Jmer 2018-1

Journal of
Modern Education Review

Volume 8, Number 1, January 2018
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Journal of
Modern Education Review
Volume 8, Number 1, January 2018
Contents
Engineering Education
1 The Emancipatory Process of Teacher Bacharel in Engineering in Their Training Period:

1975–2016
Magnaldo de Sá Cardoso, Maria do Amparo Borges Ferro
17 Geographic Distribution of the Engineering Schools Registered within Crea in Minas Gerais,
Brazil
Enid Brandão Carneiro Drumond, Almeida Eliane, Rodrigues João, Leonido Levi
Social Science Education
27 The School Lag of Students in Poverty

Celia Carrera Hernández, Josefina Madrigal Luna, Yolanda Isaura Lara García
33 Belonging in Time: Australian Women Playwrights in a Changing Landscape

Janys Hayes
40 Tailor-made Teaching of University Practical Language Course in Hong Kong

Ho Wai Chi, Vichy
45 Visitors’ Interests for the Croatian Natural History Museum Publications — Analysis of Visitors’
Attitudes on Museum Publications
Renata Brezinščak
55 Self-Directed Learning Ability of the Students in Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology and
Education Vietnam — Reality and Development Direction
Truong Minh Tri, Bui Van Hong, Vo Thi Xuan
64 Art, Emancipation and the Colombian Reconciliation after the Peace Process
Sergio Bedoya Cortés
Journal of Modern Education Review, ISSN 2155-7993, USA
January 2018, Volume 8, No. 1, pp. 1–16
Doi: 10.15341/jmer(2155-7993)/01.08.2018/001
© Academic Star Publishing Company, 2018
http://www.academicstar.us
The Emancipatory Process of Teacher Bacharel in Engineering in Their
Training Period: 1975–2016
Magnaldo de Sá Cardoso, Maria do Amparo Borges Ferro

(Federal University of Piauí-UFPI, Brazil)
Abstract: This work analyzes the emancipatory process of the professional bachelor of engineering in UFPI,
Brazil, in his academic training and educational practices. It accompanies the emancipatory process involving the
teacher and his praxis, highlighting the form of access of the professional to the teaching of higher education. It
seeks to understand how this teacher, who does not have in his initial training studies directed to teaching, acted in
practice in the classroom in a freeway. It reflects on the engineering curriculum, and makes considerations about
the teacher as critical intellectual identifying the classroom as a space for learning and adaptation to everyday
school situations. The central question that this paper seeks to answer is the contribution of the academic
institution to the process of emancipation of relationships and the interactions that are established, both outside
and inside the working and learning environment, important axes that support the development in the formation of
teachers. The cut comprises the period 1975 to 2016 and is based on a historiographic study based on Cultural
History by authors such as Roger Chartier. It is influenced by Michel de Certeau, ViñaoFrago, AntónioNóvoa,
Maurice Halbwachs, Cecília Souza, some of whom deserve greater prominence.
Key words: history of education, engineering teaching, higher education
1. Introduction
This paper intends to reconstruct the history, memory and pedagogical practices of the bachelor of
engineering in the Technology Center of the Federal University of Piauí — CT/UFPI/Brazil. It is also envisaged to
understand how this teacher, who came from a Center for Teaching Training in Exact Sciences and, therefore, did
not have in his initial training studies focused on teaching, he acted in his practice in the classroom. How did the
engineer professor develop his formative trajectory and how did he record his passage and participation in the
chain of interrelationships in the classroom of his professional teaching practice? This is the central question that
this research project seeks to answer.
Starting from the proposal to reconstruct through the present manuscript the history, memory and the
professional course of pedagogical practices of the bachelors teachers in engineering of the Technology Center of
the UFPI, Brazil, a study was made about how the process of professional teacher development took place of the
teacher engineer, who goes through the rescue/reconstruction of the history of education, daily life, pedagogical
ideals and practices, pedagogical didactic resources used and appropriated by these teachers throughout their
Magnaldo de Sá Cardoso, Master Degree, CEUPI-Centro de Ensino Unificado do Piauí; research areas/interests: education. E-mail:
ecoelho2@yahoo.com.br.
1
The Emancipatory Process of Teacher Bacharel in Engineering in Their Training Period: 1975–2016
teaching trajectory. The study set out to reflect on the following questions to arrive at an understanding of the path
taken by the professional of engineering to become professional of the education. These are the questions: (a)
What is the profile of a bachelor’s degree in engineering; (b) What didactic resources were used during the
trajectory in the pedagogical practice of the teaching activity; (c) In what way was the “adaptation” of the teacher
in Technology, faced with the challenges to the exercise of the Higher Magisterium, in relation to pedagogical
knowledge and teaching practices; (d) What investments are made by the bachelor’s degree in engineering in the
development of his/her profession; (e) How the process of training and professional development of a bachelor’s
degree in engineering in the teaching career is characterized.
The first concern about this work, goes back to the author's own academic trajectory, which in the course of
researching his master’s thesis on the historical trajectory of the Technology Center/UFPI, heard from the teachers
interviewed, main characters of the retelling events, life histories, how they entered for the teaching of higher
education, without any teaching experience or have studied in their undergraduate courses or even attended some
course or isolated discipline preparatory to university teaching.
This research identified that, in the composition of the teaching staff of the Technology Center of the UFPI,
in its first moments, there was no proven teacher with teaching practice in higher education institutions. On the
other hand, it was also observed that there was, as there is, to date, in the curricular matrix of engineering degree,
any specific discipline, preparatory to a possible option of the graduate, by teaching.
Considering the mastery of the content of the subject that is taught only a necessary but not sufficient
condition to the teaching work, since the content taught in the classroom is never transmitted simply such and
such “[it] is transformed, that is to say, staged for an audience, adapted, selected according to the understanding of
the group of students and of the individuals that compose it” (Tardif, 2002, p. 120). Thus, from the previous
research, this disturbing question about the pedagogical practices of higher education teachers from undergraduate
courses that did not aim to train education professionals was rescued. However, considering the delimitation of the
theme, object and universe of the research, it was defined as the focus of interest of the present work, the history,
the memory and the emancipatory process of pedagogical practices of the teacher engineer in the higher teaching
of the courses of engineering at the Federal University of Piauí.
2 Review of Literature
The reconstitution of the history and memory of pedagogical practices of the bachelors professor in
engineering is also the rescue of his cultural patrimony. Understanding the term cultural heritage, in the light of
the vision of Michel de Certeau (1996, p. 191), in which the latter is expanded, the approach is adopted, which
states that:
[...] the renewal that departs from the educational and state perspectives that encouraged the preservation of a
treasury of public interest. [...] it is less interested in monuments than in ordinary habitat, less with a
circumscription of national legitimacy than with exogenous historicities of local communities. [...] less with a
privileged cultural period than with collages made by successive re-employment of the same constructions.
It is precisely at this point that it becomes fundamental to reconstitute the history and memory of pedagogical
practices of the bachelors professor in engineering, aiming at a reflection on the dimensions of spaces of memory,
trying to make problematization of the reality in which one lives, through the understanding of its construction
process. Therefore, the present research consists of a historiographical study based on Cultural History, through
2
authors such as Roger Chartier (1990). As regards the analysis of the daily teaching, school culture and memories
of teaching staff of Engineering and Architecture of the Technology Center, receives subsidies from the studies of
Antonio Nóvoa (1992); Viñao Frago (1993); Michel de Certeau (1996) and Cecília, Cortez & Sousa (2000).
Thus, in order to understand the development of the teaching profession of engineering bachelors teachers, it
is necessary to make an incursion for their Life History in the sense that is attributed by Souza (2006a, p. 29), in
which the History of Life can be a method as it can be understood only as a technique of data collection “is both
method, because it has achieved in its historical process vast theoretical documentation, as a technique, because it
also enjoyed conflicts, consensus and theoretical and methodological implications on its use”. The History of Life
brings an intimate relationship between the interlocutor and the researcher. Each participant will try to reflect on
his / her own formation process and to be aware of the strategies, spaces, and moments that have shaped him / her
throughout his / her life (Nóvoa, Finger, 1988, p. 11).
Often this process of formation takes place unconsciously, without a rigorous reflection on the subject, which
stems from a natural march of professional development.
Throughout his personal and school life history, it is assumed that the future teacher internalizes a certain
number of knowledge, beliefs, values, etc., which structure his personality and his relations with others and
are re-used and reused in a non-reflective way, but with great conviction, in the practice of their craft (Tardif,
2002, p. 72).
Thus, the teacher is forming a framework of experiences and knowledge necessary for the activity that seeks
to exercise.
The fact that the author of this work was a participant in this process of historical construction of the
bachelors professor in engineering at the Technology Center, given the condition of being a former faculty
member of that Teaching Center since its inception, requires the adoption of a posture vigilant in the sense of not
being influenced by the position previously occupied or by the involvement motivated by the proximity of the
occurrence of the historical facts raised here. It is the firm conviction that the elements of Brazilian History of
Education can be rescued and reconstructed through memory, as taught by Ferro (2000, p. 22), which moves the
interest in carrying out the present proposal of scientific investigation.
Memory is always an interpretation influenced by the experience of the present. All the work of the historian
is a representation of the past. But it is, moreover, a selection of what is considered important. Memory constructs,
reconstructs, re-elaborates, re-signifies the past (Ferro, 2000, p. 22).
It is not intended to make a faithful recovery of the past, but rather to record the researcher's perception of the
research object, contributing, from his vision of history, the memory and the emancipatory path of pedagogical
practices of the bachelors professor in engineering Center for Technology, for knowledge in the area of Education,
especially with regard to teacher training in higher education.
2.1 Reflections on Teaching in Technology
One of the most challenging experiences experienced by the engineer or another graduate in technological
areas, when choosing to teach, is the confrontation of the classroom, in view of being the place where the
pedagogical practice is constituted, even in very ordered classes of situations not controlled, unprecedented,
dictated by the interaction between teacher-student-content-environment. Consequently, there are no “ready
recipes” of teaching behavior to control these actions occurring in a space conducive to debate, representations
and actions resulting from these interactions. It should be noted that in the composition of the teaching staff of the
3
UFPI Technology Center, in its early stages, there was no proven teacher with a teaching practice in higher
education institutions.
We can confirm what was said, following the testimony of teacher Rafael-Vitor do RêgoMonteiro, on his
admission to the UFPI:
[...] then I went back to Rio and Professor Camillo asked me to research new courses that he wanted to create.
[...] I started to visit universities; I started with PUC, which was mine. [...] What happened was this: where I
came everyone thought I should accept. I was just talking to teachers; they were all people who really liked
the teaching field, in love. Everyone thought that I should accept.... That it was a unique opportunity, that at
the age that I was ... That no one would lose that opportunity, to create a new area in a university, soon in a
Federal University.
The argument is that it was a rare opportunity to “create an area and then a Federal University”. There is no
allusion to any specific “training” or aptitude for teaching. The prof. Rafael accepts the invitation, justifying that:
[...] I was not thinking about going back ... But it was exactly the contacts that I had with the professors of th7
se universities ... Then my own boss put the sentimental side too – “boy, you know, go near your family, to
your land”. [...] I know that in the end, I ended up coming back.
It can be observed that there is, in the report, any reference to the teaching practice or externalized feeling
regarding the vocation to the exercise of teaching.
There was no, and there is, in the training of the engineer, any specific discipline, preparing it for a possible
option for acting in teaching. In turn, technology teaching faces a huge challenge: how to prepare the
teacher-engineer (or the teacher engineer) to perform the teaching function? How to equip him with knowledge,
knowledge and pedagogical practices for the exercise of higher teaching? How to instruct him on the subtle
nuances that occur in the classroom every day? How to inform you about the planning, methodologies or
evaluations that occurred during the teaching process? That is, “the constituent elements of the teaching
profession, namely: academic formation, concepts, specific contents, ideals, objectives, regulation, code of ethics,
own characteristics that constitute the initial formation of the teacher” (Pimenta & Anastasiou, 2002, p. 107).
Thus, it is considered that the teacher in Engineering does not receive any initial academic training for the
proper exercise of the teaching function. Then, it is assumed that it is only in the exercise of their functions and in
the practice of their profession that teachers develop the knowledge, which Tardif (2002, p. 39) defined as
knowledge of experiences or practices, in which teachers
[...] they develop specific knowledge, based on their daily work and the knowledge of their environment.
These knowledges spring from experience and are validated by it. They are embodied in individual and
collective experience in the form of habitus and skill, know-how and know-how (Tardif, 2002, p. 40).
Understanding the habitus, according to Bourdieu (1972, pp. 178-179), as being

