Archives

  • Education and Prison. March-June 2024
    No. 29 (15)

    The penitentiary issue is usually sensitive and widely questioned at a social level. The sentence with deprivation of liberty entails several changes, situations and realities that affect or influence the life of the sentenced person and their environment, as well as a series of measures, resources, means, professionals, etc., that incur in the disciplinary process, in the attention during the sentence and the projection after the fulfillment of the same. However, from the educational perspective in general and socio-educational in particular, this context constitutes a field of study and action aimed at promoting the integral development of a human being and its processes of social integration, regardless of where it occurs. The approach is vast and complex but stands as a challenge to be dealt with in this monograph.

     

    Coordinators: PhD. Fanny T. Añaños y PhD. Elisabet Moles López, Department of Pedagogy, University of Granada, Spain.

  • Cognition, learning, and education. November 2023-February 2024
    No. 28 (15)

    How do human beings learn? Which mechanisms within the human mind make it possible for us to acquire behaviors, knowledge, attitudes, even cognitive biases? How does what we learn modify our cognitive features? What role does formal education play in cognition? How can we turn developments in sciences related to the human mind and the human brain into strategies that favor learning? 

    The developments in technology that we have witnessed since the last century have had a strong impact on education, as have findings in other disciplines – such as neuroscience – that were not linked directly at first to the field of education. Nevertheless, we now observe a growing interest among researchers in education to understand the human mind and the learner’s brain, whether this learning is part of the schooling process like reading, writing and mathematics, or it is learning required for social coexistence and emotional wellbeing, whose impact goes beyond the realm of the school. Thus, through interdisciplinary dialogue, research is enriching the study of the educational phenomenon and broadening its possibilities to understand, intervene, and transform society.

    In this Issue 28 of Diálogos sobre Educación. Temas actuales en investigación educativa we would like to present research findings, theoretical insights, or essays that address the links between cognitive science, neuroscience, and cultural psychology, with learning in formal, non-formal and informal educational contexts, through basic and applied research. 

    Coordinators: Teresita de Jesús Montiel Ramos - Universidad de Guadalajara. Gerardo Restrepo – Université de Sherbrooke, Canada.

  • Educational Journeys. July-October 2023
    No. 27 (14)

    For the first time after thirteen years, we present an issue without a thematic focus. This decision was made for two reasons. Firstly, because we are interested in sharing that, despite the fact that the journal promotes each call for papers with a thematic focus that seeks to initiate a debate on a specific issue in the field of educational studies, we receive submissions that go beyond the proposed and encompass a diversity of topics, epistemic stances, and methodological approaches. Secondly, we want to celebrate that, as a result of this diversity and the increasing number of articles received, the journal will now be published every four months. We believe that a biannual publication is not sufficient to timely disseminate the accepted works.

    Thus, we are pleased to celebrate with this 27th issue titled “Educational Journeys”, that the publication will be more frequent while still maintaining the quality of the published content. We maintain that our goal remains to provide a space for the dissemination of relevant, innovative research findings, and to foster reflections on what is happening in the field of education.

  • The methodological outlook in education: views and perspectives. January-June 2023
    No. 26 (14)

    Few fields have such a dynamic presence in social science as that of education. As a field that articulates but is in turn articulated by several disciplines, and instituted as transversally common to all social phenomena, the epistemes that give rise to it extend, contract, hybridize and transmute at an astonishing speed and with an unusual capacity for innovation.

    It is precisely this continuous and intense input and assimilation of objects-outlooks that imperiously demands the need to draw up a state of the art, a stocktaking of sorts in the here and now that accounts for the most significant dilemmas, vicissitudes and pragmatics around its construction, its empirical treatment and its possible drifts.

    From there, and considering the premise that every research problem stems from a number of positions on what is considered problematic, enunciating how we know what we know and how the routes of dismantlement that turn phenomena into observable, understandable and explainable entities are formulated, we take it as a given that new problematizations in the field of education are not random or casual but, to the contrary, are constructed and determined by particular sets of epistemological principles and debates, as well as methodological treatments oriented and motivated by their own, exclusive conditions.

    Thus, Issue 26 of Diálogos sobre Educación. Temas actuales en investigación educativa seeks to contribute to the construction of this snapshot and has been intended as a space that allows us to identify these debates and treatments, with a particular focus on the epistemological and methodological lines in current research agendas. This implies shifting the focus of our interest from the outcomes to the processes of production of knowledge. We know that without methodology there is no research, and that methodological decisions and operations express, implicitly or explicitly, epistemological positions, but these layers of our scientific work have not been sufficiently discussed. Although it should always be relevant to address methodology and epistemology, in times of change such as the one we are living in due to the Covid-19 pandemic it would be worthwhile to reflect critically on the frameworks we adopt for our research.

     

    Coordinators: Rodrigo González Reyes – University of Guadalajara. Dorismilda Flores Márquez - La Salle University, Bajío.

