HECUA’s Teaching-Learning Approach
These principles are fundamental elements that characterize HECUA’s pedagogy. A summary follows.
1. The relationship between teacher and learner is based upon "cognitive equality" – the idea that all people involved in the educational process are participants of social conversations; differences in expertise and experience have to do with time, dedication and method. In this view, teachers and learners are partners in the educational project and its broad purposes.
2. Theory, understood as tool for critical reflection on reality when reality becomes problematic, is the core of the HECUA model. Students learn that all experiences are mediated through theory; everyone creates and uses theory whether or not it is explicit or well formulated.
3. Worldviews are social constructions and linked to systems of power. Any knowledge has historical, political, and economic context. The context intertwines the experiences of past generations into ongoing conversations.
Dominant worldviews are not neutral or objective, and they do not serve people’s interests equally. In order for people to become co-creators of society, we must be critical recipients of values, ideas, concepts and worldviews. Understanding knowledge as socially constructed forms a fundamental element of the HECUA model.
4. Critical thinking is the intellectual process through which students come to examine worldviews explored in the programs as they manifest themselves in specific areas of knowledge – urban studies, anthropology, economics, literature, art. Critical thinking involves the use of theory in the service of ethical ends. There are several intellectual steps involved.
The student’s first intellectual task is to recognize that knowledge is a social construction with ethical and political implications.
Careful examination of one’s own world view and its construction brings to light (and to question) patterns of behavior, fashion, consumption, common sense, and dominant metaphors accepted as normal. The pedagogue problematizes reality; the student learns to use theory as a tool for critical examination of reality as understood from various worldviews.
The student also learns there are multiple ways of seeing reality in different societies. (Critical examination of capitalism, especially in this time of economic globalization, is essential in HECUA programs.) All models are not equal. Choice of action must be made within ethical parameters.
The HECUA project is ultimately and explicitly an ethical project. The ethical dimension of HECUA’s educational purpose, therefore, is to promote civic responsibility by providing students with theoretical tools and experiences that allow them to understand critically their own society and the roles they have in it.
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