Thought

Under the initial guidelines of Conceptual Pedagogy (De Zubiría, M. and De Zubiría, J., 1986; De Zubiría, M., 1994 and 1996), the Alberto Merani Institute characterized four evolutionary cycles. This allowed us to guide and systematize the work on the development of thinking carried out at the institution during its first decade of existence. Its greatest contribution was to concentrate the work of teachers on the intellectual operations specific to each cycle, allowing us to break away from a curriculum that was, at that time, completely focused on particular, fragmentary, and disjointed information about each of the branches of knowledge. Boldly, Merani abandoned the curriculum in force in Colombian education in the 1980s and prioritized work on the development of thinking and reading comprehension. The results were generally satisfactory and encouraged us to continue deepening the pedagogical innovation initiated in 1988. However, this required several adjustments to the initial idea.

First, a deeper characterization of the cognitive tools specific to each of the cycles was necessary. For this characterization, it was crucial to review the concept of a concept and to diversify the representations of each of these tools, since the "mind maps" initially used in the institution (De Zubiría, M., 1996) showed us very negative effects on the flexibility of thought. It was therefore necessary to conclude that the concept and its components essentially depended on the context in which we operated to characterize it in one way or another. Thus, the immediately superior genus of a concept and its specific differences depended to a greater extent on contextual factors. Thus, for example, the essentiality of the concept "family" differs depending on whether it is characterized from an anthropological or pedagogical perspective. For anthropology, the family is a social institution established on the basis of blood ties, and this differentiates it from other social institutions such as schools or political parties, since blood ties are not essential in either of them. On the contrary, political parties are social institutions created to bring together individuals with similar ideologies in the pursuit of power; and the school—in this sense—would be an institution that brings individuals together for instruction—in the most common type of school we have encountered so far.

However, for pedagogy, the family is not a social institution established on the basis of blood ties, but rather an institution that performs a function analogous to the family itself, but in a different context and dimension. For pedagogy, the family is a formative institution at the individual level, essentially focused on the emotional and value-based processes of the individual. The difference with the school is that it carries out its formative process individually and with greater emphasis on the emotional and value-based dimensions of the individual. Meanwhile, their participation at the cognitive and practical levels is low, and their role in the individual's socializing dimension is relatively limited; while asymmetrical relationships prevail, particularly in families that increasingly tend to have fewer siblings, as is the case in the West, and even more extreme in countries like China, where having siblings is prohibited by law.

To make the previous example more complex, it can be argued that the concepts of school and family differ depending on the paradigmatic perspectives from which we start (Kuhn, 1963). Thus, the essentiality that a heterostructuring pedagogical model assigns to school is different from that assigned to a dialogical or self-structuring model (Not, 1983 and 2001; De Zubiría, 2006a). For a heterostructuring model, school should essentially be a place to foster instruction and the transmission of information and norms constructed by culture, so that new generations have access to the knowledge and norms created by human culture. For a self-structuring model, the essence of a school lies not in the transmission of accumulated information but in the socialization of children and in their search for their own identity and happiness; and for a dialogical model, the essence of school lies in seeking the development of children in each of their dimensions. For a dialogical model, the school should not focus on learning, but rather on development and on ensuring that such development allows for the humanization of the human being by fostering their ways and means of thinking, feeling, acting, and interacting (De Zubiría, 2006a).

As can be seen in the previous example, concepts are determined by the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which they are used; and they are reworked according to the paradigms we employ. Hence, it is necessary to carry out conceptual reworkings according to the different contexts in which we are using them.

Likewise, conceptual representation is preferable to be carried out through various diagrams, so that the concept is not identified with its representation and so that the opposite effect is achieved. And, as we are seeking the development of thought, rigidities and inflexibilities that run counter to the intentions of developing thought are not produced. Hence, for us, it was absolutely necessary to resort to various representative diagrams. Among them, Luria's "semantic fields" (1978, 1985 edition), conceptual pyramids (Bermúdez and Rodríguez, 2004), conceptual maps (Novak, 1980 and Novak and Gowin, 1982), mind maps (De Zubiría, M, 1996) and Venn diagrams; among others.