  • Subject-Centered Epistemologies and the production of knowledge in Latin America. July-December 2022
    No. 25 (13)

    How can we accept the validity of the multiplicity and co-existence of epistemologies without delving at the same time into the validity of the very epistemology of scientific knowledge, whose legitimacy entails precisely not being one of many ways of knowing but the proper and exclusive way of knowing? By universalizing one type of subject, Western modernity excluded from participation in the construction of true discourse all those epistemologies based on other assumptions, other ontologies, other ways to relate to themselves, to history, and to the universe. Thus, it may be worthwhile to ask some questions:

    How can we produce valid knowledge when we are faced with a plurality of ways of knowing, all of them struggling to be recognized as legitimate? How does that plurality influence the teaching and learning processes? How does the knowledge of the participants – which interweaves in a fabric within which what is given and received in the cognitive interaction is combined and recombined – operate in these processes? How can we access the knowledge of the practices, experiences, relationships, ways of knowing and explaining of the participants such as they happen in the teaching and learning processes? How can the view of the Latin American Other be retrieved and made our own in order to see ourselves through it?

    Clearly, this discussion cannot be strictly political, insofar and inasmuch as the amount of participation that nourishes the discourses and practices regarded as true will determine an acknowledgement of the otherness and the differences that might range, on an institutional level such as that of education and public policies, from seeking to efface them to trying to protect them.

    From this perspective, the centering on the subject to which we invite around this issue’s main topic would equal to a de-centering of a type of subjectivity, to suggest instead a space open to the varied and different participation of diverse subjectivities and their ways to relate to and build the truth and the world.

    The central position given to the cognizant subject has begun to be resisted by those who seek either to bring to light the multiple ways to know and create knowledge or to listen to voices that have been forbidden, silenced, overshadowed, outshined, rejected, disregarded by the totalizing concert of authorized, legitimized, and learned voices reiterated by the chorus of traditionally adopted epistemologies. Recovering those overlooked ways of knowing requires a previous decolonization, break, revision, epistemological and methodological objection, as well as the formulation of proposals that admit the plurality of epistemologies and methodologies as an expression of a diversity of ethnicities, peoples, cultures, utopias, cosmogonies, beliefs, ways of being in the world and being in different worlds. 

    Thus, the scientific production of social sciences faces huge and paradoxical challenges, such as the one created by the tension between creation and legitimation. This tension encompasses a wide spectrum from epistemologies, theories and strategies to collect and analyze data to ways to conceive, construct, and make use of data, forms and criteria of validity, as well as regimes of truth.

    Coordinators: Irene Vasilachis. CEIL-CONICET, Argentina. Mariano R. Gialdino. CEIL-CONICET, Argentina.

  • School, Violence and Experiences. January-June 2022
    No. 24 (13)

    The school, as a territory, is constructed through linkages between different experiences. It is the center where subjectivities are produced that will be brought into play for the rest of the students’ lives, both in the deployment of the basic technical knowledge required for the exercise of political citizenship and in the training of “human resources” for economic production. Modernity, in its disciplinary and panoptical design, had clear objectives for the operation of the school’s devices, producing students (and only by extension young individuals) who were obedient, attentive, devoted to their work and willing to learn.

    This totalization is linked to a decrease in variability and the elimination of diversity; in short, to the uniformity of students, a tendency towards a one-dimensionality that expunges or tries to expunge other experiences, subjecting the students to the coarseness of the exclusiveness of the experience of school, mutilating their subjective richness that is then expressed in forms of resistance which, in order to maintain that one-dimensionality of the school experience, must be sanctioned. Thus, the school is a site of disciplined training, rife with regulations and prohibitions whose aim is the positive construction of a normal subject.

    Social violence, exerted by the societal system embedded in consumption capitalism that adds on new forms of stratification besides class, race or ethnicity and gender, pervades the school and promotes new kinds of violence seemingly exclusive to its territory: bullying, or violence among peers, and anti-school violence, identified as direct actions against the school, ranging from the material to the symbolic. This kind of violence intertwines the sources of social violence (social inequality) with cultural differences between social experience and school experience; that is, the disparity between the symbolic capital acquired prior to the school experience and its clashes with the simultaneity of experiences.

    Bullying seems to be the perfect alibi to hide more structural forms of violence, both as a symptom and in its mediatic mutation, to promote institutional choices that set aside more foundational issues such as the transformation of the school device. Through this violence the school device, as a process, seeks to cling to its disciplinary form in a social context in which childhood and youth must be contained, in a socio-economic environment that cannot assure employment or higher education. And the vicious cycle in which current society is now trapped asphyxiates the school, an institution that is increasingly more needed to guide young people when the family has been preyed upon by social conditions. Since the school is a tool for the containment of dangerous environments, children and youths find in it a safe place where they can relate to their peers in a different way, following rules of play that will be revoked outside. This inside-outside dichotomy is the school’s most consistent drama, especially if the school is understood through its relationship to the social violence that provides it with a background.

