse. This approach aims to enhance learning for understanding in all students through an artistic and clinical method. It requires building a classroom communication model where social relations, curriculum, and the knowledge structure of academic tasks are negotiated through teacher-student interactions. This model, in turn, necessitates a radical transformation of the education system, its institutions, and its social function.

The Ethical Dimensions of School Practice

Teaching practice is justified not merely by the results it achieves, but insofar as it facilitates and promotes a work process in the classroom and school where values considered essential for human community education are realized. The results of this process are long-term.