La comunidad de pensamiento mágico: Un laboratorio de cambio virtual para experimentar nuevas formas de aprender a leer y escribir en secundaria

Abstract

This research analyzes how a methodology of formative intervention in a virtual community contributes to the collective construction of knowledge among teachers to reorient writing and reading practices from a sociocultural approach. Placed within the scientific field of Didactic of Language and Literature, this research focuses on describing transformative processes in teaching practice (through conceptualizing activities) in which participants become aware of their own practice: what they think they do, what they do, what they would like to do, what they will do, and what they have been able to do. At the same time, the researcher has intended to verify if participants develop agency in order to improve their teaching activity system in terms of reading and writing. The research design has a qualitative orientation, and is particularized as a “case study”, carried out with a group of four Costa Rican middle and high school teachers, who have taken part in the Virtual Community of Magical Thought bulletin board system for a period of fourteen months. The training intervention methodology used does not focus on responding to a previously defined specific problem, but rather it emerges from the participants' activity system, and they are the ones who seek solutions. Some instruments of data building and analysis, which have been used are Engeström’s argumentative grammar, specifically human causality layers and Negueruela’s proposed semiogenetic analysis. Results intend to explain how first learning and experiences of teachers with reading and writing abilities come out of stimuli of social environment in which they develop and create a world of representations that transfer to their space of teaching performance. Through processes of reflection and internalization, teachers understand the contradictions and tensions they experience in their practice and acquire new understandings that allow them to transform it.

Date of Award	26 Sept 2017
Original language	Spanish
Supervisor	Teresa Ribas Seix (Director)