This system of durable and transposable dispositions which, integrating all past experiences, functions at
every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions, and makes possible the accomplishment
of infinitely different tasks, thanks to the analogical transferences of schemes that allow problems of the same
nature.
Aware that at present, in engineering teaching, there is a professional practice, based on technical rationality.
The basic idea of the model of technical rationality (Schön, 1995), the professional practice that consists in the
instrumental solution of problems by applying a theoretical and technical knowledge, previously available that
4
comes from scientific research. The practice would imply the intelligent application of this knowledge to the
problems faced by a professional, in order to find a satisfactory solution. A model with characteristics identified in
the scientific knowledge acquired by positivism, created by Auguste Comte (1786–1857), which valued
observation and interest in nature, the relevance of probability and deduction, the mathematization of nature, the
notion of experience, coincidence and predictability (Alves-Mazzotit, 1998).
2.1.1 Education: Challenging Aspects
With the globalization of the third industrial revolution, characteristic of postmodernity, the media, with its
speed of transmitting information, make the importance of school institutions and teachers more explicit (Alarcâo,
2001, p. 26). In this sense, one of the major challenges of the university is to mediate between the information
society and students, in order to enable them to acquire the necessary conditions for the permanent construction of
the human. According to Pimenta and Anastasiou (2002, p. 102):
The university, as an educational institution, is configured as a public service of education that is effective
through teaching and research, with the following purposes: creation, development, transmission and criticism
of science, technology and culture; preparation for the exercise of professional activities requiring the
application of scientific knowledge and methods and for artistic creation; scientific and technical support to
the cultural, social and economic development of societies (Pimenta & Anastasiou, 2002).
Teaching at university is characterized as a process of search and scientific construction and critical
knowledge. Thus, according to Pimenta and Anastasiou (2002, p. 104), the task of teaching at university
presupposes the following dispositions:
- consider the process of teaching and learning as an integrated activity to research;
- propose the substitution of teaching that is limited to the transmission of theoretical contents by a teaching
that constitutes a process of investigation of knowledge;
- integrate the research activity with the teaching activity of the teacher, which implies teamwork; - seek to
create and recreate learning situations;
- to value the diagnostic and comprehensive evaluation of the activity more than the evaluation as a control;
- to seek to know the cognitive and cultural universe of the students and, based on this, to develop interactive
and participatory teaching and learning processes.
These provisions refer, in addition to the specific and pedagogical knowledge, options and ethical
commitments to the results of teaching, sensitivity and wisdom of teachers.
In testimony given to the CPI of the Chamber of Deputies, installed to examine higher education in the
country in 1968, Teixeira (1968, p. 54), quoted by Candau (1987, p. 15), refers to the great expansion of Veiga &
Amaral (2002, p. 108), and a large number of higher education institutions in full activity, created in recent years,
are particularly noteworthy. Installation of courses in which purely expositive teaching is taught, which requires
only a classroom, for lecture, without the use of equipment.
Teaching then becomes a valuable and rare commodity, disputed for the reasons and interests of the most
varied. The professionals of the bachelors of different areas (doctors, psychologists, engineers, lawyers,
economists, etc.) enter the field of teaching in higher education as a natural consequence of these activities and
thanks to the competition, moreover, disputed between private colleges of higher education. Most of the time,
these professionals never questioned the meaning of being a teacher. Therefore, “his transition to teaching occurs
5
naturally; sleep professionals and researchers and wake up teachers!” (Pimenta & Anastasiou, 2002, p. 104).
Like several other professors hired at the time by the UFPI, teacher Antonio Manoel Castelo Branco was also
“surprised” by a phone call that gave rise to his hiring. The following excerpts from his testimony, in which he
reaffirms.
[...] I was still completing my postgraduate course in Spain in Irrigation Engineering. [...] I was still there
when they phoned me, offering this role of Director of the Technology Center. [...] That was an extraordinary
challenge, after all, at the time I was only 24 years old, very young even for a great responsibility. And when I
arrived in Teresina, I went directly to the Federal University and he (Professor Camillo) only showed me a
document of the Foundation’s Board of Directors, authorizing the entrance exams that would be held at the
end of July for Technologists courses. [...] And also showing me a Resolution creating the Administrative
Model that I would manage.
According to Antonio Manoel, this “suddenly found himself” teacher of undergraduate education, and even
more, director of a Technology Center. And the most aggravating, according to Pimenta and Anastasiou (2002, p.
104), “the institutions that receive them already assume that they are so, thereby absolving themselves of
contributing to make them teachers.” Adding to this analysis the fact that in the University Reform, Law 5540/68,
art. 12, paragraph 3, creating the department, as a smaller fraction of the structure of the university, for the
purposes of administrative, didactic-scientific organization and distribution of personnel, made up of related
disciplines. This has institutionally fragmented teacher training. For in the words of Veiga and Amaral (2002, p.
112), “inasmuch as the disciplines that make up the specific and pedagogical contents of teaching were distributed
in several departments, the question of fragmentation in teacher training became even more intensified”.
On access to teaching in higher education, teacher Paulo de Tarso Cronemberger Mendes offers the
testimony:
[...] In 1978 I returned to Teresina. And one of my interests was to join the UFPI. I already had an experience
at the UFPE, I was a monitor when I was an engineer of a structural engineering company there in
Pernambuco, and one of the owners of the company had a health problem and asked me to replace him at the
Catholic University in Civil Engineering. [...] I was at the Technology Center and I left my resume there. I
competed and at the time, if I'm not mistaken, Fernando Drumond and Arnold Magalhães were classified.
And for a momentary contingency Fernando Drumond had to go to São Luis because he worked at
Construtora Poty. And then I took over that job. I took up and started to teach a course at the beginning of the
course, General Mechanics I.
In excerpts from his testimony, from prof. Wilson Martins de Sousa relates how his own UFPI
[...] I, in particular, can assure you that I did not even imagine being a CT teacher. I had graduated, I had run
for Petrobras, I went to Nuclerbrás in Rio de Janeiro and I had already taken internal courses. [...] At a dinner,
Professor Antonio Manoelbeing present, he told me that the Federal Technology Center of Piauí, at that time
being born, was having difficulties because in the next few days he would need someone to take care of
Geology. [...] Here, Professor Antonio Manoel took me to Mestre Camillo, already with the idea that I being
hired at that time, would attend to the TC and the CCN. [...] I placed my functional situation in terms of
salaries at Nuclerbrás, and he told me: “If the Piauíans do not take care of their Piauí, outsiders, if they take,
will not take with the love that the piauienses would take”. Then I confess that after those days, I returned to
Rio with the idea that I would give a brief answer to what was put by the Rector.
The Prof. Wilson Martins reports that when he returned to Rio de Janeiro, he was informed that it would be
crowded at Nuclerbrás offices in the south of the country. This was not in his interest, since his preferences were
6
the offices based in Bahia, Pernambuco or Ceará, cities of the Northeast preferably, the closest to Teresina. He
says that if he does not succeed, he makes the decision:
[...] I could not, so that was the reason why I came here. [...] The classroom adaptation I have to say that I was
no amateur in teaching, because since the first year of College and I was a teacher of Drawing. Moreover, the
disciplines that involved me here were very early disciplines, those that by training were already quite
familiar with their contents. And the time was just giving us more white hair and experience so that we would
adjust the discipline according to the need. It repeats the fact that there is no training in the pedagogical area.
Record the “monitoring experience” of Prof. Paulo de Tarsus and the “experience in drawing classes” of Prof.
Wilson Martins. However, no reference is made to the knowledge acquired for teaching. Knowing well the subject
to be taught is only a necessary condition, and not a sufficient condition, of the pedagogical work. In other words,
content taught in the classroom is never simply transmitted as such “[...] it is interacted, transformed, that is,
staged for an audience, adapted, selected according to the understanding of the group of students and of the
individuals composing it ” (Tardif, 2002, p. 120).
However, whatever the variation from one class to another, pedagogical practice consists of a succession of
micro-decisions of the most varied natures, as taught by Perrenoud (1997, p. 37); and goes further, in a moment of
work, with a large group, we must manage simultaneously:
- the intellectual structuring of interactions;
- its didactic evolution, in the sense of a discovery or a provisional synthesis;
- the climate and the overall dynamics of the class group;
- the interventions or individual conduct of a part of the pupils;
- external interactions (someone who knocks, an incident in the playground, the student whose chair breaks,
rain falling suddenly etc.);
- the maximum time available before the next activity or play.
Thus, the classroom is a stage, and acting in this scenario presupposes the individual to be endowed with a
repertoire more or less vast, that can adequately encompass the situations found in the classroom. Surely, the
practice of teaching is the practice of an art.
Some results of the document entitled “Weights on some evaluation results (1994–1995), carried out at the
Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), are presented below, with the purpose of raising the level of
satisfaction the student body, with the degree of appropriation and objectification of the technical-scientific and
pedagogical knowledge of its teachers” (Rosemberg, 2002, p. 58). These are data collected through exploratory
study whose sources of information were the reports of institutional evaluation, based on the statements of the
students of that HEI, thus made explicit:
[...] The teaching staff leaves much to be desired, presenting a didactic performance where the theory-practice
link does not occur.
[...] There is a need for greater specialization of teachers in certain areas linked to the labor market.
[...] The content is already outdated, and disciplines are largely of low application in the labor market.
[...] The insertion of the course in the modern age is indispensable because it is already becoming obsolete.
The course is out of the reality: the curriculum outdated and out of sync with the professional training that the
7
job market demands.
[...] Teachers understand the university outside the productive process, as if they were just forming other
professors and researchers, not professionals to work in the labor market.
[...] Postgraduate students have high theoretical knowledge and little practical knowledge, have no market
experience and are somewhat outdated.
[...] The outdated curriculum does not form the professional that the market needs and wants to have.
[...] There are trained teachers, but completely lay in teaching practice, causing disinterest in class.
The statements of the student body raised indicate that the conditions of operation of undergraduate courses
and the performance of teachers were problematic. In this way, teacher training was a factor that discriminated the
quality of teaching taught at UFES. Concludes the survey:
We believe that, even today, as far as teacher training is concerned, this situation has not changed. This
assertion is based on the certainty that little or nothing has been done concretely in this sense, or that the
structural and conjunctural issues that have involved the federal public universities, it seems, have rendered
unfeasible the minimum possibilities of alteration and improvement of the scenario designed and
disseminated in 1995 (Rosemberg, 2002, p. 62).
The research suggests that the scenario designed by Rosemberg (2002) Is very close to what is currently in
the UFPI Technology Center, since it is not recorded in the follow-up of this trajectory of the bachelor’s degree in
engineering, no fact that led him to believe that the behavior of the students and teachers in technology was
markedly different from the behavior framed by the said researcher for the subjects object of their study in the
UFES.
The conclusion of the research refers to a professional teaching practice based on the technical rationality
model. As Contreras (2002, p. 93) teaches,
It is this kind of knowledge that Harbermas (1984) and McCarthy (1987) called the empirical-analytical,
proper to the physical-natural sciences, and whose constitutive interest is the technical one, that is, the action
on the objects to obtain from them the desired results.
The problem with this kind of knowledge arises when its use extends beyond the realm of action over nature,
reaching also that of human action. Assuming then that “professional practice in the social sphere should be
conducted as an engineering, that professional action can be understood in the margins of the human and social
contexts in which such practices occur, and of their consequences on them” (2002, p. 94); since, according to
Schön (1995), “the positivist conception of scientific knowledge is what sustains this model of technical
rationality”.
However, one way to rethink and restructure the nature of teaching activity is to view teachers as
transforming intellectuals. Accompanying Giroux (1997) on this class of intellectuals:
If we believe that the role of teaching cannot be reduced to the simple training of practical skills, but instead
involves the education of a class of intellectuals vital to the development of a free society, then the category of
intellectual becomes a way of uniting the purpose of teacher education, public schooling, and professional
training to the very principles necessary for the development of democratic order and societies (Giroux, 1997,
p. 162).
Acting as a transforming intellectual, the teacher must assume a discourse that unites the language of
8
criticism and the language of possibility, so that social educators recognize that they can promote change.
Therefore, they must demonstrate against injustices, inside and outside the school, whether in the economic,
political or social sphere. As Giroux concludes (1997), “To do otherwise is to deny educators a chance to take on
the role of transforming intellectuals.”
2.1.2 Reflections on the Engineering Curriculum
On the loan of Bazzo and Pereira (1997) the inquiries that permeate the technological teaching and the
assumptions that involve the main actors of this process:
How have engineering schools faced the teaching process in the face of new technologies? How to compete
with the ever evolving media? What is the teacher-student relationship most appropriate for dealing with these
new technologies? How have the modern media influenced the technological teaching process? How should
the teacher face the learning process and teaching learning to ensure an intellectual, professional and personal
growth of the future engineer? (Bazzo & Pereira, 1997, p. 148).
It is not the proposal of this text to answer all these instigating questions about the teaching of Engineering,
nor to identify all the paradigms guiding the educational action in the exercise of the teaching profession in
technological areas, but to raise and reflect on points pertinent to teaching, and that are present in the day-to-day
activities of the Graduate Technology Schools; These issues are of concern as a faculty member in the area of
Exact.
I believe that a good technical training is essential for the characterization of an Engineering professor;
however, didactic training for the activity he will perform is important and should not be overlooked. Then the
first and disturbing question arises: Is there in the initial formation of the engineer specific content that leads to
the exercise of teaching? Of course not.
As a consequence, those who assume the status of engineer-teachers end up “learning” to be teachers, by
their own experience, predominating a solitary effort, without the benefits of a rational systematization of
procedures. The teaching quality of Engineering (or any other area of knowledge) is not only done with
well-equipped laboratories, air-conditioned classrooms, libraries with up-to-date and available titles, computerized
attendance systems, etc.
These conditions certainly facilitate and help humanize the teaching process; but there are many questions
between the individual and the knowledge that the most apparent aspects will certainly not solve. Take as a
starting point the understanding of terms that would be integrated into the teaching-learning process. Would not
there be a mismatch of interpretation of terminologies that teachers tacitly consider understood by all? When in
the classroom, when mentioning terms such as technique, science, and technology, do students understand them in
exactly the same way as one imagines? By adopting (among several others) the definition of Ivan Rocha Neto
commented on by Bazzo & Pereira (1997, p. 148) on technology, science, and technology, namely
Technique: dexterity; ability; knowledge; methods; knowledge and skills related to the performance of a
specific operation; knowledge and experience not grounded in science; empirical culture; knowledge that can
be acquired empirically or through the study of specialized literature; set of procedures that enable the
solution of problems and the realization of things; validation for its efficiency and utility; symbolic system
built as a result of man's interaction with his products.
Science: special wisdom; organized set of knowledge about nature, about man and about society; activity
object of the scientist; accepted and validated by consensus of the scientists; systematic search for “true”
explanations of reality; rational reconstructions of reality, based on the phenomenological relations and the
9
dialogue of the scientist with his object of investigation; special way of thinking and interacting with nature,
ideologically and socially partial (non-neutral), according to socio-political-cultural contexts.
Technology: “useful truth”; useful and efficient combination of science and technology; organized and
systematically applied knowledge in the production of goods and services; fundamental techniques in science;
solution of problems through scientific, political, ideological and socially committed theories, methods and
processes, and therefore not neutral.
It is unlikely that everyone present in a classroom understands the terms in their breadth, as they are
proposed in the quoted text. Bazzo and Pereira (1997, p. 61) affirm:
A teaching can only be considered of quality if it allows the construction of knowledge by all the individuals
involved in the process. It can only be considered of quality if it allows its participants to grow intellectually
and become individuals aware of their roles as members of larger collectives than only their restricted
professional or social communities.
It is a fact that Engineering has strong positivist roots, roots that are embedded both in professional practice
and in the process of training its members. Strictly under the guidance of the dominant paradigms, professionals
are formed who, transformed into teachers by the simple fact of having a technical diploma of a higher level,
perpetuate, not only the positive aspects necessary to maintain the style of the professional community's thought,
but also their mistakes
On the other hand, the students, when they arrive at the university, bring with them the formal educational
bag acquired in Elementary and Middle School, which they received in previous years of schooling. These
students, when they arrive at the Engineering course, bring pre-fabricated certain expectations regarding the
teaching behavior, which, somehow, point to the model that the teaching system has reproduced.
It is not difficult to realize that most engineering students prefer a teacher who does not understand teaching,
pedagogy or theories of knowledge, but who is an individual with a wide professional experience and
recognized technical competence in his area. The teacher who reproduces this expectation will therefore
reflect the stereotypes of the students about what it is to be a “good professional”. [...] Perhaps this is one of
the frameworks that legitimize some teacherso underestimate the type of training that is not purely technical
and, in a sense, also disregard the need for specific training for a teaching job (Bazzo & Pereira, 1997, p. 96).
With positivism as the guiding principle of Engineering's actions, the teaching process becomes an
affirmation of the reality of the object by the teacher, and a memorization of technical information, preferably
mathematical, on the part of the students.
Engineering training courses are globally idealized, following an applicationist model of knowledge: students
spend some time attending classes, based on disciplines consisting of propositional knowledge. Then, or during
these classes (last period usually), they will train to “apply” such knowledge. Thus, when the training ends, they
begin to work alone, learning their craft in practice and realizing, in most cases, that such propositional knowledge
does not apply well in everyday action.
The application model involves two fundamental problems: the first problem is that this model is idealized,
according to a professional logic centered on the study of the tasks and realities of work, always changeable from
the everyday of engineering; the second is that the model treats students as “virgin spirits” and does not take into
account their previous beliefs and representations about teaching. This model is limited, in most cases, to
providing them with propositional knowledge, information, but without doing much work on the cognitive, social
According to Tardif (2002), this training model represents a false representation of teaching practice:
10
[...] is similar to what Durand (1996) calls the order model, where the situations of action are approached
according to the postulate of the existence, in the actor, of cognitive structures prior to the action and from
which the actor acts, directing in a certain way the action in function of its cognitive structures. [...] Human
thought does not seem to work as these models suggest. As we have already shown, a teacher who is
immersed in action in the classroom does not think, as the positivist model of thought affirms, as a scientist,
an engineer, or a logician. Propositional knowledge about teaching based on disciplinary logic, knowledge of
these vehicles during training, is therefore a false representation of the professionals' knowledge about their
practice (Tardif, 2002)
Therefore, the teacher should be aware of being a co-author of his practice and his knowledge. The task of
constructing a repertoire based on the study of the professional knowledge of engineering presupposes a critical
examination of the premises that underlie the certainties of one or the other in relation to the nature of professional
knowledge. Quoting what Candau (1996) thinks about the experiences that spring from the daily work of the
teacher:
[...] I consider it essential to emphasize the importance of the recognition and valorization of teaching
knowledge in the context of continuous training practices, especially the knowledge of experience, the vital
core of teaching knowledge, and from which the teacher dialogues with the disciplines and curricular
knowledge. The knowledge of experience is based on daily work and knowledge of the environment. They are
knowledge that flows from experience and is validated by it. They are incorporated into the individual and
collective experience in the form of habitus and skills, know-how and know-how (Candau, 1996, p. 146).
What’s next, how to transform “the professor for this new proposition”, as the preschool institutes are
preparing for orientation to engage in professorship workshops? Or, basically, when it comes to the professors of
their quadrons, compromise the academies, compromise of the “intentions” for the purpose and the insignia, and
the conclusion of some of the rituals of the words in the tutorial of compromise.
2.1.3 Teacher as Intellectual Critique: New Ways
Proposed to move in the direction of what Schön commented by Nóvoa (1995) denominated of reflection in
the action, having the teacher as researcher of its own practice, transforming it into object of inquiry directed to
the improvement of its educative qualities. And supported by MacDonald (1989), commented by Contreras (2003,
p. 106), “teaching is not the application of the curriculum but the continuous invention, reinvention and
improvisation of the curriculum”. On the subject, Contreras teaches (2002, p. 106):
Often, we are not even aware that we have learned some actions, we simply find ourselves doing them. In this
type of situation, knowledge does not precede action, but rather, “is in action”. There is nothing — according
to Shön — that makes us feel that our “knowing as” consists of a set of rules structured before the action. In
this sense, knowledge does not apply to action, but is tacitly personified in it. That is why it is “knowledge in
action”. [...] On the other hand, on many occasions, we think about what we do, or even think “while” we are
doing. This is what Schön calls “reflection in action”.
This is the reflection process of the transformation of the proficiency, conforming Shön (1995), to the
“prospectus of the contexts of Pratik”. In practice, this method, in order to solve the problem, is not only a
solution to the problem of acoustic determinants, but also reflection on the way to the end, because its significance
is complex in complexity and conflict situations, “There are problems that can be resolved in the resolution and
they are despotic” (Shön, 1995, p. 130).
Looks at the reflection professor’s attribute:
Because of this, there is no limit to the deliberation on the ones that depend on a precedent for the fins. There
11
is no separation between the fingers and the fingers, unless it is defined intermittently, conforms to the
problematic situation (Shön, 1995, p. 69).
Still on the reflective teacher’s acting:

His research is not limited to a deliberation on the means that depend on a prior agreement on the ends. It does
not keep the means and the ends apart, but rather defines them interactively, according as the demarcation of
the problematic situation (Shön, 1995, p. 69).
In addition to the model of Giroux (1997), professor as “intellectual criticism” allows you to enter into the
work of the professor “as intelligent as a teacher, in the context of concepts of purely technical or instrumental”.
The press conference “is an intellectual and intellectual property relationship with the problems and experiences
of the day”. You do not think that,
The professor of the devotional is not a compilation of the circle of people, but the fact that, as with the alunos,
the devotee is a basis for critique and transformation of the social prosecution that constitutes the contexts of
the universe (Giroux, 1997, pp. 176–178).
And it goes further,

The aim of social change is to educate the students to take risks and to interfere with the interior of the
relationships of the transition relationships, having the capabilities of the alternatives as the basics of living in
life. With the help of transformative transformers, it is important to help students to acquire critique on the
social backgrounds of economics, such as economics, state, world of work and mass culture, the way in which
institutes can take over potential transformations. A transformation, another case, leads to the progress of
human social order (Giroux, 1997, p. 90; Contreras, 2002, p. 159).
It is worth acknowledging that, on these reflections, the stakeholders themselves — the teachers — have not
credited the importance to this reflection. In fact, they have not credited the importance due to this subject, even
going so far as to neglect the didactic-pedagogical procedures already systematized. They also disregard the
possibility of dedicating themselves, on their own or institutional initiative, to researching and developing
alternatives for changing this framework in the area of technology teaching.
In view of the foregoing, what competences, skills, techniques and new didactic attitudes should the teacher
be appropriated for teaching in the face of the great challenges of the beginning of the third millennium?
At the beginning of the 21st century, Alarcão (2001), a context of profound social, political, economic and
ideological change in which humanity is passing, points to education as the core of the development of the human
person and his experience in society. Continues the author, the school of the XXI century presents itself as an
organization marked by the complexity of the reality of the current moment strongly influenced by the multiplicity,
by the complexity, as reflections of the advances of science, information technology, internet, the way of
communicating between people and institutions.
From this reality, continues Alarcão (2001),
The school needs to adapt. The school will have to metamorphose itself or it will remain immutable and static.
The school will create new spaces and times. Open to the external community, it dialogues with it, attentive to
the inner community; it involves everyone, so in a dialogical way it builds its conscious and contextualized
project in the diversity of multicultural interactions generating spaces of liberties. In this participatory project,
the school building should be changed in the creation of spaces for coexistence, computer rooms, space that
make learning a collaborative and participatory learning between teachers and students.
12
In fact, this is the context in which the bachelor’s degree in engineering is inserted in front of the challenges
of this early century in his professionalism. Like the school, the teacher will have to metamorphose or remain
immutable, static and irrelevant in his training of people. This new possibility foresees the ability to coexist
between groups, participatory and collective evaluation, mastery of computer techniques, communication skills
and to produce knowledge among networks and communication networks, especially without departing from a
holistic and ethical perspective.
Thus, this new perspective contrasts with the traditional, positivist formation of the Newtonian-Cartesian
model present in pedagogical practice based on the reproduction of knowledge, contemplated in Brazilian
education in the last five hundred years (Behrens, 2010). How then, can the teacher without initial or continuing
pedagogical training in his/her professional career suddenly be able to appropriate new knowledge, skills and
teaching attitudes? As the professional in his traditional pedagogical practice characterized by fragmented content,
supported by the reproduction of models, presupposes the evaluation with ready and finished answers coming
from the conservative school held as the only center of knowledge, can reinvent itself in the construction of a
participatory evaluation? And yet, in what way and what guidelines should the teacher have to assimilate the
proposals of emerging paradigms in methodological processes favoring the dimension of knowledge production?
New paradigms that point to education towards a holistic view of man as the center of the world? Or, a
progressive proposal of education, emancipatory, aiming at equality, social justice identifying the individual as
subject of education? Or, finally, how to follow a teaching approach with research towards the information society,
with access to new technologies in the production of information?
The problem is to raise awareness of the Morin (2003), which will summarize the whole of humanitarianism
as a census, technological, and economic development. It is a fact that there is in concretization of the social
campus and ethical trajectories as a result of tech innovation, secondly, the studious, producing and invading
artificial masks, cranes, specialties of lodging, provoking the unemployment and the communications of the
people.
And in this context of challenges, how the bachelors in engineering can participate in this contribution of
education and professional doing articulating the pedagogical act in its highest sense, to lead the school in an
unusual direction: the possibility of a planetary education in search the safeguarding of humanity and the
continuation of hominization? (Morin, 2003).
These reflections about teaching in Technology and its challenges need to be deepened, recognizing that they
have other studies that analyze these issues more deeply.
3. Methodology
The methodology adopted for the development of this research delimits the Engineering Courses of the
Federal University of Piauí, University Campus Minister Petrônio Portella, in the city of Teresina-PI/Brazil, as
research subjects, essentially, professors engineers with more than five years of teaching experience in Higher
Education and graduates of the Technology Center — UFPI. The historical cutback covers the period from 1975
(year of creation of the Technology Center) to 2016, with some setbacks and advances needed to understand the
facts of the past and the present.
The sources of research include official records, private collections, reports, newspapers, photographs,
testimonies, architectural plans and interviews. The collection of oral testimonies was performed in the light of
13
Cultural History. According to Peter Burke (1997), identifying and considering, also, simple people as subjects of
history. A “story from below”, in which “historical facts are not always what one wants to be an officer”. And in
this respect, the research contemplates a relatively recent period: 1975 to 2016. This fact, led to identify that many
of the characters/actors of this process are still active, which favors the present manuscript, regarding the survey
of the History of Life, line of research that was adopted.
The option, in this case, was the qualitative research that, from Martins’s (1989) perspective, does not have a
pre-established field of action, also covering the educational and other aspects of the knowledge of human life. It
implies that qualitative denomination is defined as entering the world of the meanings of actions and human
relations and is based on criteria of observation and analysis that allow us to unveil its meanings and meanings
(Moura, 2011, p. 87).
For the production of data, the method adopted was that of the History of Life, since second (Moura, 2011, p.
107) allows the subject of the research to resume their experience retrospectively. From this perspective, the (self)
biographical interviews were chosen, considering that it is the participant of the research that provides information
on formative life and his professional development. Semi-structured interviews were developed, composed of
open and closed questions, in which the subject of the research has the opportunity to respond on the subject, in a
freeway and without ties.
The aim of this approach is to comprehend, in a global and dynamic way, the interactions that occurred
between the various dimensions of the study object of the present work.
The considerations, reflections and challenges previously addressed in the studies and researches of the
proponents of this manuscript need to be deepened, hence the continuity of the investigation of the subject through
the execution of new inquiries, are relevant and necessary.
4. Final Considerations
One of the most instigating questions raised in this work refers to the way in which the teacher's adaptation in
engineering was faced with the challenges to the exercise of the Higher Magisterium. Since their initial
undergraduate education does not contemplate specific subjects in the area of education, characterized by the
development of the teaching profession in the act of performing it.
Through testimonies raised, it was confirmed that it is in the classroom, in the direct action of the teacher/
student/content/environment interaction that the teacher “learns” to “adapt” to the classroom dynamics, and to
find the best solution to the most varied situations of school life faced by the teacher.
In this aspect, the study about the performance of the bachelor’s degree in engineering at the UFPI
Technology Center throughout the body of the text indicates the total absence of pedagogical contributions in the
training of this teaching professional. Or, in exceptional cases, the presence of discrete traits in significant
pedagogical initiatives in the search of methods, techniques and theories, with the perspective of keeping the
teacher continuously updated in the formative trajectory and his professional teaching practice.
Certainly the investigations contained in this paper allow for more questions than answers. The research
identified through the collected reports the inexistence of knowledge in the pedagogical area in the initial
formation of the teacher. He verified that the professionals who assume the condition of engineers-teachers end up
“learning” to be teachers, by their own experience, predominating a solitary effort, without the benefits of a
rational systematization of the procedures. Thus, they begin to work alone, learning their craft in practice and
14
finding, in most cases, that such propositional knowledge does not apply well in everyday action. On the other
hand, “the institutions that receive them already assume that they are so, thereby absolving them of contributing to
make them teachers”. In this way, this work presupposes the varied possibilities in following unfamiliar and
challenging paths.
These analyzes and concerns lead to conclude that these are the relevant aspects that serve as a basis for
understanding the context of the mission of education and educators, applying at present, adequate preparation of
the teaching professional in technology, to deal with current and future issues inherent in the complex and
challenging act of teaching: being a teacher.
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Doi: 10.15341/jmer(2155-7993)/01.08.2018/002
Geographic Distribution of the Engineering Schools Registered
within Crea in Minas Gerais, Brazil
Enid Brandão Carneiro Drumond , Almeida Eliane, Rodrigues João, Leonido Levi
(Universidade Trás Os Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD), Portugal)
Abstract: Over the last decade there has been an increasing number of engineering schools in the state of
Minas Gerais, Brazil, boosted by new policies of the Ministry of Education and Culture and other government
incentives. Such strategies yielded a significant change in the academic profile of the Education Institutions,
which opened room for the conduction of a study on the geographic profile of the Engineering formation in the
state of Minas Gerais. The study linked the population in each regional unit covered by the Regional Council of
Engineering and Agronomy (CREA-MG) with the number of engineering courses (Civil, Electrical and
Mechanical) allocated thereto. The Engineering schools are not distributed proportionately to the population of the
regions where they operate. It could be seen that the schools are concentrated where industrialization
predominates, mainly in the southern region of the state, where dynamism is linked to integration and industrial
expansion. It was concluded that in order to meet the demand it will not be required to increase the number of
schools, but instead fill idle vacancies resulting from non-enrollment and high evasion throughout the course.
Key words: engineering schools, CREA-MG Regional Units, regional population
1. Introduction
Engineering is and has always been the lever for the progress of a country. It is the formation of basic
scientific knowledge that allows professionals to participate in the several activities of the production chain in any
organized society, besides increasing job generation capacity and improving life quality and income for everyone.
By doing a background analysis on the history of Engineering, Telles (1994) states that Engineering is an art as
old as man, but when taken as organized and systematic knowledge, tested on scientific bases, is relatively new
and can be considered as dating back to the 18th century.
Therefore, one can observe that engineering as formal academic knowledge is recent in the contemporary
world, mainly in Brazil.
The first school that formally delivered a course which could be defined as an “engineering course” was the
École Nationale des Ponts et Chausseés, founded by Daniel Trudaine in 1747 in Paris, France, coming up as the
first reference on professionals certified and classified as “engineers” (Pardal, 1986). This school as well as those
that arose from it formed builders with a general knowledge on the art of constructing, who at the time performed
activities that are today delegated to a number of other professions.
Enid Brandão Carneiro Drumond, Civil Engineering, Ph.D. Student, University FUMEC; research areas/interests: educational
sciences. E-mail: enid@fumec.br.
17
Geographic Distribution of the Engineering Schools Registered within Crea in Minas Gerais, Brazil
In 1792, while Brazil questioned the colonial regime then in force, in the city of Rio de Janeiro came into
existence the first school of the Royal Academy of Artillery, Fortification and Design, which is also regarded as
the first engineering school in the Americas, according to the authors Pardal (1986) and Telles (1994), afterwards
becoming the School of Engineering of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the Military Institute of
Engineering. It was only later in 1802 that the United States Military Academy at West Point was established.
The 1828 Imperial Decree set out the earliest professional requirements on the “constructor’s job”, and the
Federal Decree n. 23.569 of December 1st 1933 was the first to recognize and define the engineer, architect and
surveyor activities.
In Minas Gerais, following its mining vocation the then emperor D. Pedro II established the second
engineering school of Brazil in the town of Ouro Preto, which was organized by the French engineer Claude Henri
Gorceix (1842-1919) with a focus on geology and mineralogy, thus becoming a forerunner in Brazil in that field.
After the republic proclamation in the late 19th century, five other engineering schools were created. In the early
20th century and before the 1st World War, Brazil already had 12 engineering schools, out of which one-third
were based in Minas Gerais (Table 1).
Table 1 Engineering Schools Established until 1950