    The current conditions of violence that Mexico is going through have made this phenomenon far more complex than a mere symptom of social breakdown which, although self-evident, has been turned by current forms of violence into a form independent of its sources; that is, it has gone from being a symptom to becoming a social form. Added to this we witness how the school and social experience have been affected in their specificity in the context of the health crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has displaced the territory of the school to other realms such as cyberspace and the home.

     

    Issue Coordinator: Hugo César Moreno Hernández

  • Reading and writing practices. Subjects, materialities, literacities. July-December 2021
    No. 23 (12)

    Throughout the ages, reading and writing practices have been intrinsically linked to large-scale civilization processes. Rituals, canons, devices, appropriation processes, as well as the  dynamics that influence and tend to model them, become an object of study that helps us understand the cultural projects of entire societies. Given their complexity, analyzing them requires interdisciplinary theoretical approaches and diverse methodological frameworks.

    The significant transformations of these practices, linked to the exponential growth of information and the ubiquitous presence of digital technologies, raise questions of extreme relevance for educational research: we are witnessing changes in the physical supports for reading and writing, a diversification in the publishing and consumption rationales, a preeminence of audiovisual language in the production of contents and the expression of ideas, combinations of textual genres, as well as different perceptual schemes, ethical requirements and forms of authorship. We are also witnesses to a decline of old hierarchies and referents, as well as in the habits, rhythms, times and spaces previously regarded as conducive to reading and writing.

    Within the school environment, we can identify relevant transitions at different levels: teaching and learning processes, educational modalities, ways of managing teaching, performance assessment, institutional frameworks and structures, as well as the uses and appropriations of different technical devices for the management of information and production of knowledge. Other de-centerings take place in occupational spaces, namely those where reading and writing practices are subjected to institutional regulations – whether implied or explicit ones – since they are often viewed as indicators of professional competencies. Gradually, certain vernacular reading and writing practices that emerge and develop outside institutional environments are being reshaped. Such practices are self-generated after individual or group motivations, which are not subjected to rigid rules and canons. They may be as varied as the aims that animate them and the contexts in which they take place. Often undervalued, they nevertheless acquire great importance for the analysis of culture.

    On the other hand, the progressive intersection of popular culture contents and scientific texts promotes an increasing hybridization of practices. This social phenomenon becomes evident in the forms of production and reception of textual materials with procedures that are characteristic of the hypertext, as well as in the growing mediation of digital platforms governed by algorithms where a significant number of data base consultations take place, either social networking ones or those regarded as professional or academic, which may in turn lead to social interactions between the individuals who read and write in them. Issue Coordinators: Diana Sagástegui Rodríguez, Yolanda González de la Torre & Myrna Carolina Huerta

  • Education and pandemic. Educational practices and challenges in times of COVID-19. January-June 2021
    No. 22 (12)

    In recent weeks society as a whole has experienced multiple challenging circumstances due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which has not only created a worldwide health problem but also disrupted (perhaps irreversibly) social aspects as encompassing and fundamental as the economy, trade, tourism and, of course, education. These changes have implied, among other things, new educational challenges to address the need to prevent the spread of the disease by staying home while at the same continue offering and developing educational activities and processes at all levels of education.

    The COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled and put to the test all the operational, technological and pedagogical capabilities of almost every educational system around the world. This has led especially to the need to rethink and develop academic activities through the use of virtual environments and multiple technologies by teachers and students. Staying home has meant migrating from traditional classrooms to the most widely diverse virtual and digital spaces, times, interfaces, and rationales.

    This transit and adaptation of educational practices to digital environments invites us to recognize this historical opportunity to understand education through other perspectives that acknowledge the new meanings and practices that technologies and culture have for some time now driven us towards, and that have come to the foreground with the pandemic. This de-centering of education does not only imply spatial and temporal transformations of learning processes, but also entails the challenge of acknowledging and solving the gaps that have opened or grown between the actors of education.

    These are some of the questions that may help us to understand the current situation in the realm of education: How profound has the transformation of education been, and how have the different entities of society dealt with the urgency of an education beyond the traditional environments? What kind of pedagogical and technological implementations are being used as alternative solutions? What are the gaps between those who have technical access and competencies and those who do not? It is time now to start imagining and thinking how the pandemic will affect education in the near future.

    Issue Coordinator: José Manuel Corona-Rodríguez

  • Agreement and divergence in sexual education. July-December 2020
    No. 21 (11)

    Secular education acquired the status of a Constitutional principle in Mexico a hundred years ago. However, sexual education policies have been developed progressively through the struggles between social actors and responses to emerging situations when faced with demographic or public health issues, and have also been part of a democratization and cultural change process that has transformed views on sexuality and the phenomena involved in it.

