Involvement in Educational Transformation. Ethical-political Thought and Action in Initial Teachers´ Training

Abstract

This paper analyses the experience of teacher education students, in the subject “Educational Management of schools and institutions”, in Malaga University. These students collaborate voluntarily in schools carrying out social transformation projects, mainly Learning Communities, in public schools. The study we are presenting is part of research project about initial teacher education, funded by Malaga University (PIE 19-193). In this project we have set ourselves the objective of knowing the reflections of undergraduate education students in processes of involvement in the reality of educational centres that initiate democratic and community transformations. Specifically, we analyse the reflection of the students that highlight contradictions in which we make our conscience visible. For several years we are exploring and researching how this way of participation, interaction and approach to schools, becomes a possibility to educate new teachers that breaks with established frameworks and with those more conventional practices already lived by students in other traditional educational contexts. These previous experiences often block the possibility of opening up to different options than the one lived. These experiences do not allow questioning the hegemonic school model and they involve an initial socialization as an educator. The training that is promoted with this project implies a break with the technocratic paradigm, characterized by a programmatic, linear and objective organization. It focuses on the outcomes understood as preset goals that enclose students and teachers. It is part of the agend derived from neoliberal international policies (Morin, 2005; Guiso, 2010; Faltoni, 2016; Giroux, 2018; Leite, Márquez, and Rivas, 2018).