sábado, 16 de enero de 2021
viernes, 15 de enero de 2021
EDUCATIONAL GUIDANCE AND COMMUNITY SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT.
Prof. Dr. Julio González Bello (2020)
University of Carabobo-Venezuela
Abstract
What is presented here is a brief article in the modality of reflection article (Colciencias, 2010) to try to answer the question, what is the main role that educational guidance can play in community social development? It is noteworthy that in Educational Guidance, the emphasis had been placed on improving, in the students, their study habits, their adaptation to the environment, the solution of personal relationship problems and on how to make better vocational-professional decisions; and ultimately, as in Education, in how a person could be helped in her social ascent from a social fringe of poor or lower middle class to an upper middle class. That is, basically aimed at individual development. Now, in this change of era, it is intended that educational guidance also facilitate the improvements that must be made in the community where you live. Hence, in these times, through Educational Guidance, individual development is complemented with sustainable and inclusive social community development, and that in my opinion, neither of the two should be above the other, in the understanding that in Human Development, both individual development and community social development should be considered. As a conclusion, it can be affirmed that the guidance professional must exercise his role as an agent of change, facilitating and coordinating the processes of social transformation from the community and even promoting community mobilization, when could be necessary.
Introduction
First of all, it must be clarified that Educational Guidance is a process of pedagogical and bio-psycho-social accompaniment (OrientAcción Magazine, 2018) that is carried out from a school institution, including the period from primary or basic school to University education. In this sense, we share what was expressed by Gutiérrez Gómez (2018) when he states that "educational Guidance seeks to integrate the different forms of Guidance in school, for example, vocational, school, professional, family, etc." (p. 1).
On the other hand, from a fairly general sense, community social development can be understood as the material and immaterial improvements that can be achieved in a given community. The idea of improvements is related to the intention of raising the levels of well-being and the provision of services that can occur in a specific community, but also to improving immaterial levels such as social justice, communitarianism, human rights and universal values.
In the present work it is intended to develop the idea of how the change in the current era also supposes changes within the initial conception of Educational Guidance. In these times it is no longer enough to maintain the same focus that has lasted in it for so long, where the emphasis was placed on an Guidance process with an individualistic vision, and where it was basically an Guidance to solve problems in the students. These problems ranged from improving their study habits, their adaptation to the environment, solving personal relationship problems and how to make better vocational-professional decisions; And ultimately, as in Education, in how a person could be helped in their social ascent from a social fringe of poor or lower middle class to an upper middle class, basically due to their inclusion in the economic productive apparatus of the country .
In this sense, the idea expressed by Brunal, Vázquez, Mora, Borja and Osorio (2018) is shared when they affirm that it is necessary to overcome the instrumental technical approach that prevails, in educational Guidance, to date. Although it is fair to recognize that at one time there was also an approach to the community, but basically with the student himself as the main focus. In this case, attempts were made to reach out to teachers, parents and guardians and other influential figures in student life, but at this time a totally different approach is required.
Guidance and Community Social Development
What is the main role that educational guidance can play in community social development?
To date, in the field of Guidance, there had been talk of a development based on the individual, where it was only sought that a person could climb positions within the social pyramid and be able to ascend within the different social classes and basically from the from the poor or lower middle class rising to the middle or upper class. All these considerations are about to change since in the field of Guidance the idea of community social development is gaining strength. This idea could be understood as the advancement of material and immaterial improvements in a certain community, and can be considered truly novel since it implies the consideration of the group where one lives at the same level as that of the people.
For the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) (2015), (inclusive) social development supposes, in the first place, the overcoming of poverty, basically providing possibilities for decent work and improvements in living conditions, in aspects such as food and drinking water distribution, to which can also be added the reduction of inequalities (gender, ethnic and racial), the strengthening of human rights and the capacities of institutions in the community and guaranteeing social participation .
Educational Guidance to date had meant that thanks to the professionalization process a person changed their social status, and it meant that if they previously lived in a neighborhood (poverty area or lower middle class), as a product of that professionalization, the first What he was doing was moving to an urbanization where people with better income generally lived and thus enjoyed a better quality of life. Now the idea that Educational Guidance should also attend to community social development means that it should also deal with other issues that were not previously thought by Guidance professionals, that is, the role of educational Guidance has been expanded.
This new change in Guidance now means that Guidance professionals must become promoters of change in the community where their educational center is located, be it a primary or basic school, secondary, or a university education institution. Now the Guidance work must be done from a community conception, not so much with individual work, person by person, but also work with the entire community.