Foundation Location Foundation Name Current
Rio de Royal Academy of Artillery, Fed Univ of Rio de Janeiro – UFRJ
1 1792
Janeiro/RJ Fortification and Design Military Institute of Engineering (IME)
2 1874 Ouro Preto/MG Minas School Fed Univ of Ouro Preto – UFOP
3 1893 São Paulo/SP Polytechnic School of São Paulo Univ of São Paulo – USP
4 1895 Recife/PE School of Engineering of Pernambuco Fed Univ of Pernambuco – UFPE
5 1896 São Paulo/SP Mackenzie School of Engineering Mackenzie Presbiterian Univ – UFPM
Porto
6 1896 School of Engineering of Porto Alegre Fed Univ of R Grande do Sul – UFRGS
Alegre/RS
7 1897 Salvador/BA Polytechnic School of Bahia Fed Univ of Bahia – UFBA
Juiz de
8 1909 Polytechnic Institute Fed Univ of Juiz de Fora – UFJF
Fora/MG
Belo
9 1911 Free School of Engineering Fed Univ of Minas Gerais – UFMG
Horizonte/MG
Fed Univ of Paraná – UFPR
10 1912 Curitiba/PR School of Engineering of Paraná
Foundation Location Foundation Name Current

11 1912 Recife/PE Polytechnic School of Pernambuco Univ of Pernambuco – UPE
12 1913 Itajubá/MG Electrotechnical Institute of Itajubá Fed Univ of Itajubá – UNIFEI
Rio de
13 1928 Military Engineering School Military Institute of Engineering – IME
Janeiro/RJ
14 1931 Belém/PA School of Engineering of Pará Fed Univ of Pará – UFPA
15 1946 São Paulo/SP School of Industrial Engineering Industrial Engineering College – FEI
Rio de
16 1948 Polytechnic School Cath Univ of Rio de Janeiro – PUC-Rio
Janeiro/RJ
Source: Oliveira, 2010.
There are currently more than 150 engineering schools in the state of Minas Gerais, each one of them
offering several different courses. This paper presents a report on an exploratory study conducted within the
Regional Council of Engineering (Conselho Regional de Engenharia-CREA) of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Data were
collected about the schools registered with the council until 2015. Besides the general data, three traditional
18
engineering courses (civil, electrical and mechanical) were selected for the quantitative and spatial analysis of the
schools that offer them, according to the municipality and regional unit in Minas Gerais, Brazil.
2. Methodology
The methodology employed in the elaboration of this paper was based on the quantitative analysis of data
collected within CREA — Conselho Regional de Engenharia e Agronomia in Minas Gerais, Brazil (Regional
Council of Engineering and Agronomy).
As Richardson (1989) points out, the quantitative method is characterized “in both information gathering and
treatment by means of statistical techniques, from the simplest to the most complex ones” (Dalfovo, Silveira &
Lana, 2008, p. 7). It is worth highlighting the data accuracy, since they are numeric and quantitative figures. Thus,
the quantitative approach is herein utilized from the data collected and statistically treated, which were spatialized
through the use of the software ARCGis.
Therefore, the 2015 updated CREA/MG database was consulted, from which the following variables were
selected: schools registered within CREA/MG per municipality and regional unit; engineering graduation schools
registered within CREA/MG per municipality, regional unit and course (civil, electrical and mechanical
engineering).
The gathered data were dealt with on Excel 2000 charts and then exported to the program ARCGis for
spatializing purposes. Upon treatment, the data were analyzed and the relevant discussions were elaborated.
This type of study can be characterized as descriptive, since it seeks to understand the collected data while
establishing a correlation based on the obtained figures. According to Richardson (1989, apud Dalfovo, Silveira &
Lana, 2008, p. 7), this method “is aimed at investigating ‘what is’, i.e., finding out the characteristics of a
phenomenon as such”. .
3. Results and Discussion
3.1 Engineering Teaching Policies in Brazil

Currently in Brazil the role of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) has been discussed by considering that
the State has not met the social demands, thus letting the market free to meet society’s needs through the
establishment of private HEIs.
The 1990s saw the start of the process of commodification of higher education with the new laws passed in
1995, 1996 and 1999 providing the sector with higher autonomy in a period characterized by privatizations and
deregulations, thus favoring the growth of private HEIs (Torres, Macedo & Câmara, 2014).
The engineering curricular guidelines, as established by the Chamber of Higher Education of the National
Education Council, set out the procedures to be followed in the curricular structuring of the Institutions registered
within the Country’s Higher Education System under the Law on Guidelines and Bases — LDB (Law n. 9.394
dated December 20, 1996). This law revoked the Resolution n. 48 dated April 27, 1976, of the Federal Education
Council — CFE (now extinct), and abolished the minimum curricular requirements while granting scientific and
teaching autonomy to the education institutions, which contributed to the expansion of the engineering schools in
Brazil from 1997 on.
In this context, a new stratum of the population brought a significant demand for higher education, mainly
offered by the private initiative. This is denominated by Britto et al. (2008) as the “new” student and described by
19
the same author as a public made up by individuals whose families do not have a higher education background,
with low quality formation level, whose perspective to enter the job market is based on their high school grade,
and who generally work full time with a focus on attending evening classes.
Some authors, among which Chua (2004), think that the students and families who pay for their tuition can
be seen as customers, and that quality assessments should take into account the perceptions of different groups of
customers, namely the students, their parents, the teachers and the employers (Bonito et al., 2009).
This new paradigm led to the creation of several HEIs without any care about the curricular grid of their
courses, mainly engineering courses. Such expansion was boosted by an improved financial level of the low
income families, whose purchasing power was increased thanks to the government social policies. This scenario
left aside the professional qualifications of engineering graduates, without any concerns about the job market, but
instead focusing on increasing the number of graduated individuals in Brazil. The government policies resulted in
increased access to funding by the population as well as stronger economic power. Also, the number of public
institutions was not enough to meet the higher demand. As a consequence, since 1990 private institutions have
undergone major changes and taken over the market of higher education.
Data from the 2012 Survey on Higher Education jointly conducted by the Education Ministry (MEC) and
Anísio Teixeira National Institute of Educational Studies and Surveys (INEP) provide evidence on the boom times.
Over the last 10 years, the total number of enrolments in graduation courses (bachelor, degree level and
technologist) in Brazil has almost doubled. In 2003, the private network registered 2,760,759 out of 3,936,933
enrolments, which represented a 70% market share. In 2012, the total number of enrolments jumped to 7,037,688,
and the share of the private institutions (with 5,140,312 enrolments) rose to 73%. As the goal of the 2011–2020
National Education Plan is to double the coverage of higher education in the country by 2020, the future is also
promising (MEC, 2013).
Since then, despite the various emphases put by the different governments, MEC has thrown special light on
engineering teaching in Brazil and its future, either through specific programs target at updating formation courses
for engineers or by means of policies that drive offer and access to such courses.
3.2 The Engineering Courses in Minas Gerais
Minas Gerais is one of the 27 federative units of Brazil. It is located in the Southeast Region of the country, is
the fourth state in terms of territorial area and the second in number of inhabitants. Its territory is subdivided in
853 municipalities, the largest number among the Brazilian states. It is the second most populous state in Brazil,
with 19,597,330 inhabitants, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics — IBGE. With a
diversified industrial park, Minas Gerais accounts for the third largest economy in Brazil — just topped by Rio de
Janeiro and São Paulo.
In Minas Gerais, the engineering courses and their respective professionals are linked to a council — the
Regional Council of Engineering, Architecture and Agronomy of the State of Minas Gerais — Crea-MG. Created
by the Resolution n. 2 of April 23rd, 1934, as established by the federal Decree n. 23.569 of December 11th, 1933,
and maintained by Law n. 5.194 as of December 24th, 1966, it is an autarchic entity that oversights the
performance of professional activities, as a public law legal entity linked to the Federal Council of Engineering
and Agronomy — CONFEA that operates throughout the country.
The Federal Decree n. 23.569, dated Dec. 11th, 1933, regulates the exercise of the engineer, agronomist and
surveyor professions. The professionals covered by the referred decree are only allowed to legally exercise
20
professional activities upon duly registering their certificates and grades within the Regional Council of
Engineering and Agronomy in the relevant jurisdiction. Therefore, all graduates in the state of Minas Gerais shall
register within CREA-MG before starting their activities. CREA-MG has its territory divided into 12 regional
units (Figure 1). Each regional unit has a coordination office served by a regional coordinator, an inspector and a
representative of the Education Institutions based there.
Figure 1 Regional Units of CREA Minas Gerais

