Conceptual Cycle

The Conceptual Cycle is one of the most studied intellectually, as it develops reversibility, and as a result, the invariants of quantity, weight, and volume emerge. Piaget demonstrates that the impossibility of conservation concepts stems from the lack of reversibility in thought. Since, until the beginning of this cycle, thought cannot "return" actions, the child is unable to maintain quantity, weight, or volume constant. When reversibility is achieved (mentally returning the action performed), the child acquires the concept of conservation. It is because they can mentally return the action performed that they understand that there has been no change in quantity, weight, or volume, despite the formal transformations the object has undergone.

The concepts of conservation will be essential for all work in mathematics, since it is not possible to understand any arithmetic operation without the concept of conservation of quantity. Likewise, the essential concepts of the natural sciences, particularly those of matter and energy, require principles of conservation of weight and volume. Consequently, this is the period par excellence to address the main concepts of the natural and social sciences. That is, to approach them from a scientific perspective.

As Vygotsky (1929, 1993 edition) demonstrated, everyday concepts are acquired empirically, by comparing external characteristics and starting from what is concrete and visually perceptible. Therefore, they can be acquired without the existence of schools, and are therefore acquired by children in their daily experience and living. Scientific concepts, on the contrary, express the internal characteristics of nature and society and, therefore, are not directly perceived through contact with reality. Thus, for example, the law of gravitation is invisible to the human eye, nor are atoms, microparticles, relativity, energy, power, social revolutions, black holes, or the relationship between inflation and currency devaluation. Despite what the Active School believes to the contrary, scientific concepts are not formed from our everyday experiences and experiences. If this were the case, neither schools nor teachers would be necessary.

Scientific concepts acquire their meaning and validity as long as they are part of an organized and hierarchical system of propositions, since they are theoretical and abstract. Therefore, they are not grasped in everyday experience. They require a mediator for us to grasp them; they require a teacher and a school that are deliberately and intentionally interested in their students' ability to grasp them.

The Conceptual Cycle must prepare young people to learn the main concepts of the social sciences, the natural sciences, and mathematics. This was one of the merits of Conceptual Pedagogy in its early years: having formulated the need to concentrate "primary" education, as it was called at that time, on learning the main concepts of each of the sciences. The text Fundamentals of Conceptual Pedagogy (De Zubiría M. and De Zubiría, J., 1986) culminated with a characterization of the main concepts to be addressed in the Social Sciences, and this characterization made it one of the areas that most clearly and distinctly defined its content at the Alberto Merani Institute from its early years. Despite this, it was only when we began working on comprehensive and general competencies (De Zubiría, 2008) that we were able to generate impacts in the development of more sensitive individuals, with greater social participation and a greater understanding of social problems—individuals with greater cognitive, evaluative, and praxiological development. In doing so, we emulated Morin (2001), who stated that an intelligence incapable of facing the context and the global complex became blind, unconscious, and irresponsible.

In any case, the program implemented from the early years at the Alberto Merani Institute for the area of ​​social sciences was profoundly daring in focusing its work not on geographical and historical information, as is the case in almost all basic education institutions around the world, but on the fundamental concepts of the social sciences, concepts derived primarily from sociology, political science, economics, and anthropology. This proposal also ran counter to that formulated in England by the research group known as 11-13, inspired by the emerging constructivist approach to education and supported the thesis that students should be taught to think in social terms and work as if they were historians or anthropologists, effectively leaving aside historical or geographical content.

At the language level, the essential work of the cycle consists of developing inferential reading and writing skills. This implies that, at the school level, students should be guided to initially locate explicit information and, through questions, lead them to make simple inferences. Mastery of this type of explicit inference should allow for the development of implicit inferences. To achieve this, it is necessary to integrate dispersed information and grasp relationships between the various parts of a text. This work should allow students to reach the macropropositions of texts and discourses (Van Dijk, 1997; Van Dijk et al., 2006). This process allows for the "cognitive reconstruction" of the most general propositions, and for this purpose, the use of the various rules postulated by Van Dijk as macrorules of generalization, deletion, and construction is recommended, while simultaneously promoting induction processes. (What principle, what law, what generalization could we make from what we have read so far?)

This set of strategies should equip students to understand discourses as complex symbolic structures in which the inference of explicit and implicit information plays a fundamental role. To achieve this, children must be able to identify basic inferences in different types of graphic discourses (cartoons, billboards, images, etc.). They must also be able to analyze the symbols, signs, and nonverbal signals that play a fundamental role in constructing the meaning of different graphic discourses (cartoons, billboards, images). However, to achieve this, it is essential that education understand that the contemporary world is visual, and that it therefore remains completely absurd for the language area to exclude most of the discourses students encounter and fail to prepare them for true interpretation. It makes no sense for the language area to address only written texts, ignoring more than 80% of the graphic, visual, and audiovisual discourses that children encounter every day at the beginning of the 21st century. This can only be understood by taking into account the highly conservative nature of the school structure prevailing in today's world (De Zubiría, 2006b).

At the evaluative level, the essential task of the cycle consists of discovering the other. Recognizing the other as a being who thinks, values, judges, and feels for themselves and independently of my thoughts, values, and feelings. It involves understanding their intentions and recognizing the validity of human subjectivity. It involves knowing them, feeling them, and valuing them as independent individuals.

In Wallon's terms, the Conceptual cycle is predominantly cognitive and essentially directed toward the formation of the self. The essential thing is to grasp the fundamental concepts in each area of ​​culture. Hence, the central activity is the activity of study (Elkonin and Davidov, 1987a). To understand this, we must keep in mind that during this period, school significantly changes a child's life. Their personal, social, and family life is shaped around it. Due to the school process, children change their schedules, responsibilities, and rights, as well as their social ties.