EDUCATIONAL INTERVENTIONS TO IMPROVE DAILY LIVING TOGETHER IN SCHOOLS.pdf (original) (raw)

In our contemporary societies, from the least developed to the so called "first world" countries, we find now a social environment of great violence, brutality and drug abuse, strong economic deterioration, unemployment and lack of dialogue and understanding between generations that influences in a negative way the development of the young people, driving them toward an aggressive cruel behavior. One of the main concerns of the contemporary society is the formation of citizens as social actors that can participate in the building up of better ways of living together where the values of tolerance, respect to the human dignity, solidarity, honesty and justness are included. This would be only possible through the overcoming of the individualism in benefit of the wellbeing of the whole that is the collectivity. Therefore, the sensitization and the socialization of children and adolescents in a civic culture and communitarian living together are high-priority objectives for the basic education. The school, as educational institution and place of meeting of diverse individualities, is the essential nucleus for the formation of future citizens and social actors. In fact, besides transmitting the basic knowledge of language, science and culture, it transmits the ways of carrying out the activities where values are affirmed, as well as forms of being and living together. This is done through norms, rules and disciplinary approaches settled down by the traditions of the school culture that the children and youths should follow in the school community. These rules have arisen historically with the intention of regulating the individual behavior of the pupils to favor the emergence of a community ethics. This ethics should contemplate the interests of the whole collectivity, guiding the individualistic manifestations toward the collective interest. However, the unequal distribution of social and cultural goods between social sectors and the existence of different socioeconomic cultural strata create a partition in the social system where the parts have different beliefs, values and perceptions about the others and themselves. This is a source of aggressive behavior provoked by stigmatized perceptions between the parts. let us to ask the following questions: how can we ensure that students respect the ways of being and personal differences of their peers, when they observe in the society the categorization of people, the recognition of someone and the exclusion of others, the conflict and the individualism? How to wake up their social sensibility and to get the skills to engage with others, in the construction of a community they feel part of? Richard Savin (1976) sustains that from a perspective of the human psychological development, it is important that inside a net of interactions the individual finds a place for itself, a status. In this net, there are necessarily a pattern of power relationships based on the different capacities and personal abilities, being this pattern a constant feature in the structure of human relationships. In fact, the adolescents have such a great necessity to belong to a peer's collective that they agree to accept the conditions that they must cover to be accepted. These conditions depend on the collective's identity, its own values, belief and behavior systems and are related to the image that the collective wants to express. Among these requirements could be mentioned the physical characteristics, certain specific abilities and a sense of humor toward himself. The aim of this study is to answer the question of how can we enable students to respect the ways of being and personal differences of their peers, when they observe in their social environment multiple ways of categorizing people, recognizing some of them and excluding others, and the prevalence of conflict and individualism. In this work we presented a cybernetic cognitive conceptual model to explain misperceptions and aggressive behavior in students. We found that basic trust development through self-esteem and the value that the agent attributes to herself from the knowledge of her abilities, skills and limits, will positively influence cognitive distortions related with the decrease of her misperceptions and aggressiveness. Therefore, self-esteem, basic trust development and self-regulation of distorted perceptions must be developed through awareness and reflection. This development should be a precondition for educational intervention programs for the young people to develop social skills, as the necessary elements to change the aggressiveness that leads to antisocial behavior. After reviewing several proposals about educational intervention, particularly regarding the assessment planning, we identified the need to advance a paradigm that provides a dynamic perspective, interrelationships between parties and the emergence of new phenomena, because the educational change aimed at intervention, is the result of different dimensions, influences, conditions, and therefore, it cannot be analyzed considering only linear cause/effect relationships. In this proposal, we started from a dynamic social reality and focused on the emergence of small and medium self-organizational changes, where the trend of results will guide us towards continously adapting the intervention model. To focus on these processes, we have relied on complex systemic schemes that try to capture the dynamics of interrelationships. We note that the proposed monitoring processes of educational intervention here presented, is targeting educational real intervention projects, and subsequently we will be able to account for the results and challenges in implementing this model.