My Teaching Beliefs

I understand and commit with language as action and discourse. Not as structures, but as a social mean to get things done.

Teaching is an act of love, of commitment and sharing, where we, as teachers, form, educate people to get the best things from them [this according to Rousseau’s conception of student¹] and put them into play in the social system.

If the student doesn’t understand it is, at first, whether I’m not addressing the topic, the skill, the content, in an interesting way to him/her; or, there are some emotional barriers or psychological problems related to the student’s family, for instance (I could be others), I would have to fathom in and deal with the family of the student. It is not matter of finding who the fault is. There are not guilty persons, only incomplete, insufficient processes that aren’t able to reach the student in a holistic way: as a learner, as a citizen, as a human being, as a boy or a girl, with moral and ethical values, with cultural construes, affective history (Villarreal 2000:45), etc.

Thus, education ought not to be regarded as transmission. Education is a formation process, not a self-development, but a social-development process; where we shape in the student the citizen we would like to have.

Through language--and formal education--students get to know who they are (conveying their identities, whether ethnic or linguistic), what the society asks (and wants) from them and where will they go.

1 Rousseau’s sees the child as having “an inherent potential that should be allowed to grow or flower in the school” (1762) in Crookes: 2003: 56.

Teacher, I know you will think that I have just published this post, however, I have done it in other blog called Sharing FL concepts long time ago, but I just realized that I should have published it in Affectivity in the Classroom, please check this blog and you'll see:

http://sharingflconcepts.blogspot.com/

Thank you, happy new year 2009