Contextual Cycle
(6º, 7º y 8º)

From a physiological perspective, puberty is a period of profound changes leading to biological and social maturity, generating radical changes in the child's organism and in the interaction between the adolescent and society. This process generally begins first in women.

On the one hand, it is the quintessential period of growth and sexual maturation. The child's organism transforms rapidly into a body with marked adult features. The increase in muscular strength is evident in boys, while breasts and hips develop in girls. These profound hormonal changes occur in parallel with the identity crisis, the sexual crisis, and the crisis of authority that initiates puberty (Carvajal, 1993).

The sexual crisis is derived from the significant physiological changes linked to the hormonal explosion and the accompanying changes in self-image and social interactions. This is an accelerated sexual maturation that initiates the transition from childhood to adulthood, which tends to generate a situation of insecurity, instability, and anxiety in most young people.

Preadolescents explore interests, ideals, readings, friendships, and their particular way of using their time and space. This exploration will necessarily generate contradictions with the adult world that until then had defined their projects, spaces, and times. This is the period par excellence for close friends, writing poems, and keeping personal diaries. Preadolescents begin their journey to discover themselves, to differentiate themselves from those around them, and along the way, they will confront those who oppose their independence. Tensions with adult parents and teachers generally occupy a central place within them, as these previously acted as central elements in their relationships, to the point that Ausubel (1983) calls them the essential satellites up to this point. Hence the criticism of authority, relatively common from puberty onward, which will become more acute in adolescence itself and in the Projective cycle, giving rise to a crisis of authority and a transition toward an ever-increasing satellization of the reference group of peers. From the essentially individual child, we move to the preadolescent stage, in which intense and intimate friendships between couples, usually of the same sex, predominate.

On an ethical and evaluative level, the essential tension arises between "being oneself" and "being anyone." As Gerardo Andrade will affirm in the following chapter, we have all experienced the conflict of seeing our personal desires and longings opposed to those of others, or of finding ourselves compelled to act differently than we would like. This situation constitutes the tension between "being oneself" and "being anyone." The tension in this cycle tends toward the "being anyone" pole, while in the Exploratory cycle it tended toward the "being oneself" pole. By "being anyone," we abstract our individuality to become part of a group, a conglomerate, or a team. And we could not do this if the "being oneself" pole were privileged. Despite this, this pole will continue to influence the evaluative and ethical development of the individual, as we can only define our ethical stance by becoming "ourselves."

As will be discussed in the next chapter, education begins through understanding the self (Exploratory Cycle) and the other (Conceptual Cycle), the interpretation of their intentionality, and the recognition of the validity of human subjectivity, which is an encounter between human beings whose essential objective is to generate meaning for life. The first school cycle allows us to identify and discover ourselves. The second cycle allows us to identify and characterize others. From this understanding, we can also speak of the understanding of context (Contextual Cycle) and the understanding of transcendence (Projective Cycle). Consequently, what is characteristic of this period at an ethical and evaluative level is the understanding of context: who we are in a given context in which others exist, and we embody and assume ourselves as ethical beings in these social, natural, cultural, and historical conditions in which we were called to live, and from which we draw nourishment and which we help to transform, as we establish interstructuring relationships with this environment.

It should be noted, however, that the term "comprehension" does not refer exclusively to the cognitive dimension, hence the "h" to differentiate it from that meaning. Comprehension implies a meaningful intersubjective relationship that involves both objective and subjective factors and transcends the merely cognitive field to extend to attitudes and behaviors. Each understanding, as explained in the third chapter, is developed through three axes: the sources of ethics, the value tensions, and the connection, while also involving metacognitive, metasensitive, and metapractical aspects.