Source: CREA-MG, n.d.
The engineering teaching institutions have grown significantly in terms of coverage and also when it comes
to the number of courses offered. Such growth resulted from a number of factors, such as the rise of different
engineering branches and the increasing number of other graduation courses. It follows the several political,
economic and social cycles of the country where they are provided. With new policies towards fostering and
funding courses in Brazil, the start of the 21st century was marked by this phenomenon, despite its close relation
with the development of each region’s industry, technology and financial capacity. From CREA’s map of insertion
in the state municipalities, it is found that its spatiality can be regarded as satisfactory while taking into account
the total number of schools registered within this Council (Figure 2), as well as the regional borders and the
reference municipalities. However, this study concentrates on those fields of expertise that qualify a higher
number of students (57%) in the engineering courses (civil, electrical and mechanical).
In 25% (231) of the 853 municipalities that make up the state of Minas Gerais there are engineering,
technology and technical schools registered within CREA/MG. And in 62 municipalities there are engineering
schools registered within CREA/MG, being the highest number in Belo Horizonte (18), followed by (12), Uberaba
(11) and Itajubá (10).
21
Figure 2 Municipalities Where There are Schools Offering Engineering Courses
With views to carrying out this comparative study, it was necessary to survey the state population, as
distributed across the regional units of CREA-MG, so as to compare it with the number of civil, electrical and
mechanical engineering schools there located (Table 2). It is highlighted that the choice of these three courses was
based on the fact that they are the most traditional in the state, are offered by the oldest schools and gather the
highest number of students among the engineering schools.
Table 2 Population per CREA Regional unit X Engineering Schools

Number of engineering schools Population/schools
Regional Unit Population (2012) per regional unit
Civil Electrical Mechanical Total relation
Metropolitana 3.239.676 3 2 4 9 359.964
Belo Horizonte 2.385.639 10 7 6 23 103.723
Centro-Sul 1.142.940 4 1 5 10 112.494
Centro-Oeste 1.529.611 7 2 5 14 109.258
Nordeste 1.632.759 6 2 2 10 163.276
Noroeste 777.817 3 1 0 4 194.454
Norte 2.024.789 2 1 1 4 506.197
Rio Grande 741.728 7 3 2 12 061.810
Sudeste 2.343.718 5 6 6 17 137.866
Sul 1.303.112 7 7 3 17 076.654
Triangulo 1.036.798 4 10 5 19 054.568
Vale do Aço 1.771.723 8 6 4 18 098429
Total 19.930.310 66 48 43 157 126.945
Source: IBGE (2012), CREA/MG (2015), adapted by the authors, 2015.
22
By considering a total number of 157 geographically distributed across 62 municipalities in the state, a ratio
of 126,944.6 habitants/school was found.
Generally speaking, the organizational model of the Engineering courses has not undergone major changes
throughout the centuries, since they were originally created in an attempt to join “theory”, which bloomed among
scholars of physical sciences and mathematics in the 18th century, to the “practice” gained through the works
executed by the workmen of the time. The educational projects of the HESs in the curricular structuring of the
courses continues to be organized in basic, Engineering basics and professionalizing levels, which prevailed in the
model adopted by the French Écoles founded in the 18th century, with fragmented disciplines usually not
integrated to their insertion and application medium, and which is currently still adopted by MEC. Several
changes have been made to the conception of the engineering courses towards adjusting their curricular structure,
which have given rise to a number of different courses that have little to do with the paramount role of the
profession. In order to keep track of such changes, only knowing is not enough anymore, for it is required to know
what to do with the lessons learned in the courses. In order to analyze the territorial distribution of the civil,
electrical and mechanical engineering schools in Minas Gerais, following are presented Figures 3–5.
Based on the data published by MEC (2013, cited by Oliveira, Almeida, Carvalho & Pereira, 2012), it was
found that from the total number of civil engineering schools operating in Brazil (464), 66 are located in the state
of Minas Gerais, that is, 14.2%. Electrical engineering schools account for 13.5% (48 out of 354 existing schools);
and mechanical engineering schools account for 14.7% (43) of the 293 schools operating in the country. The
graphs below comparatively show the schools as allocated to the regional units. The state capital (Belo Horizonte)
houses the largest number of engineering schools (23); followed by Triângulo regional unit (19) and Vale do Aço
(18). It is worth highlighting that these regions concentrate a large number of companies that absorb this
workforce, and that is one of the reasons why so many engineering courses have been open over the recent years.
Figure 3 Cities Where There Are Schools Offering Civil Engineering Courses
Source: Authors, 2015
23
Figure 4 Cities Where There are Schools Offering Electrical Engineering Courses
Source: Authors, 2015
ESCOLAS DE ESCOLAS DE
ENGENHARIA MECÂNICA ENGENHARIA ELÉTRICA
POR REGIONAIS - MG POR REGIONAIS - MG
4 6
Triangulo 5 Triangulo 10
3 7
Sudeste 6 Sudeste 6
2 3
Norte 1 Norte 1
0 1
Nordeste 2 Nordeste 2
5 2
Centro-Sul 5 Centro-Sul 1
6 7
Metropolitana 4 Metropolitana 2
0 2 4 6 8 0 5 10 15
N. ABSOLUTO N. ABSOLUTO
TOTAL DE ESCOLAS DE ESCOLAS DE

ENGENHARIA POR ENGENHARIA CIVIL POR
REGIONAIS - MG REGIONAIS - MG
18 8
Triangulo 19 Triangulo 4
17 7
Sudeste 17 Sudeste 5
12 7
Norte 4 Norte 2
4 3
Nordeste 10 Nordeste 6
14 7
Centro-Sul 10 Centro-Sul 4
23 10
Metropolitana 9 Metropolitana 3
0 10 20 30 0 5 10 15
N. ABSOLUTO N. ABSOLUTO
Figure 5 Engineering Schools Per Regional Units in Minas Gerais

Source: CREA/MG, 2015; adapted by the authors, 2015
24
The spatialized results show geographical gaps, since certain courses are only offered in larger municipalities.
In general, the north-center region of the state houses a lower number of schools and shows an uneven spatial
distribution of schools, which characterizes a delay in disseminating these courses across the regional units. This,
in turn, results in a migration of students to the south-center region of the state.
4. Final Remarks
By analyzing the number of schools per regional unit, we found there is no proportionality across the
regional units of CREA-MG. It could be observed that the schools are concentrated where industrialization
predominates. Production is markedly stronger in the Southern region of the state comprised by the regional units
that have stood out for their dynamism allied to integration and industrial expansion.
It can be stated that, if Brazil intends to reach the same technological level as that of developed nations it
should invest heavily on the formation in Engineering. At the same time, the country should try and improve the
quality of these courses by implementing better formation processes and investing in the qualification of the
teaching workforce. It means the country needs to prepare “more and better engineers” towards reaching new
standards, not only in terms of technology but also regarding economic, social and political development.
According to a survey by the National Industry Confederation (CNI) based on the data of the Census on
Higher Education, 57% of the 105,101 students who started engineering courses in 2007 gave up completing
them.
Therefore, in order to raise the number of engineering graduates, at first it would not be necessary to increase
the number of courses and vacancies. The only requirement is developing projects and mechanisms to fight the
high evasion rate, which is currently close to 50%; in this way, the country could qualify double the number of
engineers. It was also showed the existence of 35% of empty vacancies in these courses, even though the
candidate/vacancy ratio is higher than 1. This may signal that creating or improving programs towards filling
these empty places would further increase the number of graduates. An increased installed capacity, which
currently makes around 300 thousand vacancies available annually, would allow the country to surpass developed
countries in the short run through effective actions towards fighting evasion and creating full entrance conditions.
Since an Engineering course requires infrastructure, which must include laboratories and special rooms,
resources could be better used through the establishment of institutions receiving a higher number of students,
thus preventing resource pulverization and dispersion that characterize the country’s predominating model.
Besides that, such practice ends up impacting the qualification quality, since it can lead to the presence of
institutions lacking the required infrastructure.
References
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ensino de alunos de enfermagem: Um estudo exploratório”, Revista Galego-Portuguesa de Psicología e Educación, Vol. 17, No.
(1,2), pp. 141–153.
Britto L. P. L., Silva E. O., Castilho K. C. de and Abreu T. M. (2008). “Conhecimento e formação nas IES periféricas perfil do aluno
“novo” da educação superior”, Revista da Avaliação da Educação Superior, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 777–791.
Chua C. (2004). “Perception of quality in higher education”, accessed on 20 April, 2015, available online at:
htt://.auga.edu.au/auqf/pastfora/2004/program/papers/Chua.pdf.
CREA-MG – Conselho Estadual de Engenharia e Agronomia de Minas Gerais (n.d.), accessed on 20 April, 2015, available online at:
http://www.crea-mg.org.br.
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Dalfovo M. S., Lana R. A. and Silveira A. (2015). “Métodos quantitativos e qualitativos: Um resgate teórico”, Revista
Interdisciplinar Científica Aplicada, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 1–13.
Garcia Torres A. A., Macedo C. A. and Câmara E. C. (2014). XVII SEMEAD Seminários em Administração, accessed on 20 April,
2015, available online at: http://www.semead.com.br/.
IBGE-Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (2015). “Estatística de Minas Gerais”, accessed on 30 April, 2015, available
online at: http://www.cidades.ibge.gov.br/.
Martins R. M. R. (2008). “As políticas do MEC para a educação superior e o ensino de engenharia no Brasil”, Revista de Ensino de
Engenharia, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 61–68.
MEC–Ministério da Educação e Cultura (2013). Qualidade da educação superior, accessed on 20 April, 2015, available online at:
http://portal.mec.gov.br.
Naveiro R. M. and Oliveira V. F. (2001). O Projeto de Engenharia, Arquitetura e Desenho Industrial, Juiz de Fora: Ed. UFJF.
Oliveira V. F. (2002). “Teoria, PrÁTica e Contexto no Curso De Engenharia”, in: Educação em engenharia: metodologia, São Paulo:
Mackenzie.
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doutoramento apresentada a Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro.
Oliveira V. F., Almeida N. N., Carvalho D. M. and Pereira F. A. A. (2012). “Um Estudo sobre a expansão da formação em Engenharia
no Brasil”, Revista de Ensino de Engenharia da ABENGE, 5001, pp. 1–31.
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26
Doi: 10.15341/jmer(2155-7993)/01.08.2018/003
The School Lag of Students in Poverty
Celia Carrera Hernández, Josefina Madrigal Luna, Yolanda Isaura Lara García
(University Pedagogical National of the State of Chihuahua, Mexico)
Abstract: Economic reforms neglected the development of social groups, generated unemployment, poverty
and migration (Katzman, 2000), a situation that makes Mexican families vulnerable and influences student
learning. Therefore, the purpose is to demonstrate the influence of the context in which the student develops with
the learning achieved. 150 students with academic lag participated as inclusion criteria. The research was
non-experimental, descriptive-correlational, with cross-sectional design. The structured interview with
socio-family data, an observation guide in the classroom and a test of proficiency in Spanish and mathematics
were used. It was found that 96% of the students live in poverty, the parents work long hours with low salaries. 36%
of teachers do not respond adequately to the affective, social and cognitive demands of these students and 85%
reported isolation or aggressiveness in the classroom. The variable context presented positive correlation with the
variable cognitive domain in Spanish and mathematics since 95% of the students presented low or very low level.
What indicates that the context determines the academic performance, that it is necessary to rethink the curriculum
and analyze the challenges faced by teachers, parents and students.
Key words: vulnerability, academic backwardness, teachers, learning
1. Introduction
Twenty years after the educational reforms in Latin America, dropouts and school dropouts continue to affect
poor and vulnerable students in different societies. The Information System on Educational Trends in Latin
America (SITEAL) through the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI, 2009) indicates that less than half of
20-year-olds complete secondary school in Latin America and identify in which sectors of the population is
concentrated abandonment and the definitive disengagement of the school.
The problem is sharpened in contexts and countries of the region, maintaining the social reproduction
favored by schools. In Latin America, public social services deteriorate rapidly, globalization excludes a large part
of the population, employment is scarce in society and tends towards informalization and precariousness. As a
consequence, the poverty and indigence index that affects millions of people increases. Currently, there is social
and economic inequality that impacts schools, due to the political-economic measures that modify the education
system.
In Mexico, the achievements of the goals established in the formal curriculum of basic education are not
achieved by the high percentage of students who do not access the expected learning; teachers are accused as the
Celia Carrera Hernández, Dr., Professor, National Pedagogical University of the State of Chihuahua; research areas/interests:
curriculum and training. E-mail: carrera.celia@gmail.com.
Josefina Madrigal Luna, Dr., Professor, UPNECH. E-mail: jmadrigal@upnech.edu.mx.
Yolanda Isaura Lara García, Dr., Professor, UPNECH. E-mail: ylara@upnech.edu.mx.
27
only responsible for this fact. However, it is recognized that both teachers and parents and students suffer the
consequences of the dominant economic practice.
A high percentage of children drop out of school without reaching minimum levels of knowledge and skills
to integrate into society, due to the academic backwardness due to the minimum achievement of learning, which
indicates a marked educational and social inequality later, since according to the INEGI (2010), 81% of young
people without education or only with primary education are located in the worst jobs unlike those who have
secondary school who have a formal job, but also, poorly paid. Students who had very low or failed academic
results during their academic education dropped out of school because they were not treated to overcome this
problem. Unfortunately, they become part of the population with low paid jobs and therefore have a low social
status, which shows that the school continues to participate in the reproduction of poverty cycles.
According to the evaluation carried out by the National Plan for the Evaluation of Apprenticeships
(PLANEA), there is evidence of academic lag in primary school in mathematics and Spanish. 63.9% of the
students in Chihuahua who finished primary school in June 2015, do not know how to solve basic mathematical
problems and only 52.4% can read simple texts. The 31.9% of the students that finished secondary understand
basic texts and 68.3% solve elementary mathematical problems. The academic backwardness with which the
students finish their basic education is worrying and it is anticipated failure in the following educational levels.
The academic lag reflects inequality in the school from the marked socioeconomic inequality (Blanco, 2011),
therefore, it is emphasized that the context is inseparable from the participation of the students in their learning,
ignoring it negatively influences the applicability and validity of the curriculum However, until now, no change
has been sought in the curriculum that serves teachers who work in these contexts, students with academic
backwardness and parents in vulnerable situations.
Therefore, the objective of this research was to problematize the social, family and classroom context of the
student and relate it to learning outcomes to suggest ways to solve it, with innovative proposals to address the
curriculum; it is considered that the school cannot achieve its educational mission if it does not problematize the
social context that surrounds it and from it, continue to actively work for the improvement of the personal, school
and community life of the students (Delval, 2000).
The research questions were: What is the relationship between the socio-family and classroom context of the
student with the academic lag? From what theoretical and psychopedagogical perspective does the curriculum aim
to overcome the academic lag?
The research hypothesis was: The socio-family and classroom context in which the student develops has a
significant relationship with the academic backwardness. The null hypothesis mentions that the socio-family and
classroom context in which the student develops does not have a significant relationship with the academic
backwardness. The independent variable is the socio-family and classroom context and the dependent variable the
academic lag.
2. The Academic Backwardness
Currently, it has been forgotten that the cause of the educational backwardness is the academic or school
backwardness, which is understood as lagging behind, according to the encyclopedic dictionary Larousse (2005).
The academic backwardness is derived from a series of social, economic and cultural factors in which the student
develops. It is a silent problem neglected in schools to level students in their cognitive, social and emotional
28
development since the school system reproduces social inequalities, without combating them (Muñoz, 1994,
Brunner, 2011). In this case, academic lag was measured with a knowledge test in the subjects of Spanish and
mathematics in the different grades of primary school.
3. The Socio-Family and Classroom Context
The social context is defined as the space where each person lives, develops and learns, and is constituted by
people and groups with knowledge, values and experiences. Therefore, it is considered that the student receives a
strong influence from the social context that impacts on the willingness to learn within the school and outside of it,
since it constitutes the environment in which the educational event takes place and takes place, is made up of the
socio-family, school and classroom context, that is, it refers to the areas in which students can interact with others
and learn from them. Only the socio-family and the classroom context was studied, it does not mean that the
school context is not important, however, only instruments were applied to recognize the influence of these areas
in the academic lag of the students under study.
4. Methodology
The research was non-experimental, descriptive-correlational with transversal design (Kerlinger & Lee,
2001). Participated a sample for direct and intentional convenience from the records of teachers in which the
students with very low or failed grades were identified, trying the homogeneity of the participating group,
composed of 150 students (98 men and 52 women) of primary who attended downtown schools in the City. 30%
of the students come from the Shelter House (orphanage of indigenous children), 30% are students who live in
other orphanages, 30% are students with Specific Educational Needs and 40% are students in marked poverty.
As a criterion for the inclusion of the students, it was considered that they had difficulties to access the
expected learning according to the formal curriculum, that their grades were 7, 6 and 5 in the subjects of Spanish
and/or mathematics.
The instruments used were:
(1) Structured interview of social, family, economic and cultural data, composed of 15 questions.
(2) Observation guide for students and teachers in the classroom.
(3) Test of cognitive domains in Spanish and mathematics.
The data were analyzed with the Pearson correlation coefficient to establish the linear relationships between
scores obtained with the tests, observation guides and context measurement.
5. Findings and Discussion
5.1 The Aulic Context

