Learning guides: curriculum defined for the rural primary school from a New School model in Colombia

Abstract

For understanding the rural education in Colombia, it is necessary to focus attention on the Escuela Nueva model, which emerges in the 70´s of the 20th century as an alternative to improve the access problems to primary education by the rural population. Its implementation has more than half a century, and although its evaluation and revision has gone through different moments in the educational politics of the country and the academic research, the rural education that conceives and in-stalls the model, follows been a current topic in the rural multigrade schools. So, this article starts from the interest by understanding the curricular component of the Escuela Nueva model specifically the Learning Guides. The research enrolls in a qualitative study from which it was possible to trace the notions of school time, student and teachers present in the structure of the Guides. Among the findings, it was found that the Learning Guides operate as artifacts designed to account for, of anticipated way, of the needs of the teaching situation with a guiding and regulatory function of elapse of the teacher´s work. Likewise, it is concluded that the curriculum since the Escuela Nueva model is organized from a structuring of divided, separated and static content that does not consider the multi-grade didactic.