Alicia Camilloni; El Saber Didactico, La Didactica y los Docentes

3. Teachers and Didactic Knowledge, Erudite Didactics, Common Sense Didactics, and Pseudo-Erudite Didactics The great challenge is to give teachers access to genuine training in wise or erudite knowledge of didactics, and not to a simplistic reduction of it. Are Theories Useful? Yes, as long as they meet certain criteria: they must be tools, they must be applicable, they must be understandable, and they must not be misinterpreted or applied in a biased manner. Teachers' Beliefs Of course, teachers have beliefs about their work: how to teach, what to teach, how to evaluate, why to teach, why the educational system exists, and what their role is within it. These theories are often described in specialized literature by their four characteristics: they tend to be practical, meaning related to their professional work; they tend to be tacit, meaning unreflective patterns of action; they tend to be naive, meaning unrelated to their professional training; and they tend to be subjective or personal, unlearned, and non-transferable. All of them were generally formed in early childhood during their schooling years, which were less and less meaningful than their professional training years. Some say they cannot be changed, and others say it is difficult. All of them constitute Common Sense or Current Didactics. Bruner defines these as archaic ideas about teachers, their role, students, types of students, school, etc. They tend to be naturalizations, generalizations, and categorizations that are unquestionably and unreflectively. They are often based on slogans and sayings such as "focus on students," "meaningful learning," "teaching-learning process," etc. Which have replaced older and more disastrous ones, such as "a letter enters with blood," "what nature doesn't give, Salamanca doesn't lend." Or metaphors such as "school is like an organism," "like a company," etc. Pseudo-Erudition Didactics Contrary to current didactics or common sense, which can be more or less haphazard and contradictory, Pseudo-Erudition Didactics is consistent and dogmatic. It consists of always adhering to the latest Pedagogical Fashion, considering all new contributions as positive and discarding all previous knowledge. Erudition Didactics Didactics, to put it briefly and concisely, is a science. If the sciences are divided into Formal and Factual Sciences, and the latter into Natural and Social Sciences, then didactics is a Social Science. It is oriented toward investigating a Social Practice, which is Teaching or Pedagogical Action, with the goal of achieving the best teaching and its best design. Therefore, it is a science of the Artificial or of Design. Despite the proliferation of paradigms and theories within it, there is a coherent body of research with solid empirical foundations. 4. The Subject of Didactic Discourse: To Whom is Didactic Knowledge Addressed? Abstract, Concrete, Empirical