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Educare

Educare

OCTUBRE 2003 N° 1 Volumen 1

Deconstruction or loss of the knowledge: conceptual approximation and notes for a reflexive methodology to generate new professional knowledge

Section: TEACHING TO LEARN

Authors

José Luis Medina

Position

Profesor del Departamento de Didáctica y Organización Educativa de la Facultad de Pedagogía de la Universidad de Barcelona.

Contact address

Univ. de Barcelona. Facultad de Pedagogía. Depart. de Didáctica y Organización Educativa. Campus Mundet. Edificio de Levante 2º. Pº Valle d`Hebrón.

Contact email: jlmedina@ub.edu

Abstract

In today´s world, in which the promises of Illustration vanish into the thin air of our hopes, a paradox becomes increasingly apparent. While the "world of ideas" appears to be in turmoil, instable, and permanently in crisis, in search of new ways to make the internal and external reality of the human being intelligible, the world of "professional practices" appears to be stagnate in a sort of old fashioned rationality emerging from Aristotelian logic, Cartesian methodological prohibitions and Newton´s determinism. This stagnation and the "loss of aim" in the practice of care require more than ever before a careful examination and the questioning of the traditional ways in which we think, describe and orientate this practice.
Deconstruction as a reflexive method of critical questioning of reality helps us examine the theoretical structures that each individual has mastered, more often than not in an "acritical" manner, during his or her professional and formative trajectory. Thanks to the knowledge we acquire, we can critically examine the horizon of meanings that constitute the basis of our perception of reality and the way in which we assert our life. This questioning permits us to evoke the path that makes up our personal constructions, allowing us to identify some deficient areas, some gaps and the contradictions within our categorical frameworks.
This critical examination of our habitual ways of thinking and behaving in today´s world is not intended, however, to serve as a guide for this transition process towards more authentic and fundamental forms of awareness. The aim is simply to delete the evidence from our categories, from our habitual thinking patterns and from the way in which we describe the practices of care and its teaching. This goal is achieved by simply attempting to think of these ways in a different way, using different scales and with other connections. In this sense, the aim here is to avoid the arrogance of being in a privileged position from which we can show in an unequivocal and omnipotent manner the road towards truth and certainty. On the contrary, what we are looking for is to perform a continuous questioning exercise of what is evident and to accept the limits of our thinking patterns and the uncertainties of our time, because …. What is criticism, other than the permanent questioning of the experiences upon which constitute us?

Keywords:

deconstruction; loss of knowledge; critical thinking; complexity; technical rationalitythe problematic of knowledge

Versión en Español

Título:

La deconstrucción o desaprendizaje: aproximación conceptual y notas para un método reflexivo de generación de nuevos saberes profesionales