84% of the students with academic backwardness maintain an inappropriate communication with the teacher.
54% have physically mistreated at least one member of the group at least once. It is very frequent that 77% of
these students interrupt the work in class since 53% tend to be distracted very easily and leave the unfinished
work, this because 42% of the children showed nervousness and sudden mood swings in his behavior The
difficulty in concentrating and the behavior manifested in class hinders the results of learning in Spanish and
mathematics as shown below.
29
Table 1 Correlation Between Academic Context Variables and Academic Lag in the
Reading, Writing and Mathematics Domains
Sudden mood Easily distracted Interrupt in Mastery of reading Mastery of
swings class and writing mathematics
Correlación de ** **
1 .269 .289 -.173* .178*
Pearson
Sudden mood
swings Sig. (bilateral) .001 .000 .035 .029
N 150 150 150 150 150
Correlación de **
.269 1 .064 -.016 -.069
Pearson
Easily distracted Sig. (bilateral) .001 .437 .849 .401
N 150 150 150 150 150
Correlación de
.289** .064 1 .065 -.075
Pearson
Interrupt in class Sig. (bilateral) .000 .437 .430 .359
N 150 150 150 150 150
Correlación de
-.173* -.016 .065 1 .162*
Mastery of Pearson
reading and Sig. (bilateral) .035 .849 .430 .047
writing
N 150 150 150 150 150
Correlación de * *
.178 -.069 -.075 .162 1
Pearson
Mastery of
mathematics Sig. (bilateral) .029 .401 .359 .047
N 150 150 150 150 150
**.The correlation is significative at the level 0.01 (bilateral).
*. La correlación es significante al nivel 0.05 (bilateral).
In the classroom context, actions that affect the development of academic work in the classroom were
identified, such as: being easily distracted, interrupting work in class and having sudden mood swings. This
variable has a significant relationship with the academic lag of students, expressed in the domains of reading,
writing and mathematics, which reflects that students do not have cultural and economic resources that favor their
integral development, so they demand a curriculum that responds to your training needs.
5.2 The Socio-Family Context
47% of the students do not have a computer or internet at home to support their academic activities and 53%
have these resources, however, they use them to play games not for academic purposes. 52% of parents work long
hours and with very low salaries, which affects the purchasing power to satisfy their basic needs, in addition to
breaking affective bonds between parents and children since 86% of children are cared for by grandparents , older
brothers or are alone at home. Parents cannot devote time to the education of their children. Therefore 62%
mentions not having a good relationship with parents for the duration of the work days and the absence of one of
the parents. 60% of children do not receive support in homework for their families and for 33% support is scarce.
Students show disinterest in attending school and learning due to the influence of the socio-family context, which
impacts on learning in the subjects of Spanish and mathematics, as shown in Table 2.
30
Table 2 Correlation between Variables Socio-Family Context and Academic Lag

Mastery of Mastery of The student The mother Maintains positive
reading and mathematics receives support and father of links with parents
writing in carrying out the student
tasks work
Reading and writing Pearson
1 .162* -.315** -.513** .636**
domain correlation
Sig. (bilateral) .047 .000 .000 .000
N 150 150 150 150 150
Mathematics Pearson
.162* 1 .213** -.217** -.076
proficiency correlation
Sig. (bilateral) .047 .009 .008 .354
N 150 150 150 150 150
The student receives Pearson
-.315** .213** 1 -.249** -.244**
support in carrying correlation
out tasks Sig. (bilateral) .000 .009 .002 .003
N 150 150 150 150 150
The student's mother Pearson ** ** **
-.513 -.217 -.249 1 -.539**
and father work correlation
Sig. (bilateral) .000 .008 .002 .000
N 150 150 150 150 150
Maintains positive ties Pearson
.636** -.076 -.244** -.539** 1
with parents correlation
Sig. (bilateral) .000 .354 .003 .000
N 150 150 150 150 150
*. The correlation is significant at the level 0.05 (bilateral).
**. The correlation is significant at the level 0.01 (bilateral).
The correlation between the socio-family context variable and academic lag is positive and significant. It
follows that the variable with the greatest impact on student learning is the socio-family context with its indicators,
since children are alone at home in the afternoon and the people who care for them do not provide support in the
activities academic In addition, students do not have economic or technological resources to perform school tasks
related to research.
It follows that educational activities must be relevant and interesting for students and that they offer a truly
useful training for their daily lives, since the formal curriculum has not been designed based on the needs of
disadvantaged sectors of society, for what does not meet the necessary conditions to achieve the learning of
students who live in unfavorable economic conditions (Muñoz, 1994).
6. Conclusion
Academic achievement can only be combated if a socially relevant and culturally relevant education is
imparted. This means ensuring, on the one hand, that the formal curriculum must meet the needs of the different
sectors to which they are directed (Muñoz, 1994) and that the participation of teachers and parents is developed in
a coordinated manner to raise the level of student learning
It is a priority for Chihuahua to promote changes in curricular innovation, such as:
Offer differentiated educational models in accordance with regional conditions and the particular
characteristics of the population served (rural areas, urban areas, urban-marginal areas, areas with a higher
31
percentage of indigenous population, border areas, etc.).

