Improvisation in pedagogy: Continuity in a life

Abstract

I am submitting a partial investigation report. In general terms, its purpose is to recreate the history of the life of a female teacher from Hidalgo. In this paper I work from the perspective of an analytical approach of research to show that the way to get into the services of teaching without the corresponding education has been common in the teacher’s life, from her parents to her grandchildren. This paper is divided into three parts: the first one analyzes the need for pedagogical improvisation since the Secretaría de Educación Pública was created in 1921, moment in which the elementary school was considered as the key to reconstruct the country. In the second part I gather the teacher’s educational background within the state of Hidalgo, where pedagogical improvisation was kept during long decades as a priority for the establishment of elementary schools. In the third part I show the pedagogical trajectory of the teacher previously mentioned. Accordingly, I analyze the way in which her father as a rural teacher and the remembrance of her teachers, also rural and improvised, gave her the pattern for the teaching exercise. That idea allowed her into pedagogy in the fifties during the last century, and she also avoided the conflicts of getting a pedagogical major and even though –while she was at service– she acquired her academic credentials at the Instituto Federal de Capacitación para el Magisterio and later at the Universidad Pedagógica, she did not leave that particular idea of improvisation in order to have teaching as a way of sustaining her family. The history of life has as main source the search for information from the oral testimonies of people that are generally “not authorized” to be heard, because they don’t belong to certain social classes. Triangulation between oral testimony, archive research and bibliographical review is the base for this analytical work.