For Camargo Martínez (2009), Community Guidance supposes the commitment of the Guidance professional for “social transformation based on a process of awareness, organization and mobilization of people in the search for collective well-being” (p. 24)
But in addition to all the above, it should also be considered that from educational Guidance, as it has been considered by a group of professionals affiliated with the Latin American network of Guidance professionals (Relapro), community social development should be directed by awakening a group ethical conscience, which includes concepts such as social justice, communitarianism, universal values, respect for human rights and that of a solidarity economy.
It is also to be clarified that from Latin America, due to the existing political conditions, basically due to the existence of the two great poles to explain macrosocial development (capitalism and socialism), we find ourselves in an extremely complex situation, where apparently neither of these two Options, to date, have been able to meet the expectations of the general population, since capitalism only tries to favor large economic corporations and since socialism, in some countries it has meant the formation of military castes, the enrichment of some sectors of society related to the government of the day, and the economic-social-health and educational debacle of the population, and in some cases, going back to the nineteenth century, according to the socio-health conditions in which they live
At this point it is convenient to highlight what was expressed by the Latin American Network of Guidance Professionals (2020), and the idea is shared that:
Like the community International points out, this group expresses its dissatisfaction with the two predominant approaches in the world in general (capitalism) and in the hemisphere in particular (Cuba and Venezuela), opting for the communalist perspective, in order to develop Guidance models that contemplate the component of the solidarity economy in their programs. (3rd, parr)
Hence, one of the main challenges of Educational Guidance in the 21st century is to consolidate the role of Guidance professionals as agents of change in a community and to be a facilitator of human development, in the understanding that it is made up of individual development and community social development.
conclusion
In this change of era it is necessary for the Guidance professional to decide on the search and experimentation of other goals and objectives in his professional career, the time for counseling to improve study habits and the application of psychological tests to determine the best career to follow. The time has come to address other issues, such as social justice, community development, solidarity economy, meaning of life, forms of government, democracy, human and peoples' rights, and universal ethics and values. As a conclusion, it can be affirmed that the Guidance professional must exercise his role as an agent of change, facilitating and coordinating the processes of social transformation from the community and even promoting community mobilization, when necessary.
References
Brunal, A., Vázquez, S.G., Mora, A., Borja, C., and Osorio, S. (2018). Transitional Guidance for the meaning of life. OrientAcción Magazine. Available at: https://revistaorientaccion.blogspot.com/2018/04/orientacion-para-la-vida-activa-completo.html
Camargo Martínez, X. (2009). Community Guidance and communication tools for its approach. A social approach to Guidance. Mexican Magazine of Guidance. Vol. VI. N.16, pp. 24-29.
Colciencias (2010). Permanent Indexing Service of Colombian Science, Technology and Innovation Magazines. Colombia: Recovered from: http://www.colciencias.gov.co/sites/default/files/upload/paginas/M304PR02G01 guiaserviciopermanente-indexacion.pdf
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) (2015). Inclusive Social Development: a new generation of policies to overcome poverty and reduce inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. United Nations. Santiago de Chile.
Gutiérrez Gómez, R. (2018). Educational guidance, labor market and globalization: employment prospects of the educational programs offered by the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico to young university students. Ibero-American Journal for Educational Research and Development. Vol. 8. N. 16, pp. 1- 24
Latin American Network of ^ Guidance Professionals. (2018). Bio-psycho-social Pedagogical Model of Educational Guidance. Vol. 4. N. 4. Available at: http://redOrientadoresprofesionales.blogspot.com
Latin American Network of Guidance Professionals. (2020). Human development research online progress report. Available at: https://relapro2020.blogspot.com/2020/06/informe-general-avances-en-la-linea-de.html
Educational Guidance and Socioeconomic Development.
Amilkar A. Brunal
When asked by REMO journal in 2012:
"Is it valid that a magazine specializing in the dissemination of educational issues is also dedicated to the treatment of social and economic problems? Is REMO a means of political analysis?"
I took advantage of this academic provocation at the time to assert what I do not know if many people share in the academic world of Guidance:
"Of course we must as Guidance professionals, dedicate ourselves to the study and treatment of the social and economic problems of our time which not only our students and Counselors experience, but ourselves, not only as social beings, but as professionals that we face day by day in our daily work, the effects of the models of social development in what we live.
An Guidance devoid of this level of analysis would be no more than a technical discipline in which the naive and intuitive counseling is applied in a tone of popular wisdom that our grandmothers, with the best intention, have historically performed.