    Nevertheless, this is a relevant issue. Research on sexual education is still a seldom explored field, although some research on analysis of the curricula, educational interventions and ideological debate around sexual education in recent years have contributed to a better understanding of what happens in society at large, beyond the boundaries of the school.

     

    Issue Coordinator: Armando Javier Díaz Camarena

  • Ethnographies on and with children and youths in educational contexts. January-June 2020
    No. 20 (11)

    Some ethnographic research conducted in the last 80 years shows that the participation of children and youths in field work is key to making new findings in social research in educational contexts. In the last 40 years, a number of circumstantial and contextual political, economic, legal, social and ethical elements have combined in complex ways and generated a growing and unprecedented trend in ethnographic research of and about children and youths. This trend has been part of a global movement of affirmation of the rights of children and youths, which has found expression in social research through debates on the issue of the lack of recognition of their role as social actors with agency, the difficulty to distinguish childhood and youth as a multiple and diverse complexity, the minimization of analytic categories such as age and generation, and the underestimation of children and youth as active individuals in the processes of production and social reproduction, among others.

    Strategies to counter the ways to silence children and youths have multiplied in social research in different disciplines and paradigms, which have generally coincided in considering them active subjects in socialization processes “discovering that they can teach ‘things’” to adults. There is also a degree of consensus around the idea that ethnography, as a research approach, is particularly appropriate to incorporate children and youths by giving them a voice and participation in the processes of production of knowledge, just like other interlocutors.

     

    Issue Coordinator: Diana Milstein

  • Education is a right, not a privilege. July-December 2019
    No. 19 (10)

    Poverty, inequality and exclusion are terms that reveal a serious problem in contemporary societies. Development, equality and inclusion are words that express, in counterpart, the intention and public objectives of reversing and solving these social problems. It is admitted that these structural phenomena are not reduced to the economic dimension and that it is necessary to incorporate into the studies, discussions, design of public policies and educational processes, other factors of cultural and educational, social and political, even identity, which are decisive to understand reality and be able to transform it. Undoubtedly, education is a disputed terrain in which different political and educational goals, institutions and programs, concepts and meanings, as well as modalities and practices converge; from always and given its nature, multiple expectations and collective projects are deposited in it, as well as demands and demands on the State. Inclusion appears in this discriminatory context as one of the challenges of education in democracies.

    Discrimination, understood as inequality of treatment that has its sustenance on prejudices, stereotypes and cultural stigmas, crosses the educational field and increases the doubt about the capacity of institutions and the scope of public policies to contain it and face structural inequality. It is noted that education in its different levels and modalities is a social good distributed and applied unequally, even inaccessible to many social groups for reasons that not only obey the availability and adequate distribution of economic resources, but also cultural factors and politicians: identity classifications place people and groups in situations of disadvantage and educational exclusion.

    Even though the principle of equality and the antidiscrimination law are inserted in the national democratic agenda and unfold a new legal and institutional scenario, both are invalidated by the reality resulting from an economic model that produces a structurally unjust society. Whenever a person or social group limits, annuls or prevents the effective exercise of a right, in a prominent way the right to education, because of some identity characteristic (ethnic origin, gender, age, disability or migratory status) , sexual preference, gender identity and expression, religious beliefs, among others) are facing discriminatory practices. On the other hand, it can be considered that studies about discrimination have a very recent origin and still do not constitute a stable paradigm in the social sciences.

    Issue coordinator: Teresa González Luna Corvera

  • The social biography of teachers: new horizons of knowledge. January-June 2019
    No. 18 (10)

    This thematic issue aims to enrich our view on several aspects of the field of teaching by focusing mainly on the teachers themselves. As a theoretical and methodological approach, social biography allows us to learn about the social and cultural life of a collectivity and an era through personal experiences. By studying the subjects of teaching, and especially the teachers, we seek to show their capacity of agency in the daily work of education. Describing and tracing their careers makes it possible to shed light on the ways teachers interact with the material and symbolic conditions of teaching, school communities, educational policies, pedagogical models, didactic approaches and educational materials that circulated in their working environments.

    This approach to the school world seeks to disclose how, within the framework of educational policies and teaching conditions, the everyday work of teachers, students and parents can reveal specific aspects of teaching on different spatial and temporal levels.

    This field of enquiry arose from the renewal that social and cultural history has undergone in its search to disentangle the complex web of relationships between structure and subjects, the collective and the individual, the prescribed and the actual. As suggested by historians like Dosse (2007) and Polgovsky (2010), social biography allows us to identify events and processes that had a defining role in the subject’s history, taking into consideration their family, training and work, a dynamic in which teachers undoubtedly express their capacity to create and recreate their teaching experiences. In this respect, in Mexico the work of Mary Kay Vaughan, Milada Bazant, María Teresa Fernández Aceves and Carlos Herrejón Peredo has stood out and opened an important debate that has offered interesting suggestions for the study of teachers’ histories.