At the intellectual level, Piaget studied in detail the intellectual operations characteristic of adolescence and concluded that they would allow for the consolidation of formal cognitive structures, because they contained the operations of formal logic in an integrated manner, with control of variables, a predominance of the possible over the real, and the emergence of hypothetical-deductive thinking (Piaget, 1974, and Piaget and Inhelder, 1980). Formal thinking, as Piaget demonstrated, is free of content, and therefore the question of its veracity is irrelevant. It is a type of thinking, as its name indicates, that seeks formal logical coherence, and by abandoning content, the concern for veracity disappears. Its infinite strength lies in its concern for validity and coherence. Its immense limitation is that formal logic is clearly insufficient for interpreting the world (Lefebvre, 1972). Piaget (1955) defines formal thinking based on five characteristics. Let's summarize each of them.

First, formal thought reverses the order of reasoning that had governed until then. There is an inversion in the sense of the real and the possible. The young person privileges and subordinates the real to the possible. He considers all the possibilities of the real, not just those directly expressed in reality. If he speaks of the family, he could think about multiple types of families, not just those that have existed up to that point. He is not limited to those he knows in practice. If he speaks of politics, he could reflect on various forms of expression of power and the state, not just those he has known. And thus he operates in multiple fields. His priority is the possible, not the real. Thought is empowered, since the real thus appears as only a subset of the possible. And this allows his reflections to broaden. In his terms:

The second property of formal thought is the emergence of hypothetical-deductive thought processes. Thus, formal thought begins with a hypothetical situation and draws conclusions from it. To do so, the hypothesis is assumed to be true, and possible deductions from it are established in order. (It also operates based on concrete cases until a hypothesis is formulated through an inductive process.) It is hypothetical in that it begins with a situation that has not necessarily occurred, but that logically could occur. And it is deductive because it develops chains of implications from the situation initially anticipated as possible. The typical way of expressing it is through the question "what would happen if…?" For example: What would happen if the world were ruled by women? What would happen if Columbus had not reached America? What would happen if Nazism had won World War II? What would happen if schools developed young people's thinking? What would happen if…?

The third distinction of formal thought is that it establishes—as Piaget asserts—a "logic of propositions" that no longer refers to real facts, but to hypothetical ones. This allows us to understand it as a type of thinking that uses "second-order" operations related to abstractions and relationships. Abstractions and relationships become propositions and objects of reflection.

The fourth of its characteristics has to do with the emergence of inductive and deductive intellectual operations within an overall structure. This allows for the development of chains of propositions in two directions: from the general and abstract to the particular and concrete, and from the particular and concrete to the general and abstract.

Examples of inductive processes include the following: What do people who obtain excellent academic results in a given school have in common? Or what do teachers who generate the most interest in students in a particular course at an educational institution do in their classes? Or what do schools with the best results in the ICFES have in common? Any of the above questions can be resolved inductively if we proceed from each of the previous cases and find regularities and generalities within them. For example, if we find the common characteristics of the schools with the best ICFES scores in Bogotá and compare them with those obtained by the best schools in other regions, we can find characteristics that present a greater degree of generality. Likewise, if we find common characteristics of the best boys' schools and compare them with the best girls' and coeducational schools to reach a greater level of generality. As can be seen, induction is a process by which regularities are found among different cases, and through them, we can reach greater abstractions. It is a process in which we go from the particular to the general, until we reach conclusions, principles, or laws of a more general nature.

Formal thinking operates in two directions: from the general to the particular and from the particular to the general. The first case is known as deduction, and in it, general laws are applied to particular situations. Induction is the exact opposite process, in which one generalizes from initially specific situations or facts.

In this way, the young person, armed with their concepts and using propositions as a reference, will be able to establish qualitatively new relationships between them. With the advent of formal thought, propositions are linked to each other inductively (generalizing) and deductively (particularizing).

The enormous educational power of mastering formal inductive and deductive operations lies in the fact that they considerably enhance and multiply learning, while simultaneously reducing the time invested in them. This is so because if, for example, deduction is mastered, with a single learning process, seven or eight propositions not directly studied but included in the general proposition could be derived. This means, neither more nor less, that this student would be learning at a rate seven or eight times greater than another who was not capable of using deductive processes.

