didactics

This article examines the biography and scientific production of this distinguished Spanish educator. He was born in Cuenca (Spain) on March 27th, 1920, and died in Madrid, on June 21th, 1998.

He held a scholarship in the Instituto San José de Calazanz and was a collaborator with the Spanish Society of Pedagogy. At the age of 33 he became a Professor of Teacher Training Colleges. He worked as a teacher, mainly in the Teacher Training Colleges Fray Luis de León and María Díaz Jiménez. He was appointed Provincial Representative of Education in Cuenca. In recognition of his professional excellence, he was awarded with the Prize of the Alfonso X the Wise Civil Society. He published several books and a number of articles in the most prestigious journals at that time, which dealt with almost all pedagogical aspects.

 

Key Words: History of Pedagogy, School Organization, Didactics

The main issue we have analyzed in this paper is about the actual content of Didactics and its relationship with the concept of Curriculum, more related to the Anglo-Saxon tradition. We have shown how important both Didactics and Curriculum are in the teaching and learning process. First we have presented the Nordic approach with the participation of several English and American authors. Later on we have analyzed more than 25 studies of General Didactics published in Spanish from 1985 to 1998. This section is focused on the descriptors of Didactics, Curriculum, Methods and Strategies. From our analysis we have concluded how even all of them take care about Curriculum only a few part gives importance to methodology and learning strategies.

In the last part we have included some suggestions about the most important contents for teaching in the 21st century based on Spanish and international researches (UNESCO, OCDE, European Community). As a conclusion, we would like to emphasize the idea of how Curriculum and Didactics must take care about the educational contents and also the learning strategies.

 

Key words: Didactics, curriculum, teaching, learning, learning strategies, contents of education.

This article stresses the need of moving teaching strategies from curricular contents to one more learning-based approach. One of the main challenges teachers have to assume in the current conditions of schooling is just to become supporters of the student's processes of learning. Starting from the meaning of the learning-based teaching as a general referent for didactics, nine factors influencing the learning processes are analysed: personal abilities, practice, task perception of learners, expectations, attribution, attention, context conditions, choral learning and feed-back. The first belong to the cognitive level and the last three to the social context of learning processes. All of them offer important knowledge for teachers to be the central resource for improving learning.

 

Key words: Learning-centered teaching, learning processes, teaching, cognitive conditions for learning, social conditions for learning, didactics, learning strategies, teaching strategies, expectations, choral learning.