    Issue coordinators: María Guadalupe García Alcaraz y Luciano Oropeza Sandoval

  • Challenges of police training in democracy

    Challenges of police training in democracy. July-December 2018
    No. 17 (9)

    If we looked back, we could refresh our memory of the most illustrative moments of the journey in which police institutions in Latin America and other regions of the world acquired the undeniable status of a public problem under the constant scrutiny of the media’s magnifying glass. Such an exercise would place us in a scenario of corruption issues (including the payment of “cuts” to police chiefs, extortion, kidnappings, homicide and organized crime), inefficiency to prevent and manage crime, the inexistence of preventive social intelligence processes to anticipate situations that generate conditions of violence and ungovernability, or the historical, concealed and illegal links with politicians that have given meaning to what some scholars have called the political misgovernance of security. In order to revert this situation, we must promote profound, comprehensive and sustained police reform processes. Despite the natural resistance that any change entails, these organizations entrusted to maintain order and enforce the law are now facing the complex challenge of participating in an ongoing process of reinventing themselves in order to achieve the effectiveness demanded of them by society, making deep changes in the structures and mentalities within their ranks, and repositioning the figure of the police officer in a society that is ever more disenchanted with their functions and results; that is, transforming and modernizing the social mission of the police so that the important role they play in democratic governability can be recognized.

    One of the most pressing issues in police reform is the urgent training and professionalization of the police. The lack of professionalization of the police contributes to the sedimentation of arbitrary, inefficient and ignorant forms of legality both in the use of force and in the performance of the tasks assigned to each police force. The widespread idea that the police must be professional is widely acknowledged, although its meaning is still unclear and incomplete. In this respect, this issue of Diálogos sobre educación inquires into how the police is educated in democracy, who can legitimately provide this education, what is the source of this legitimacy and the knowledge to be acquired in the education and professionalization of a police officer in democracy, how these processes are taking place, and to what extent they are congruent with the actual routine tasks of a police officer working in multiple and complex contexts. We seek to promote a critical reflection and discussion on the education, education systems and training of the police, as well as their capacity to work as a vehicle for the induction of criteria, scientific knowledge and techniques aimed at meeting the norms and expectations demanded by democracy. In turn, this debate seeks to generate proposals aimed at adopting new perspectives that trace a direct relationship between the democratic quality of education, the professionalization of the police, and the democratic quality of the decisions made by the police officer in his or her everyday work.

    Issue coordinator: María Eugenia Suárez de Garay

  • Beyond the classroom. January-June 2018
    No. 16 (9)

    Educational research is a broad field, with many branches to explore the phenomenon of teaching and learning. The topics for research on formal education systems are more than enough to occupy researchers exclusively in this area. However, due to deficiencies in the quality and coverage of formal education, it is also essential to evaluate the projects that are developed with and for people excluded from these systems, projects that seek to "guarantee" the right to education. For this reason, Dialogues about Education. Current topics in educational research seeks to offer a forum to analyze the educational projects carried out beyond the traditional spaces for teaching.

    There are countless educational projects provided by religious, academic and community groups, civil society organizations, and others interested in going beyond traditional school spaces and formal models to teach. These grassroots initiatives often lack formal design, impact assessments and basic resources. However, over the past decade there have been numerous efforts from the academic field to professionalize and strengthen projects of this type. We hope that this issue of the journal will help publicize the accomplishments of some successful programs and provide a critical analysis of the roll that education occupies outside the classroom.

    Issue coordinator: Rebecca Danielle Strickland

  • Education in Latin America: historical perspectives. July-December 2017
    No. 15 (8)

    Educational processes are complex, and that is precisely how we should view them. They are nourished by institutional devices, pedagogical articulations and the practices of individual actors, in the course of specific political, social and cultural transitions.

    Seeing education in these terms allows us to acknowledge the places occupied by different actors other than teachers and students, as well as the specific weight the latter have. Weighing thus the place that the history – or histories – of communities has had and still has in the shaping of national and regional identities in the light of these educational processes enables us to delve deeper into the recovery of memory as a pedagogical instrument, a human right, and the support in the creation of educational models or forms that resound in an attentive, driven and active listening. It is a history that restores the timbre of silenced voices, material places and symbolic practices, histories retrieved by individual subjects and placed in the service of educational processes inscribed in their own times and spaces.

    In this sense, Latin America emerges as a region that articulates a plurality of similar social and political processes – with, at the same time, local particularities – which must be taken into account. Mapping educational models, locating their re-appropriations, understanding the actors’ experiences, social resistances, and manifestations of agency, allows us to see education as a path that can lead to imagining more democratic spaces, with individuals who are able to envisage more fully lived lives.

    Thus, research that, through careful analysis of its own – as well as its shared and nearby – history, enables us to see the value of education as an emancipatory asset, has gained strength in Latin America. These researchers see history – social and cultural heritage, oral tradition – apprehended through theoretical frameworks, as well as specific methods and instruments, as a window for questioning the past, making room for the possibilities of transformation.

