The legacy of our elders, training and pedagogical praxis

Abstract

Training for life and not exactly for competency consumption in the educational approach, it becomes important to reflect on the concepts of competence and understanding: the first enthroned in the globalized world of education, and the second mistakenly taken as subsidiary of competence. It is necessary to rethink the weight of these expressions and models in educational systems by and for life. Hence our call to value the comprehensive building perspective and related perspectives. In life formation, more than competence as potential, understanding as human baggage has a primary place: It involves knowledge, generative critical reflection and experience, as an interdependent world of knowledge, knowledge, values, attitudes, skills, reflections and applications; but, above all, the edifying understanding, that strength by which understanding manages to build, to form for life, by which the comprehensive language becomes the work of life. As we have expressed in other areas, when we develop our potential for edifying understanding (of using understandings with a sense of life, existence and of the human and common world, which requires the possibility of altering our history, history and the world from comprehensive language), we are claiming both the praxic attribute of understanding and language and our multidimensionality, our “micro” common space: the complex of interdependent dimensions that conforms us to each human, such as the physical, psychic, environmental, social, political, historical, cultural spheres, among others, and, consequently, otherness, humanity is gained (Arboleda, 2021/ 10/3). To be formed for life requires cognitive, metacognitive, value, operational, praxic, attitudinal processes, which are mobilized in understanding, understanding that builds, that co-reasons, that braids life. This is not allowed precisely by a competency environment, but by an environment crossed by paths to walk together, feeling and living the bodies, the difference, the learnings and understandings, the worldviews, spiritualities and diverse subjectivities, and in which we pay tribute to common life, no less than to our own ego.

Educational systems at the service of life, social, economic, epistemic, racial, environmental, human and pluriverse justice must not be able to assume (surrender to) models that do not have life among their priorities -- this is the case of competences--, insofar as they have been calculated to strengthen the world of consumption, which in order to maximize profits to submit them to private interests hinder social benefit; sensitive educational systems must project lights for the world of life, deploy formations that promote in the members of the educational communities awareness of the integrated world.

This is the need for educational systems not to follow the rhythm imposed by the global economic and financial powers, but to elaborate their own languages where saying means doing feeling, living, weaving life. Precisely because, to put it with De Souza Silva (2013), nothing is prior or superior to life. It is therefore imposed to form in consciousness, and such a process goes through forming in the reflective and selfreflective capacity, to see ourselves as part of the integrated and erosive life of it; it is the weapon we require to confront the imposition of the competency approach in educational and pedagogical processes, by which common life is injured. In this path, a relational ontological look would accompany other education and pedagogy, and would help not a little to recognize and challenge vulnerabilities and separatities. It gives an account of our vulnerability as members of the complex of pluriverse, human and non-human life of corporealities, cultures, worlds, worlds, subjectivities, and that of the same interdependent complex, increasingly injured, atomized, fragmented, separated, anthropocentrated, profitable, epistemocentric. We could recognize (and reflect in an uplifting way) a vulnerable endogenous separatity: the internecine disunity expressed by inequalities and atrocities in human interaction. An exogenous separatity, expressed in the fact that they are subject to the evolution of life; and also the vulnerability (or loss, separation) of the pluriversal complex itself, today subjected to anthropocentrism exacerbated by the performance society. Perhaps an education in the formation of cognitive, critical, ethical and sensitive consciousness of integrated life, allows us to morigerate the own anxieties that emerge this lived, sentient thinking. An acting consciousness of otherness. But this is a topic that merits a specific approach in another space. In any case, the relational ontological foundation of pedagogy(s) would encourage, according to Walsh, “thinking from and with genealogies, rationalities, knowledge, practices and civilizational systems and different living. Pedagogies that encourage possibilities of being, being, feeling, existing, doing, thinking, looking, listening and knowing in another way; pedagogies directed towards and anchored in processes and projects of character, horizon and decolonial attempt” (2013, p. 28).

With all this, the difference between the potential and environments of competency, comprehensive and comprehensive edifying training is radical. Although one and the other claim the know-how in context, the first translates such operability in favor of having more than being or, if life is preferred, in favor of the endless increase of economic gains for the interest, more than common, particular; the precise understanding of the reflective capacity, which operates little in the domain of competition, at least does not highlight the critical reflection that includes the utilitarian use of human and non-human goods. This mere fact says a lot about the understanding regarding competence, of taking one and the other as an educational reference, and of the need to rethink the approach and the educational and pedagogical model, especially within the framework of the purposes of the function of educating, if the latter is assumed as a commitment to the formation of consciousness in the learners so that with this they project lights to their learning activity and his life in general. And it says much more about the edifying understanding with respect to those mentioned, insofar as it gestates and takes advantage of scenarios so that reflective and contextual know-how dignifies, enhances integrated, personal, social and pluriverse life. In this direction, education demands that educational systems redeem their unfathomable debts to life, and this must not be able to happen apart from sensitive understanding, from training for an uplifting age of majority, in which the construction of meanings of life is played. Indeed, there is an age of majority that can be reached by both children and adults within the framework of an education system for life and not exactly for the market, and that education systems by and for life must promote. To train in the abrasive age, heart would go through contributing to the formation of a braiding consciousness of life, which accompanies wills, attitudes, skills and abilities to operate feelings, thoughts, learning, knowledge, understandings and other psychic functions that are part of human multidimensionality. The increase in the degree of performance, exemplariness and sentipensant testimoniality are due to a coming of age, rather than intellectual, comprehensive and edifying. Therein lies, in my view, the credibility of a genuinely educational, co-reasoning system. 

With language you can attack or care for and enlarge life. Competence as an expression of a potential that highlights, as we said above, know-how in context represents an educationally incomplete strength with a view to a sensitive, reflective and consistent formation with life, but fortunate for a formation subordinated to interests of economic and financial power. Being stealthy with language and its use involves recognizing that “understanding” is an adequate expression for bets on educational systems that weave life, and not precisely “competition” that, being an unobjectionable part of the globalized educational language, affects every time in the agencies that unweave life.

In his review, Andria I. García Méjica begins his reflection through two sentences: “Not every teacher educates”. “Edifying understanding is part of education for life. Schools and teachers must prepare to educate for life, all the more so than for professions. It is about educating to be human, supportive, sensitive, even more than being skillful or competent, without denying that the last two qualities complement the formation of the individual”. It emphasizes the need to direct or complement education (teaching, learning, training) by competences, which claims the knowledge doing, with a comprehensive edifying education, from which we have to build solid and knowledge, generating scenarios to make this work of life, with learners and educators who live sensitively, ethically their understandings. Training by competences does not guarantee the work of life, because, on the contrary, the competency world erodes the world of life after the interested eagerness, the individual over the common interests, an aspect that weighs on those social and government systems cemented in a savage capitalism, where the maximization of productivity and profits are not redistributed equitably, justly.