Developing Critical Thinking: Between Structures and Simulacrum

Abstract

The arguments presented here are the result of an investigation that had the objective of cartographically documenting the paths taken by the teacher educator in the face of the educational demands of developing critical thinking in their students. The research was carried out from a case study in a normal school in the south of the Estado de México. As part of the results, three paths stand out that are part of a whole cartography of being and doing a teacher. The first shows teachers regulated under hard strata, who adapt each study plan to their way of being because they have deeply rooted positions of their teaching work. The second shows the oscillation between the teacher's interest in the possibility of transforming their practice according to the demands of a study plan and the return to the hard stratum, circumstances that lead them to debate between the logic of an ingrained custom and the possibility to break up with it. Finally, the third path gives an account of the agency capacity that the teacher has and, in that sense, the faculty of breaking conceptual schemes to open up new ways of organizing the learning of their students and provoke the development of critical thinking.