    Issue coordinators: María Mercedes Molina Hurtado and Yobenj Aucardo Chicangana Bayona

  • Higher Education Policy. January-June 2017
    No. 14 (8)

    The profound transformations the world has witnessed in the last three decades have not left any of the many spaces or dimensions that make up our present societies untouched, and have confronted governments and societies with the urgent need to develop different instruments, strategies and policies to cope with the changes without succumbing to their turbulences.

    These transformations have had a particular impact on higher education, which has been tasked with the responsibility of providing societies with resources to deal efficiently with the new challenges and make them viable in an increasingly open world. In this context, higher education has occupied a rather paradoxical position: being affected by the changes of the modern world and, simultaneously, having to offer tools to cope with such metamorphoses.

    This explains, to some degree, the many transformations or attempts of transformation there have been in the field of higher education worldwide, which have concerned the different dimensions that form part of it, especially the area of public policies, conceived as instruments to activate mechanisms of change. Thus, the instrumentation of public policies to attend to the many problematic areas of higher education is an issue that has occupied scholars, decision makers, national and international advisors, government officials, civil organization, etc., for the last two or three decades. If anything is certain nowadays, it is that we live and will continue to live in an ever more changing and ever more unpredictable world. Nevertheless, we must act as if we understood the direction of the changes and were able to trace their course, knowing full well that we do not actually possess the instruments needed to foresee the future. This is one of the great paradoxes of our time, one that every public decision made in any domain has to grapple with, imprinting it with a guesswork quality and confronting us with the same problems over and over again.

    Issue cordinators: Nayeli Quevedo Huerta, Ducange Médor and Beatríz Adriana Bustos Torres

  • Educación, racismo e interculturalidad. Julio-diciembre, 2016
    No. 13 (7)

    En la era del multiculturalismo neoliberal y de las políticas internacionales que abogan por la inclusión educativa, se han exacerbado las prácticas xenofóbicas y racistas que culminan en la violación de los derechos humanos. Atendiendo que el racismo y la xenofobia son componentes que organizan jerarquías de poder en las múltiples esferas de las relaciones sociales, estas prácticas no se resuelven con campañas de información, de capacitación o con medidas de acciones afirmativas, como es el caso del acceso y permanencia de los pueblos originarios en la universidad. Antes bien, la escuela se encuentra ante el desafío de transformarse de manera profunda y cuestionar los entramados coloniales y nacionalistas por los que se ha regido, poniendo el ojo crítico en el carácter eurocéntrico de sus estructuras, en donde a lo largo de décadas se han reproducido currículos monoculturales y castellanizadores que privilegian a unos e invisibilizan a otros.

    De esta manera, el monográfico pretende analizar los factores, las formas y los sentidos del privilegio y del racismo en la educación en México y América Latina. Además de los procesos de discriminación institucional y exclusión que generan las políticas públicas hacia las llamadas minorías étnicas o políticas (pueblos indígenas, la comunidad china o la población afromexicana, entre otros), nos interesa escudriñar de manera crítica y transdisciplinaria las prácticas cotidianas que se expresan explícita y sutilmente en la socialización, el aprendizaje, la convivencia en la vida diaria de las escuelas públicas y privadas, de educación inicial, básica, medio superior y superior. Con ello se pretende interrogar el carácter racista de la educación para develar aquellos obstáculos que impiden el ejercicio de una interculturalidad plena, que contribuya a la democratización de sociedades plurales.

  • Educación y formación. Enero-junio 2016
    No. 12 (7)

    ¿Cómo pensar el tema de la diferencia en el ámbito de la educación, en el contexto de la llamada globalización?, ¿qué implicaciones tiene hacerlo? Este número tiene en el centro de su contenido temático estas preguntas que son reflexionadas desde distintos ángulos y problemáticas concretas. 

    En las últimas décadas se ha insistido en la importancia de combatir la discriminación en el ámbito educativo; se ha señalado este fenómeno en relación con el género, con la etnicidad, con los grupos de edad, con las necesidades educativas especiales, y otras diferencias cada vez más presentes en este ámbito. 

    El concepto de diferencia ha tomado relevancia en la teoría social contemporánea a partir de tres fuentes básicas: el pensamiento feminista, la teoría literaria y el psicoanálisis, desde los cuales es posible decir que dicho concepto puede ser entendido en tres planos distintos: como una diversidad de la experiencia, como un significado posicional y directamente relacionado con la diferencia sexual.

  • Lectura y Educación. Julio-diciembre 2015
    No. 11 (6)

    En la actualidad, la posibilidad de comprender el significado que se encierra en la palabra escrita forma parte de la vida cotidiana, sin embargo, el desarrollo de la habilidad lectora es sumamente complejo, y puede llegar a ser un factor de diferenciación y exclusión social hacia quienes no saben leer y escribir. A pesar de que la alfabetización se considera un derecho humano asociado a la educación, en América Latina se estima que más de 40 millones de personas adultas no saben leer, mientras que en México la cifra estimada en personas mayores de 15 años es de 5.4 millones. 

