Pedagogy, understanding and critical citizenship

Abstract

Vindicate the instinct of care of life

Critical citizenship is an expression of the intellectual and affective coming of age with which an education and pedagogy for life is committed.  Educating for life requires intervening in the formation of people with a consciousness that allows them to evaluate themselves permanently and continuously, that is, to examine themselves as being integrated into an interconnected complex of multidiverse systems. It is to assess their performances to notice if they affirm or deny their growth as being interested in themselves, in the other people and the other that the citizenship of life needs. It is to reflect, in the interregnum, in a critical way, not without refining their actions of resistance and re-existence to embrace life.

Criticism represents an unobjectionable attitude to be and do work of life; accompanied by experiential actions and daily reflections nourishes understanding.  But it is not enough to be a critical citizen; education for life demands an understanding that becomes a work of life, that is, to use cognitive and critical understandings not only in favor of oneself and / or the other people and the other, but of the complex of human and cosmic life of which it is part.

Pedagogy as a pluri-knowledge field that reflects and operates generatively around the educational fact finds, in counter-hegemonic perspectives such as edifying understanding, a construct that re-signifies education as an action by and for life that promotes and elevates the comprehensive potential, above all the profitable use of this to build meanings of life, to express citizenship taking care of the house, the common habitat.  "This is the relevance of contributing to the formation of an ethical, acting, experiential, comprehensive, critical, sentient, edifying consciousness," says Gil in the first article of this issue of the magazine Redipe, in an ontological approach of a sociocritical nature that emphasizes the understanding of what we are and can be in an edifying and sentient key. An authentic construction of meaning of life is comprehensive and uplifting, it goes through a cognitive, critical, sentient and doer reflection of what is learned and unlearned, it goes through self-regulation and "citizen" oversight, for being a hospitable inhabitant of the common home, protagonist of pluridiverse life. It goes through feeling and thinking, feeling and understand this one.