Develop methodological strategies to meet the different needs and different levels of performance of students
within the classroom, by teachers with the support of teams of multidisciplinary professionals.
Promote educational innovation, with a view to addressing the particular needs that arise in the different
areas of basic education (curriculum, didactic, teacher training, participation of principals and parents in the
learning of students).
Promote on-site training programs for teachers, support programs for parents and students, especially those
with academic backwardness, based on the needs of the heterogeneous population served in basic education. This
training will be oriented towards the integral formation of the students attending both cognitive and
socio-emotional development.
Overcoming academic backwardness requires a joint effort between different actors such as teachers, parents,
professionals, managers, etc., which not only attend to the students' learning, but also promote actions to support
the cultural and economic development of the families.
References
Blanco E. (2011). “The boundaries of the school”, Education, Inequality and Learning in Mexico. Mexico: The school of Mexico.
Brunner J. (2010). “The language of the home, cultural capital and school”, Educational Thinking Magazine, Vols. 46–47, pp. 17–44.
Delval J. (2000). Learn in Life and in School, Madrid: Magister.
Kerlinger F. and Lee H. (2001). Behavioral Research Research Methods in Social Sciences. Fourth Edition, Mexico: Mc Graw Hill.
Larousse (2005). Encyclopedic Dictionary, Colombia.
Muñoz Izquierdo C. (2009). “Construction of knowledge about the etiology of educational backwardness and its implications for the
orientation of public policies: The experience of Mexico”, Ibero-American Journal on Quality, Efficacy and Change in
Education (REICE), Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 28–45.
Organization of Ibero-American States (2009). “Early childhood in Latin America: The current situation and the responses from the
State”, SITEAL Report, available online at: http://www.oei.es/siteal2009.htm.
Schmelkes S. (1994). “Towards an improvement in the quality of our schools”, INTERAMER 32, Educational Series (PREDE/OAS).
32
Doi: 10.15341/jmer(2155-7993)/01.08.2018/004
Belonging in Time: Australian Women Playwrights
in a Changing Landscape
Janys Hayes
(Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, Australia)
Abstract: This paper considers time: the way each moment holds in it the seeds of the past as well as hopes
for the future.
In 2005 Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney wrote The Dolls’ Revolution as a celebration of women
playwrights whose contributions to Australian theatre between the 1990s and 2000s had reshaped Australian
cultural perspectives. Yet, in 2012, The Australia Council for the Arts released a report, 'Women in Theatre',
documenting the diminished state of the representation and support of women in key creative roles in major
Australian theatre companies. Following the recommendations of the report this paper charts the inclusion of
women’s plays in a set of major Sydney theatres’ 2016 programs.
Given this changing landscape, this paper considers how phenomenological concepts of temporality can
contribute to understanding experiences of belonging in a community. The complexity of belonging or not
belonging, of being included in or excluded from, of feeling acceptance or rejection is framed here, with particular
reference to the staging of the work of Australian women playwrights, through Husserlian and Heideggerian
philosophies. Time for both Husserl and Heidegger is a three-dimensional experience of each 'now', containing the
past and the future as well as the present. Unconscious participation in all three in any moment creates a pattern of
subjective presence and absence. Belonging is experienced as mind/bodies are 'thrown' into time with pre-existing
backgrounds of competency and familiarity shaping expectations of the future.
Key words: phenomenology, temporality, feminism, women playwrights, Australia, Australia Council
Most of us when we think of Time think of it as a measurement. For instance, we think, “Have I got enough
time to do this?” or “I have to get here or there by that time”. Or “What time is it now?” Phenomenologists
however have always considered Time as an experience. In fact Edmund Husserl, who could be considered as the
father of phenomenology regarded Time as “the basic form of all experience” (Dostal, 1993, p. 145). In this paper
I want to consider the experience of Time, of Edmund Husserl’s and Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological regard
for Time and how these relate to belonging, where belonging can be understood as, the act of “being part of
something, being a natural member of, being accepted” (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
2016). I have often thought of those exceptional artists who have worked extensively and expressively throughout
their lives to be recognized publicly only after their deaths: Van Gogh, Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Johann
Janys Hayes, Dr., Lecturer in Theatre and Performance, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong;
research areas/interests: phenomenology, embodiment, feminism, theatre, actor-training. E-mail: jhayes@uow.edu.au.
33
Belonging in Time: Australian Women Playwrights in a Changing Landscape
Sebastian Bach. Time clearly played a crucial part in their experience as artists and presumably in the sense of
identity of belonging to the artistic field they had chosen. Their sense of belonging to an artistic community or not
belonging was surely influenced by the recognition or lack of recognition of their artistic work!
The artistic community I want to consider in this paper is that of Australian women playwrights. It is a
community that I have been engaged with for several decades, for when I first arrived at the University for
Wollongong in the early 1990s, to work as a practitioner within the Theatre program, there was not one Australian
woman playwright included in the dramaturgy course’s study list. Not one. I wondered then how the many
Australian women playwrights, whose work I was well aware of, felt about academies that didn’t recognize their
hard earned writing skills. I made it my conscious decision then to choose to produce and direct plays by women,
primarily Australian women.
From 1985 until its demise in 2006, Playworks operated as the Australian national women’s performance
writing network, promoting Australian women’s writing for theatre and performance through workshopping,
dialoguing, and critiquing. In 1996 Playworks published Telling Time (Baxter, 1996), celebrating ten years of the
organization’s work. The names of the Australian playwrights included in the publication and the names of the
participants at the tenth birthday festival, which Telling Time documents, read like a who’s who of the community
of women writing for and promoting women in performance from across Australia in the 1990s — Alma De
Groen, Katherine Thomson, Tobsha Learner, Jennifer Compton, Jenny Kemp — just to name a few. The vibrancy
of this community jumps out at every page reflecting Jane Goodall’s description of the original ten year festival as
a “true festival — exuberant, celebratory and with a great spirit of collective affirmation” (Baxter, 1996, p. 1).
Jane O'Sullivan in reviewing Telling Time underscores a pertinent aspect of the publication in that it “offer[s]
insights into the struggle to achieve equal representation, and access to the means of (self) production, in an
industry in which the production of articulate representations is of the essence” (O’Sullivan, 1998, p. 148).
O'Sullivan reflects a feedback loop, where recognition in the theatre industry hinges on representation in that
industry to create a sense of belonging. In this case, these women were fighting to enable a witnessing of
themselves as writers and performance makers beyond the circle of their feminist followers, and advocates, to, as
O’ Sullivan observes, “register creative and intellectual expressions of women, in all their unity and difference”
(O'Sullivan, 1998, p. 149).
These notions of 'collective affirmation' and 'articulate representation' for Australian women playwrights are
heralded again in another milestone publication for both Australian women playwrights and directors, The Doll's
Revolution: Australian Theatre and Cultural Imagination. Published in 2005, Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney
claim that a group of women theatre artists created a theatrical revolution, through “feminist agency” to enable
“an imaginative rethinking of Australian culture” (Fensham & Varney, 2005, p. 9). It is worthwhile noting that two
of the five major playwrights analyzed by Fensham and Varney, Katherine Thomson and Jenny Kemp are
represented in Telling Time, where due to the diarized form of their writing there they offer insights to their
experiences as Australian women playwrights. In Telling Time Katherine Thomson explicitly examines her past in
relation to her imagined future, seeing each as “composed of two elements — the work one has produced as well
as the adjustments one makes to work as a writer” and identifying those elements as “the ongoing balance of
confidence, faith in oneself, clarity to work in a collaborative medium as well as the balancing of isolation with
‘being in life’” (Baxter, 1996, p. 20). Jenny Kemp identifies her writing as liberating “the audience from the usual
constraints of convention, especially those of time” (Baxter, 1996, p. 29). Time in both these authors’ experiences
plays a constituting role in their sense of being playwrights.
34
To investigate how Time relates to these and other Australian women playwrights’ sense of belonging to a
writing community I want to turn to phenomenology. The beauty of phenomenology as a philosophy is its holistic
view of our experience of “being”. Instead of isolating discrete aspects of situations phenomenology perceives
that even as we awaken to consciousness we are already immersed in a socialized and enculturated environment
with an already given network of relations of things and others (Hall, 1993, pp. 122–140). As the
phenomenologist Gilbert-Walsh states, I am already in “a coherent practical totality with which I am always
already familiar and in which I am always already engaged” (Gilbert-Walsh, 2010, p. 178). Both Heidegger
(1962), in Being and Time and Husserl (1990) previously, in a series of lectures on Internal Time Consciousness,
understood Time through this lens as the underlying structure of experience and viewed each moment, each “now”,
as tri-partite. In each moment I am already projecting myself forward in possibilities, as well as being present, as
well as embodying the past as what has already been there for me. Whilst Husserl speaks of this
three-dimensionality of the present as the “thickness” of Time, Heidegger, more analytically terms the past in this
present moment as “mood”, the present as “understanding”, and the future in the present as “discourse”. In these
terms “mood” is the facticity of the world in which we find ourselves, “understanding” is the choice we make in
the moment given that world, and 'discourse' is the means through which we articulate ourselves towards future
possibilities.
Considering “belonging” in relation to this concept of the “thickness” of Time or its three dimensionality, it is
clear that the past is always present, shaping the possibilities for the future. Whilst an ebullience and strong sense
of community resonates from both the authors and performers from Playworks in the late 1990s and from the
authors analyzed in The Doll’s Revolution (again following works from the 1990s), these female voices were still
only marginally represented in mainstream theatres of that time. In many ways, including their modes of creation,
and the styles of their writing, these women stood as deliberately oppositional to the structures of mainstream
theatre of the time. Yet Fensham and Varney argue that feminist theatre practices are capable of transforming not
just cultural activities concerning theatre and drama, but broader social relations through altering cultural
imagination. Thus the vibrancy of these playwrights sense of belonging to an Australian playwriting community
can be placed in the three dimensionality of a feminist, oppositional past providing skills and techniques, which
can be applied in the present, (that is at that time in the 1990s) and in a belief of transformation into the future. It
is a vision for greater presence and representation of Australian women's plays in major theatres as experienced
through the three dimensionality of that particular time.
How surprising then to see that in 2012 The Australia Council for the Arts released a report, “Women in
Theatre” (Lally & Miller, 2012), documenting the diminished state of representation and support for women in
key creative roles, including as playwrights, in major Australian theatre companies over the previous thirty years.
The report’s qualitative analysis is gathered from Austage for the Major Performing Arts Companies and for
Theatre Board Key Organizations. The report incorporates information from over forty interviews with key
industry figures, as well as data from the previous thirty years of reports on the issue of women in creative
leadership in the theatre sector. Frustration is expressed in the report that the same issues as identified in the 1980s
and the 1990s regarding this lack of opportunities for women in creative leadership in the theatre sector are still
present and this despite affirmative action policies and greater beliefs in gender equality. The role of Australian
women playwrights in comparison to other leadership roles is shown through this report to be particularly low.
Only 21% of productions in major companies from 2001–2011 employed a female playwright. Augusta Supple, a
Sydney based theatre director, producer, playwright and prolific blogger about theatre issues highlights, at that
35
time, that this lack of employment for women playwrights is despite living “in a different age of engagement and
identification with feminism — where the term ‘post feminist’ has been accepted by many” (Supple, 2010). She
expresses her confusion as to why this is the case. In the same blog Van Badham, award winning playwright and
now columnist for The Guardian Australia is more caustic, insisting that patriarchy still dominates the theatre
sector 'and this ongoing gender misery is not entertaining'.
Here are two of the many highly talented Australian female playwrights sandwiched in a new Time-bound
landscape. Although through study and application they have garnered specialized skills and have had successes in
their careers through non-major theatre company productions of their work they still regard their future as bleak.
Van Badham with a range of awards for her play writing is particularly vocal about her feelings of not belonging
at that time in 2010.
My last show in Sydney was a commercial hit that did sold out houses, masses of publicity and great money.
But so what? What did that change for a single other woman playwright? No-one in a theatre company lit
department turned around and said ... “better include more women in our next season”. No-one cares. The
theatre companies just don’t think that maintaining a 50/50 representative balance is important. Girls don’t
feature in their internal culture, and so girls don’t get staged (Supple, 2010).
In Heideggarian terms, we can hear Van Badham’s mood, from her past she sees herself as being immersed in
a masculinist milieu in which her writing is undervalued; we can sense her understanding of where she sits in this
situation, she still identifies as a writer of excellence, she is still developing her skills; and we can certainly hear
her articulation of the problem, her anger and disdain for the way she and fellow Australian women playwrights
are treated because of gender. She references Playworks and the past in the following particular invective against
the establishment stating,
And advocating that we change this boys-club culture by organizing away from it is an activism cul-de-sac as
well ... because we’ve been doing this FOR YEARS. We did it with Playworks and now we do it with less
money (Supple 2010).
Less money — because Playworks had been funded by the Women's Grants Program of the NSW
Department of Women, however when it was amalgamated into Playwriting Australia that kind of financially
affirmative action for women was no longer available in the early 2000s. Time has indeed altered the cultural
landscape and impacted on a particular community’s sense of belonging. In reality the inclusion or lack of it for
the work of Australian women playwrights in the mainstream had changed only minimally — fluctuating from a
low of 16%. In this different Time of the 2010s, the ongoing lack of representation of women’s writing, in
Australia’s major theatre companies, blocks a hopeful future-in-the-present for these women. Whereas in the
1980s and 90s the hope for greater representations for Australian women playwrights in the mainstream in the
future could alter an experience of belonging, by 2010 the certainty of the exclusion of these women's work
creates an atmosphere of frustration, a distinct sense of not belonging.
What of now? Examining the 2016 subscriber programs of three major Sydney theatre companies offers a
small, window of clarity as to the inclusion of the work of Australian women playwrights in the Australian theatre
mainstream in the present. How has 'thick' Time played with a sense of belonging for these writers at least in
NSW?
Fourteen plays make up the Sydney Theatre Company program for 2016, this is in comparison to thirteen
plays for Belvoir St Theatre and seven for Griffin Theatre, which of the three companies is the only one
36
exclusively committed to Australian writing. Sydney Theatre Company has three full-length plays by Australian
women writers, whilst a fourth production consists of five, twenty-minute short plays, each by an Australian
female playwright. This constitutes 44% of the works presented by the company coming from women. Clearly
Sydney Theatre Company has responded to the recommendations of the “Women in Theatre” report and their
board and senior management have altered their programming substantially. In comparison Belvoir St. Theatre has
four plays out of its thirteen productions written by Australian women playwrights with a fourth production as an
evening with Hannah Gadsby, a standup comedian. In percentage terms this is 38% of the year’s presented work.
Griffin Theatre offers only one play, by Alana Valentine, as a sole Australian female playwright, but it does also
have a more experimental collectively created production, conceived by Karen Therese, an Australian
theatre-maker. These contribute to 28% of Griffin’s presented work, which is not so very different from the 21%
highlighted by the 'Women in Theatre' report from five years earlier.
The playwrights from these three companies in 2016 are women that most Australians involved in the theatre
sector would recognize: Lally Katz, Alana Valantine, Hannie Rayson, Angela Betzien, Nakkiah Lui, Melissa
Bubnik, some newcomers to having their work in the mainstream, others long-timers. Theirs is a different cultural
landscape again. What has been their experience as playwrights of being 'thrown' into a new set of cultural
expectations.
Of these playwrights, some of whom were receiving commissions of work from major companies even as the
“Women in Theatre” report was being released, Angela Betzien is one who has commented on the gender
differential in employment in relation to her own sense of being a writer. In an interview for The Australian in
2012 (July 21), when employed by the Melbourne Theatre Company to create her work, Helicopter (2012),
Betzien expresses surprise at being offered the job, when as she says “opportunities for new Australian works
appear much diminished”. She attributes “creative confidence” as being a powerful force in enabling playwrights
to gain work, stating, “If you have mentors who believe in you, you will take all kinds of creative risks”. Then she
contends that men have more of this confidence and that women often have too little creative confidence “to go
knocking on doors to get a job”. The inference that women have been deprived of professional mentorship is clear.
Here is an experience, altering in each moment the possibilities of the future. A writer with previous commissions
and mentors can garner a strong sense of belonging in the present, in Heidegger’s terms contributing to an aspect
of mood. The sense of the past plays into the present, the lack of mentorship altering not just the confidence in
championing one’s own creative work but perhaps undermining at each moment the ability to even write.
Hannie Rayson, who since the success of her play, Hotel Sorrento, in 1990 has been regarded as one of
Australia’s significant playwrights, also writes about creative confidence. In an article in The Age in 2016
(December 31, p. 10), when working on her sixteenth play, she differentiates herself from younger playwrights
confiding whimsically that whilst her “greatest professional regret is that she ever thought doubt was useful”, she
is still not ready “to embrace the Millennial’s zest for self-regard”. Rayson speaks wryly of all the wounding
comments that critics have made of her work over the years as feeding her self-doubt, a rumination that perhaps
can only be considered publicly now Rayson has achieved success. Here is a major Australian playwright, who
understands that she belongs to the Australian women’s playwriting community, yet she offers her audience a
more subtle understanding of what she has been confronting over the years and how Time has altered this for a
new generation.
So can the women achieving success in the now, experience Time differently? The grab line for Melissa
Bubnic’s 2015 successful show at the Sydney Theatre Company, Boys Will be Boys is, “A cast of five women in a
37
play directed by a woman and written by a woman shouldn't be something that makes theatrical headlines in 2015,
but it does” (STC Season, 2016). In an interview for the ABC’s Radio National Melissa Bubnic speaks about
women negotiating male power structures and the problems of the theatre world where although women’s writing
is produced, it is more frequently presented in smaller theatres. She laughs as she tells Melanie Tate, “I tend to
think that the entire world is a boy’s club kind of world” (STC Magazine, 2015) and she reveals that her onstage
characters are far more courageous than she in speaking out against sexism. The problem that confronts Bubnic is
that, as she says, “So much of being commissioned and getting work is about your personal relationships. It’s
difficult to risk not being liked”. So the very problem Melissa Bubnic writes about becomes difficult to talk about
in the theatre. In the theatre world, as she shares, “there is no such thing as sexism because we are all
open-minded, liberal kind of people”. Here we see Time so clearly shaping being. This relatively new writer to the
Australian theatre landscape is in a post-feminist world where she is expected to presume that all her colleagues
understand gender issues and stand for equality. However the past-in-the-present tells her otherwise. Bubnic
admits that there are times when in the theatre studio she has to “bite her tongue”. Her understanding in the
present is altered. Yet at the same time she accepts her belonging in the Australian women’s playwriting landscape,
having her Patrick White Playwright award winning play produced at Sydney Theatre Company.
This paper has covered a wide expanse of Time and I realize that it has done so fleetingly. The aim however
is to search experience, not rather than data, but to add to data, in order to flesh out what is happening for people
in a particular community, that of Australian women playwrights over the past thirty years. The journey from the
nineties to now needs to embrace the pasts and the possible futures of Australian women playwrights in their
experiences of their creativity and to recognize the role that Time plays with the concept of feelings of belonging
or not belonging for and to this cultural group. The possibilities of their creative work being seen and by whom
keep changing, altering the ways in which these highly creative women view themselves in their work. There is
nothing straightforward about it. Although the balance may be shifting in terms of the productions we see, which
may be equally written by women as by men, an inner landscape of self-understanding for this community is a
more complex issue, where the past lingers and future possibilities fluctuate.
References
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, Boston, 2016.
Baxter Virginia (Ed.) (1996). Telling Time: Celebrating Ten Years of Women Writing for Performance, Playworks, South Sydney.
Belvoir St Theatre 2016 program, accessed on 14th May, 2017, available online at: http//www.belvoir.com.au/2016-season/.
Betzien Angela (2012). Helicopter, director Leticia Caceres, composer Pete Goodwin, Lawler Studio, Melbourne Theatre Company,
Melbourne, 7–17th August.
Bubnic Melissa (2016). Boys Will Be Boys, Nick Hern Books, London, UK.
Dostal Robert J. (1993). “Time and phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger”, in: Charles Guignon (Ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, USA, pp. 141–169.
Fensham Rachel and Varney Denise (Eds.) (2005). The Dolls' Revolution: Australian Theatre and Cultural Imagination, Australian
Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne.
Gilbert-Walsh James (2010). “Revisiting the concept of Time: Archaic perplexity in Bergson and Heidegger”, Human Studies, Vol. 33,
pp. 173–190.
“Griffin Theatre 2016 program”, accessed 14th May, 2017, available online at:
http://www.griffintheatre.com.au/about-us/production-archive.
Hall Harrison (1993). “Intentionality and world: Division I of being and time”, in: Charles Guignon (Ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY. USA, pp. 122–140.
Heidegger Martin (1962). Being and Time, Translated by John Macquarie and Edward Robinson, Harper &Row, New York.
38
Husserl Edmund (1990) [1928]. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), Translator J. B. Brough,
Kluwer, Dordrecht.
Lally Elaine and Miller Sarah (2012). “Women in theatre: A research report & action plan for Australia Council for the Arts”,
Australia Council for the Arts, Sydney, accessed 13th May, 2017, available online at:
http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/womenintheatre.
O'Sullivan Jane (1998). “Show and tell: Women and Australian theatre”, Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 13, No. 27, pp. 148–150.
Supple Augusta (2017). Available online at: http://www.augustasupple.com/2010/05/women-theatre-directors-action-
planning-forum/.
“Sydney Theatre Company 2015 Program”, accessed on 16th May, 2017, available online at:
https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/magazine/posts/2015/april/audio-melissa-bubnic-on-rn.
“Sydney Theatre Company 2016 Program”, accessed on 14/05/17, available online at: https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/
season-2016/explore-the-2016-season.
Sydney Theatre Company Magazine (2015). “Melissa Bubnic on Radio National”, accessed on 14th May, 2017, available online at:
https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/magazine/posts/2015/april/audio-melissa-bubnic-on-rn.
Rayson Hannie (1990). Hotel Sorrento, Currency Press in association with Playbox Theatre Company, Sydney.
Rayson Hannie (2016). “Regrets — A Summer Series: Finding belief where there is no room for doubt”, The Age, December 31, p.
10.
Varghis Sharon (2012). “The Review: Australian playwrights Angela Betzien and Leticia Caceres are flying high”, The Australian,
July 21, accessed on 16th May, 2017, available online at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/flying-high/
news-story/6fae5e82d7fd11679f44b8bf9b89b0ca.
39
Doi: 10.15341/jmer(2155-7993)/01.08.2018/005
Tailor-made Teaching of University Practical
Language Course in Hong Kong
Ho Wai Chi, Vichy