A fifth modification introduced with formal thinking is the ability to analyze hypothetical situations, while systematically controlling the variables; that is, ensuring that the expected effect is realized between the two expected variables and not through the interference of other types of unconsidered aspects. In this case, hypothetical situations can be analyzed systematically, evaluating the effect of one situation on the others, while holding all other factors constant.

However, as recent studies from the perspective of historical-cultural approaches have shown (Moll, Rogoff, Baquero, Wertsch, Bruner, Zilberstein and Silvestre, Salomon, among others), formal thought cannot be accessed outside of school, since hypothetical and deductive thinking is only acquired through cultural mediation. In this sense, Piaget's hypothesis that maturation processes allow access to formal structures is invalidated. This is evidenced by multiple studies conducted worldwide that find levels of generality far lower than those expected by genetic epistemology. Once again, we find an overemphasis on biological factors and an undervaluation of social factors, an aspect that tends to characterize Piaget's theory of evolutionary development. In the words of Rogoff, 1993, (cited by Baquero, 1996: 107) (S.N.).

At the level of the development of sociolinguistic skills, the ability to read an essay relatively clearly and to be able to "cognitively reconstruct the underlying macrostructure of propositions" (Van Dijk, 1998: 55) demonstrates the fundamental role that contextualization plays in the process of reading comprehension and interpretation. In reading and writing, contextualization takes on various meanings, as factors from the linguistic, individual, and sociocultural context intervene.

At the linguistic level, the context of the accompanying words and sentences must be taken into account. Thanks to contextualization, words are inferred (from the first and last letters, we infer the complete word). Given the enormous polysemy of language, this is an essential aspect for differentiating homonyms and for inferring unclear terms for the reader, taking into account the contextual words that accompany them. A few pages back, we showed that Luria had discovered a profound connection between thought and language; thus, he concluded that words introduce language into a complex system of connections and relationships called the "semantic field." Several of these connections and relationships can be understood through contextual analysis, as demonstrated by eliminating the meaning of a homonymous word or extracting the meaning of a word once we know the meaning of its root and extending it to other words that share the same root.

Up to this point, we have discussed contextualization at the linguistic level, as well as at the psychological and intrapersonal level; however, context is also cultural, natural, social, and historical, as we have explained in other sections of this and the previous chapter. Therefore, a full understanding of a literary, artistic, or scientific work requires adequate social, cultural, and historical contextualization. In this way, relationships are established between the text and the context (Van Dijk et al., 2001).

As the Historical-Cultural School rightly points out, cognitive, evaluative, and praxiological processes are demarcated by the historical and cultural contexts in which the subjects live. Therefore, understanding and interpretation always imply taking into account the historical and cultural context in which the author lives and in which the work is developed, which are not necessarily similar. The historical and cultural contextual nature of every process must be considered. That is to say, a theory, a feeling, or a praxis could not be understood if the social, economic, and political contexts in which they were conceived or those they represent were unknown. This school prioritizes the analysis of the social and historical contexts in which ideas are formulated and developed in order to adequately understand, interpret, and evaluate them. We are—as Merani would say in one of his most critical works on current psychological theories—historically and culturally determined beings. Thus, individuals are born by birth, we remain in historical being for a duration, and we realize our being in the sociocultural circumstances in which we live (Merani, 1976). Thus, for example—as Hymes demonstrated—someone who were to offer condolences to a friend who lost a loved one would almost certainly use culturally determined words such as: "I'm so sorry," "my condolences," or "I share your grief." Almost without variation, some of the above terms will be uttered by all those who accompany the family member of the deceased in their grief, at least in our Western context. Likewise, for such an event, we will wear discreet clothing, almost without exception black or gray, we will speak in a low voice, we will walk slowly, and during the ceremony we will assume an attitude of sadness and melancholy. It would be highly decontextualized for a friend of the deceased to arrive to sing, dance, tell jokes, or place bets, at least in our Western and Christian context.

In Wallon's terms, Contextual is a cycle dominated by interaction with the environment and the social and linguistic dimensions of human beings. Centrifugal forces therefore predominate, and the central activity could be thought to be communication and interaction with peers. Young people spend most of their time talking and reflecting with their peers.