I consider that the study of the Subject-Society-School relations (which is obviously not exclusive to sociology), cannot simply be an important chapter of our work, but the fundamental philosophical-praxiological essence for the understanding of situations as complex as the construction of life projects in this contemporary society [called by some "Modern or postmodern" and by others with whom I share their position (Ulrichk Beck) risk society or society in which the second, third and fourth industrialization are juxtaposed] in the that the overwhelming and impoverishing neoliberal policy is increasingly accepted, implemented through the normalization of hourly job insecurity, reflected in the multiple poverty (Max-Neef) of the families of most of our public or official school students, translated into precarious living conditions and probable futures.
It is for all this that an Guidance model that is called "Latin American", cannot evade the component of community life, as a fundamental axis of interaction with the educational community it serves. However, political approaches of the self-called socialist-communist left are NOT proposed here, which has shown in sister countries such as Cuba and Venezuela that the people reject any hyper-controlling totalitarian intervention of social life and equally radical and overwhelming of freedoms and human rights.
Nor could we make an apology for the savage capitalism that we suffer in most of our countries. Much less does one go to the principles of liberation theology that at the time gave their answers to the problems of depressed societies such as those we know in our daily work.
We have proclaimed several times in “OrientAcción” journal, the search for humanizing and communitarian, communalist, or community models, without any other weapon than transcendental human action in our field, which allows us to work from critical pedagogies, a construction of meaning of life in community, such as models such as “Ubuntu” of pan-Africanist movements and the well-known Abya-Yala model, or Suma Kuamsay (Good Living) proclaim: Live in harmony with the nature to which we belong and on which we depend to be able to build a life social in community (although it seems redundant), transversalized in the micro social, at least by the principles of Empathic Leadership and Alterity-Assertive (proposed in the glossary of our journal “OrientAcción”) and in the social mezzo, by principles of ethically economics- sustainable (fair trade), aesthetic (harmonious), supportive and synergistic, determined by the community, giving priority to respectful, fair production , rational and autochthonous, a principle widely explained by the economists of the "Human Scale Development" theory.
Transcendental Human Action in Educational Guidance
But what corresponds to us beyond individual commitment as citizens? What actions are typical of our professional work? Obviously the welfare position of distributing food, giving away used clothes, etc., which can be very appropriate for voluntary, merciful or empathetic citizens, No Governmental Organizations(N.G.O.s) or other types of social foundation-type organizations (which somehow try to close the social gaps that states have stopped covering, many times due to political corruption and / or mismanagement of public resources, without discounting the brutal weight of the external debt of our countries, in many cases immoral and unpayable), it may continue to be necessary and relevant in our communities, however obviously, that cannot be our role.
Social mobilization, in these cases, we leave it to those who correspond: the social and union leaders to whom we deeply appreciate the working conditions obtained after decades of joint struggle in public squares and in the streets. Nor do I think that is the role of Educational Guidance. This is not the invitation presented here, nor is this the invitation to interfere in the houses, returning old models badly imported from social work and badly implemented in the Guidance of the 80s and 90s, supplanting the work of the official entities that correspond to intervene or mediate in the domestic-family sphere. Guidance in other cases has also supplanted clinical psychology, (incidentally, playing a rather mediocre role by the way), in the search for its own identity. The same has happened with pedagogy, when the Counselor replaces the teacher in his classroom with no better results.
I propose here to work mainly and in a decisive way for the empowerment and psychosocial strengthening of the families with whom we work, from an intersectorial and inter-institutional perspective, critical (recognizing that the individualistic perspective in educational guidance is necessary but insufficient), which facilitates them generate social awareness, understood all this as the recognition of themselves, as social beings capable of transforming and transforming their circumstances transitionally, in an ethical-sustainable, synergistic-supportive, resilient and anti-fragile way, regardless of their difficult basic living conditions . It is this, the work that we consider transcendental in Guidance since it obviously affects from the individual to all known forms and levels of society
These are the reasons why, in this edition, in the midst of the greatest pandemic in recent times, we bet on various Reflection-Action articles, presented by colleagues of the highest academic and human level, who make us proud and exalt the field by demonstrate that their proposals in the areas of General Guidance, Vocational / professional and professional Guidance, Family Guidance, are not reflected in a distant desk, but in the heart of the work committed to the communities to which we we must to serve.
This is the right moment to thank and acknowledge the totally selfless and voluntary work of all of us who make this means of expression and dissemination possible. Thanks a lot
Amilkar A. Brunal