    Por otra parte, el acceso a servicios escolares no determina que un niño aprenda a leer, hoy en día se estima que alrededor de 10% de los niños que inician el aprendizaje lector experimentarán dificultades para alcanzar su dominio, por lo cual resulta relevante el análisis y reflexión de los procesos implicados en el aprendizaje de la lectura, así como de las estrategias utilizadas en la enseñanza.

    Al ser la lectura uno de los aprendizajes básicos que determinan el acceso al conocimiento formal así como la posibilidad de participar en forma activa dentro de la sociedad, resulta muy relevante tratar de comprender cuáles son los factores tanto sociales como cognitivos que inciden en la adquisición y desarrollo de la lectura.

    Finalmente, cabe preguntarnos qué sucede con quienes aprenden a leer, qué tipo de prácticas lectoras se realizan, cómo incide este aprendizaje en la generación de nuevos conocimientos y destrezas, qué representa la lectura en una sociedad alfabetizada.

    No es suficiente analizar el proceso y problemática de la competencia lectora; los estudios de la sociología de la lectura explotan una veta interesante relacionada con los consumos culturales. Por ejemplo, hoy en día hay una fuerte presencia de los libros denominados de autoayuda que son los que tienen el más alto tiraje y número de ventas. Las novelas de corte sentimental se han convertido en la nueva moral juvenil y los indicadores de lectura permiten inferir nuevos problemas que aquejan tanto a los padres como a los lectores núbiles.

  • Infancias, escuela y educación. Enero-junio 2015
    No. 10 (6)

    El impacto de las crisis sociales y de gestión pública que en los últimos tiempos ha sufrido la región latinoamericana ha generado investigaciones y debates sobre las distintas problemáticas que atañen a niños y niñas en el continente, develando, de manera central, que se trata de infancias distintas a pesar de que se insiste en alcanzar modelos hegemónicos que resultan ajenos a las experiencias singulares y colectivas concretas.

    Ya desde los últimos años del siglo pasado algunas reflexiones apuntaron el fin de la niñez, de aquella concepción moderna que configuró la escuela –junto con el hogar- como el espacio social ideal en el que niños y niñas se formarían y cohesionarían colectivamente, como entes de “naturaleza” distinta a los adultos, sujetos a una institución que les sería propia y mediante la cual atravesarían procesos normativos que les permitirían integrarse a un orden social.

    En relación con la escuela y la educación, las discusiones giran en torno a los problemas de aprendizaje y la educabilidad del niño, problemas de conducta, violencia exacerbada y sistemas de castigo, así como aquello que el propio modelo no comprende: niños y niñas indígenas para quienes el español no es su lengua materna, a quienes se les han configurado prototipos particulares de enseñanza que acusan enormes deficiencias, o estudiantes apurados por abandonar las aulas porque el trabajo los espera.

    Pensar en esta triada, por tanto, abre la posibilidad de observar dentro y fuera de las aulas escolares para reflexionar sobre aquellos niños y niñas a quienes hoy el modelo educativo no les es suficiente, en esas otras infancias que han quedado fuera de la escuela pero que atraviesan procesos sociales que pueden ser pensados desde estas tres categorías, también problematizadas con otras nociones: disciplinamiento, violencia y abandono, por mencionar algunas.

  • México al 2018: reforma educativa, políticas educativas y proyecto de nación. Julio-diciembre 2014
    No. 9 (5)

    La reforma educativa iniciada en 2013 así como la publicación del Plan Nacional de Desarrollo y del Programa Sectorial de Educación del Gobierno de la República al 2018, han dado pie a un intercambio de ideas, debates y propuestas entre especialistas de índole distinta. La revista electrónica Diálogos sobre Educación. Temas actuales en investigación educativa, se propone como un espacio que busca conjuntar análisis desde diversas ópticas acerca de la nación que podemos esperar al 2018 a la luz de los cambios educativos actualmente en proceso.

    Entre los temas que ponemos a consideración para la discusión están:

    a) Los niveles de articulación entre Reforma educativa, Políticas educativas y Programa Sectorial de Educación en el marco de un Plan Nacional de Desarrollo que, a diferencia de los anteriores, ha establecido a la educación con calidad como una de las cinco metas nacionales y considera entre sus estrategias transversales la perspectiva de género junto con la democratización de la productividad y la modernización del gobierno.

    b) Las dimensiones, niveles y elementos ponderados, así como aquellos que han pasado a segundos términos o incluso no han sido considerados, al establecer a la educación con calidad como una prioridad nacional.

    c) La manera en la que debe articularse la búsqueda de la educación con calidad con el impulso a la ciencia y al desarrollo tecnológico en el país.

    d) La dimensión internacional del campo educativo mexicano.

    e) Los retos de una verdadera inclusión de la perspectiva de género en la educación en México.

    f) Los avances y logros en materia educativa que podemos esperar al 2018 dadas las circunstancias actuales ¿Qué es lo que nos van seguir debiendo?

    g) La manera en la que la búsqueda de una educación con calidad habrá de colaborar para el logro del proyecto de nación perfilado por el Gobierno Federal.

