Academic Life

Hello everybody!

In this post we want to show you a section of a big project that we are currently doing for two of our subjects: General Didactic and School Management. Today we will talk about our School Experience, focusing on the Academic Life, but not on the formal education (exams, evaluation, degree etc.); we want to make emphasis on the learning that children achieve thanks to the informal education, which give a lot of importance to friends’ relationship, students’ participation, extracurricular activities…(Herrera, 2006) We think that this topic is very interesting, and we have read and studied a lot about it, and because of that, we have realized how important it is.

In primary school, there are some trips in the middle of the course, and children go to different places, but people don’t usually know why children do these types of activities. People think that it’s only a way to go out the school and break the routine in order to spend a great morning with the classmates, but there are a lot of things behind these excursions and plans.

For example, in our case, we remember some outings we did when we were in Primary School. We went to the Science Park in Granada, to the Farm School, to the Zoo… When we were children we only saw these moments like an opportunity to loose a class’ day and to enjoy with our friends. But now, we have another perspective and we have a different opinion. It’s true that these activities are not designed to teach in a specific way, but they allow for the development to learn some things that maybe we don’t work so much at school, like the respect we should have for the environment and the animals, the education in values against the violence, against the discrimination… the use of the dialogue to solve problems etc. Only going out the classroom and being educating outdoors, children feel more motivated (Touriñán, 2009).

These activities could seem useless, and maybe, there are people that think they are not considered in the didactic program, but the truth is that all these excursions are very considered, thought and studied in order to achieve the planned educative goals, which we have already explained.

It’s only an example of informal education. There are more and we will write about another one, which we think is very important from an educative point of view in another post.

See you soon!

References:

Herrera, M. (2006). La educación no formal en España. Revista de Estudios de Juventud, 11-25. Extraído el 3 de abril de 2017 desde http://www.injuve.es/sites/default/files/2017/08/publicaciones/revista_74.pdf

Touriñán, J.M.(2009). Análisis conceptual de los procesos educativos formales, no formales e informales: Revista Interuniversitaria,8,55-80. Extraído el 3 de Abril de 2017 desde: https://gredos.usal.es/jspui/bitstream/10366/71784/1/Analisis_conceptual_de_lorprocesos_educa.pdf