Education Society and Culture

The mind map of the Colombian representation shows us a very particular reality that moves between the optimism and the pessimism and gives us the idea of an uncertain but still open future. We can see through the different articles that the importance of the education is a priority that concerns all the actors of society, from the worried mother who wants to give an appropriated education for her children to the ministers and governors who must provide the best efforts to improve the quality of education.

One of the most interesting sentences that can be found in this document is the one mentioned by Antanas Mokus ex-mayor of Bogota “La confianza en los profesores es una premisa básica” The confidence on teachers must be a premise. As we know the society is built around the family, but the families must trust in a group of professional who are in charge of the school process of their children. It is mandatory that we as society believe in the abilities of our teachers, and also we as teacher must give out biggest effort to make the school the place that the society desires. A great example of it can be the story of Natalia Patiño, a woman who became a teacher for choice.

But the optimistic features do not come only from teachers, but also from the people who rule the country, one of the articles that really surprised me was the one about the increasing of money in the public universities for the next year because it was one of the aspects that had been forgotten for the previous governments. Another aspect is the improvement in the level of use of English according to Education First EF, and that is the result of new politics in relative to the teaching of foreign languages that have been implemented in the last years. As it is mentioned in the Warton University article, Colombia’s reality is better than before but we are facing lots of new challenges. And the education has the key to face those challenges in a better way, but for it there must be a change like the one presented in the video “the forbidden Education” which is a masterpiece in education in the Latin-American modern times.

But as I mentioned at the beginning of this reflection, the perspectives are also pessimistic in some areas, maybe because the media sometimes emphasizes in the negative, or maybe because there are some truths that cannot be hidden, things like the poor use that most of our teens are giving to the internet, where they just want to play, surf, chat, and hang out online. Maybe that is not only a problem, maybe it is also an opportunity. I also found interesting the fact that most of the teachers complain on the same things that students do, but if we see it deeper, some of them are attitudes that the same educational system have instigated, and can be changed by a deep change in the way education is conceived.

But the culture and the society also bring their own diseases, one of them is the culture of the “easy way” like in the article that presents the people that they do not do either study or work, and that become scrubs of the society, as well as the ones who prefer to beg to the government for a subsidy or a governmental allowance instead of trying to find a job and earn their own money, and it is a phenomenon that has been increasing in the last years as it was mentioned.

So as I mentioned before the future is opened, but we need to understand our reality and our history to solve this puzzle that the reality proposes today.

Task 1

This presentation from the Walden University is the one that I selected.

in my opinión the Kolb's theory can be used in a language class in a very simple way, when the students have the opportunity to experiment the use of the language by taking the risk of alking with others who have a higher level of use of the language, then it is very common that they make their own conclutions of the experience and reflect upon it. Based on those reflections they can créate abstract consepts, to finally experiment their new knowledge actively with other people in a more confident way.

Theory Of Experiential Learning Fields[1] from Vida Williams

Task 2

The rovers story from Fredy Roa

Diary September 19th

Finally yesterday was the final project presentation, in most of the cases my students had a good performance, although in some cases they decides to do the presentations memorizing the information. It was an interesting exercise but it makes me wonder how effective the last activities were. It was clear that the “stage fright” affected their normal performance but the question now is what can a teacher do to avoid the effects of it in a situation like this one.

Diary September 8th

The trimester is about to finish, and the students have to prepare the final presentation of their projects, including an abstract in English. The software programming students created apps and databases for small companies around the neighborhood, and we started to prepare those presentations. It is clear that most of our students do not have many skills in oral presentations and they do not feel confident enough when they are in front of a big audience, and it becomes even harder when they are doing it in English. So the challenge for me is even bigger. We started creating the initial draft of the oral presentation, and one of the most difficult things for them is to understand that when they are talking in a second language, they need to use a vocabulary that matches with what the already know, they tend to use “too sophisticated vocabulary” so the first task is to make the revision of that vocabulary.

Diary September 5th

Continuing with the topic of simple past tense, yesterday my students talked about any accident that they remember from their childhood, and the partners asked them additional questions to find out more information of it. This was a successful activity and it was meaningful for them, all of them had many stories to tell and it was easy to make them talk. I had done the same activity in the past but this time I made some changes like organizing students in pairs, and have them prepare some questions in advance, and it was very useful.

Any activity can be transformed and improved, it is important to understand what went wrong, and next time you use it, think in the best option to make it better.

Diary September 2nd

In this week I have been working on past experiences of my students, and storytelling. They are creating their own autobiographies and they will create a video with it. It has been very interesting to dig deeper in their personal lives and I have discovered things that I did not even imagine about them.



Yesterday they created a cooperative story, in which they wrote a paragraph of a text an then they had to switch papers with the next partner, then I gave the instructions to continue with the next paragraph. After some minutes they had to pass the paper to the next person and continue writing, and so on. The activity was good but the time given was an issue that I need to thoroughly revise, because in some cases the time was too short for them to fulfill the objective.

My Profile

My name is Fredy Roa, and I am an English teacher at SENA Centro de Materiales y Ensayos Regional Distrito Capital. I studied in the "Universidad Pedagógica Nacional" and finished in 2004. But I have been teaching for the last 12 years. M main experience has been with adults in universities.

I started working in Vocational teaching since 2011 and it has been a very interesting area to work on. In these moments I am working with Software programming students. My purpose in this course is to acquire new knowledge in the teaching field, and learn how to apply it in my professional life.