  • Sujetos de la educación y cultura. Enero-junio 2014
    No. 8 (5)

    El presente número de Diálogos en Educación se articulará en torno a la reflexión sobre la gesta de los sujetos a partir de las relaciones con sus objetos amorosos, es decir, aquellos seres humanos que los cuidan, haciéndoles posible su desarrollo y su inserción en el mundo cultural.

    Más desvalidos que los individuos de otras especies, hemos sobrevivido gracias al desarrollo de la inteligencia y la creación de cultura. Nuestra vida ocurre en un vaivén dialéctico entre el afán de sustentar y hacer posible la expresión de nuestra singularidad y la exigencia de convivir y participar en el sustento y la recreación cultural.

    Aquí invitamos a hacer una reflexión sobre los múltiples campos en los que se manifiesta esa dialéctica entre los sujetos y sus culturas de adscripción, así como sobre la manera como la educación incide en las singularidades y en el freno o promoción del cambio cultural.

  • Educación y diferencia: etnia, clase, género, generación. Julio-diciembre 2013
    No. 7 (4)

    ¿Cómo pensar el tema de la diferencia en el ámbito de la educación, en el contexto de la llamada globalización?, ¿qué implicaciones tiene hacerlo? Este número tiene en el centro de su contenido temático estas preguntas que son reflexionadas desde distintos ángulos y problemáticas concretas.

    En las últimas décadas se ha insistido en la importancia de combatir la discriminación en el ámbito educativo; se ha señalado este fenómeno en relación con el género, con la etnicidad, con los grupos de edad, con las necesidades educativas especiales, y otras diferencias cada vez más presentes en este ámbito.

    El concepto de diferencia ha tomado relevancia en la teoría social contemporánea a partir de tres fuentes básicas: el pensamiento feminista, la teoría literaria y el psicoanálisis, desde los cuales es posible decir que dicho concepto puede ser entendido en tres planos distintos: como una diversidad de la experiencia, como un significado posicional y directamente relacionado con la diferencia sexual.

  • Número especial: Políticas públicas de educación en el contexto Latinoamericano. Enero-junio 2013
    No. 6 (4)

    La vinculación entre políticas públicas y educación ha sido tema de análisis a lo largo de la historia, a veces sin que pueda establecerse de manera nítida hasta dónde las políticas orientan y dan sentido a las acciones educativas, o si dichas políticas logran impactar a los grupos sociales para los que son destinadas hasta el punto de contribuir a la formación de identidades nacionales, regionales o locales por medio de los diversos programas educativos. Por otra parte, las políticas públicas de educación encuentran, cada vez más, diversas reacciones entre los actores institucionales y sociales; se trata ahora de una doble vía en donde no es tan simple imponer las políticas como decisiones unilaterales, por ello todas las voces tienen que ser oídas, las “autorizadas” de los expertos diseñadores de políticas, las de los investigadores que aportan conocimiento que puede orientar la toma de decisiones y las de quienes viven en lo cotidiano las consecuencias de dichas decisiones como son los educadores, los estudiantes y la población en general. Este es el panorama desde el cual fueron abordados los diversos artículos que conforman este número de la revista, ubicados fundamentalmente en el contexto de lo que ocurre en Latinoamérica. Son artículos que nacieron asociados al XVI Encuentro Internacional de Investigación Educativa que tuvo lugar en la Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara en el mes de noviembre de 2012 y cuyos autores tuvieron la gentileza de entregarlos como colaboración para la revista Diálogos sobre Educación.

  • Educación y culturas digitales. Julio-diciembre 2012
    No. 5 (3)

    La educación está en el corazón mismo de la condición humana; por esta razón, toda reflexión sobre lo educativo alude a nuestro ser y actuar como miembros de una comunidad, a las maneras como contribuimos a conformarla y a los procesos de generación de subjetividades colectivas que hacen posible la vida en común. Bajo este ángulo, la sección temática “Educación y culturas digitales” tiene como propósito adentrarnos en las múltiples relaciones que se establecen entre la educación y la cultura contemporánea, fuertemente marcadas por el uso de tecnologías de información y comunicación. Llamamos “culturas digitales” al entramado de significado y acción social vinculado al uso cada vez más intensivo de dichas tecnologías; se escribe en plural para subrayar la imposibilidad de examinar el amplio universo que conforman bajo una sola directriz o lente analítico. Por su parte, la educación es entendida en su concepción más amplia, que incluye prácticas escolares o propiamente orientadas a la instrucción, al igual que toda actividad que involucre una producción social de conocimiento.

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