(School of Chinese, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
Abstract: The “Chinese Language Enhancement Programme” (CLEP) provides compulsory practical
Chinese courses to all the undergraduate students in the University of Hong Kong (HKU). How does a single
language programme suit thousands of students from ten faculties? What pedagogies are adopted to make sure
effective learning?
Key words: tailor-made teaching, flipped classroom, language curriculum development, e-learning.
1. Introduction
The Chinese Language Enhancement Programme (CLEP), which belonged to the School of Chinese, was
established in 1993 and provided undergraduate practical Chinese courses to all faculties of the University of
Hong Kong (HKU). Since then, CLEP has become the compulsory subject for all the undergraduate students.
Only if they achieve passing grade, can they graduate from HKU.
Four-year curriculum system has been implemented in all the universities of Hong Kong since 2012.
Undergraduate students in HKU have to achieve 54 credits of compulsory subjects within four years, including the
common core courses with 36 credits, the Chinese (6 credits) and English (12 credits) courses with 18 credits.
All the universities in Hong Kong offer compulsory course on Chinese or Chinese culture to undergraduate
students. For example, two “University Chinese” courses are provided in the Chinese University of Hong Kong1.
In contrast, the CLEP of HKU provides 29 compulsory practical Chinese courses with the same credits and
learning objectives with different content to all the faculties in the 2016–2017 academic years.
On the other hand, CLEP has been taking “tailor-made teaching” as the most important teaching objective.
The curriculum design mainly considers the need of working environment of students after graduation. It aims to
improve the Chinese language skills which are related to their profession.
How does CLEP provide the compulsory practical Chinese courses with the same credits and learning
objectives to different faculties on the one hand and balance the curriculum standardization and achieve
“tailor-made teaching” on the other? This paper will discuss the question from the aspects of “Professional
Chinese”, “Language Proficiency”, “Delivery Mode” and “Pedagogy”.
Ho Wai Chi, Vichy, Ph.D., School of Chinese, The University of Hong Kong; research areas/interests: flipped classroom and
Chinese practical language teaching. E-mail: vichyho@hku.hk.
1
For course structure and introduction, please refer to http://www.chi.cuhk.edu.hk/index.php/en/clan-4year-en/uchinese-home,
assessed 15 August 2017.
40
Tailor-made Teaching of University Practical Language Course in Hong Kong
2. Professional Chinese
All the CLEP courses share the three important elements that are “Chinese Grammar”, “Chinese Character”
and “Practical Chinese”. “Chinese Grammar” includes grammar, vocabulary and the correction of grammatically
wrong sentences. “Chinese Character” includes difference between Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese
characters, typo correction. “Practical Chinese” includes skills on oral presentation, group discussion, public
speaking, debating skills and practical Chinese writing (such as notice, letter, meeting minute, proposal and other
practical writing skills).
These three elements keep all the CLEP courses within the same teaching objectives and provided the
practical Chinese course with 6 credits for the different faculties in the university.
Although the main content of the Chinese practical courses in HKU focuses on Chinese knowledge,
communication skills and writing training, the teaching contents of the Chinese practical courses are variant,
according to the students’ professional conditions and job requirements based on the teaching idea of
“Professional Chinese”. To achieve the goal of “tailor-made teaching”, for example, the Chinese courses for the
Faculty of Engineering focus on the language applications in project planning, official negotiation, and
information technology. On the other hand, the Chinese courses for the Faculty of Law focus on the language
applications in the legal provisions, legal arbitration.
CLEP not only tailored its language courses for the faculties, but also for different disciplines in the same
faculty. For example, there are five CLEP Chinese enhancement courses for different disciplines in the Faculty of
Business and Economics, namely CBBA9001 for accounting major, CBBA9002 for business and information
technology major (double degree course), CBBA9003 for finance and banking major, CBBA9004 for
international business and global management major and CBBL9001 for “Business and Law” major (double
degree course). Although the five courses share major teaching contents such as Chinese characters,
communication skills and writing skills, the teaching emphases, learning items and performance evaluation are
different according to the student’s major in the faculty. For example, the class size, lecture format of CBBA9003
differs from the other four courses. Besides, CLEP provides six Chinese courses to the Li Ka Shing Faculty of
Medicine, namely, CEMD9002 for nursing major, CEMD9003 for Chinese medicine major, CEMD9005 for
pharmacy major, and CEMD9006 for medicine major (local student), CEMD9007 for medicine major (non-local)
and CEMD9008 for biomedical science major.
3. Language Proficiency
Nearly 30% students in HKU are non-local students. They come from Mainland China, foreign countries, or
even international schools in Hong Kong. They are admitted by HKU through the National Joint College Entrance
Examination of Mainland or international baccalaureate tests, such as IB, IGCSE, GCE or SAT. In general, they
are called as “Non-JUPAS”, while the local students are admitted to university through the Join University
Programme Admissions System (JUPAS). The Non-JUPAS students join the university through different channels
with different Chinese levels. For example, Mainland students may be slightly better than local students in
Chinese writing while the local students may be slightly better than the Non-JUPAS, Non-Mainland students in
this field. Besides, Mainland students have no need in Simplified Chinese learning but the Non-JUPAS,
Non-Mainland students have a low cognized standing point on Simplified Chinese. Therefore, if they were
41
arranged in the same class, teaching will inevitably be influenced because of the learning difference.
So, besides the practical Chinese courses which are provide to local students admitted by HKU through
JUPAS, CLEP also provides suitable and distinctive Chinese courses to the students who have different learning
background. For example, the Mainland students have to choose one of the two courses in CUND9002 and
CUND9003. The former serves the students who speak Cantonese (for students who mainly come from
Guangdong province, Mainland China), and the teaching content mainly focuses on Hong Kong culture,
Traditional Chinese characters and advanced practical language skills. The latter is offered to the students who are
not familiar with Cantonese (mainly comes from provinces other than Guangdong).
To achieve the goal of “tailor-made teaching”, CLEP designs distinctive Chinese courses for Non-JUPAS,
Non-Mainland students. For example, there are two Chinese courses (i.e. CEMD9006 and CEMD9007) offer to
the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine. Differ from CEMD9006 which is provided to local students admitted by
HKU through JUPAS, CEMD9007 is a tailor-made Chinese course for the Non-JUPAS, Non-Mainland students in
the faculty. The course focuses on improving their oral communication due to the requirements of the medical
profession, including the pronunciation training on Cantonese, mock medical diagnosis, medical video
interpretation, mock open talk in medical profession, difference on medical terminology in Mainland China and
Hong Kong.
4. Delivery Mode
Different with other university compulsory language course in Hong Kong, CLEP offers Chinese
enhancement courses from year 1 to year 4. In order to meet the need and timetable of students in different
disciplines or faculties, practical Chinese language courses are offered for all the academic years. For example,
most Chinese courses in Faculty of Business and Economics are offered as year 3 programme. The four CLEP
courses for Faculty of Education are respectively year 2 (CEDU9004), year 3 (CEDU9006), year 4 (CEDU9001)
programme. The adjustments are made for meeting the learning progress of the students in that faculty and the
timetable of the academic year in order to achieve the best learning outcome.
The teaching model of CLEP practical Chinese course is the combination of lecture and tutorial. The lecture
is the class with dozens or hundreds of students and has around fourteen hours per semester. Theories and
principles are discussed in lecture. The tutorial is the class with ten to twelve students. It takes ten to twelve hours
per semester. It allows students to practice, actualize the theories and principles learned in lecture. Besides, group
discussions and presentations are usually conducted in the tutorial.
However, the classroom pattern, “Lecture + Tutorial”, may not be suitable for all students (Phillips, R. 2005).
In addition to such classroom pattern, some CLEP practical Chinese courses are carried with the form as
workshop which last for two to three hour per lesson. Based on the learning and professional needs of students,
teaching, discussion, presentation are made in the same lesson. CBBA9003 for the Faculty of Business and
Economics, which is provided to finance and banking major, is an example.
5. Pedagogy
Like other university courses, CLEP has been using problem-based learning (PBL) didactics (Maggi, 2004).
Under the PBL teaching environment, students need to apply the knowledge learned in the course (C. E.
Hmelo-Silver, 2004). As the mainstream didactics, PBL is questioned by scholars to some extent (Don Margetson,
42
1997). CLEP also uses other didactics, especially those related to information technology, for cooperating with
PBL. For example, “e-Teaching Portfolio” and “Flipped Learning”.
Under the teaching environment of e-Teaching Portfolio, every student has their own personal and
independent learning account in Moodle. Task performances, including grades and the teacher's comments, are
collected and listed in order in a single online account. Students carry out continual improvement according to the
instruction of teachers and improve continuously. On the other hand, teacher's suggestion can be made in
reference to student’s performance on past assignments (Nedra & Elizabeth, 2014). Teachers help students
understand the benefits of portfolios and how to use portfolios to enhance professional growth and success.
E-Teaching Portfolio is important for continuous assessment of the Chinese learning, writing and oral
presentation.
There are different views on the popular Flipped Learning in recent years (Mike Acedo, 2013), and we tend
to adopt the following definitions:
As far as we are concerned, the successful flipped learning depends on the four pillars of “F-L-I-P”, while “F”
for “Flexible Environment”, “L” for “Learning Culture”, “I” for “Intentional Content” and “P” for
“Professional Educator”. Video clips on lecture content are uploaded to Moodle for the students to preview
and prepare for the coming lesson.
Therefore, class time can be used for group discussion, assessment and practice, which can make the learning
more efficient (Bishop & Matthew, 2013).
However, some of researches show that the learning progress of flipped learning depends on the
self-discipline of students and the handling of the teaching contents of teachers (Sandi & Peter, 2014). Besides, it
may not greatly improve the teaching effectiveness and it also does not coincide with the goal of CLEP:
tailor-made teaching. Therefore, in addition to the videos, discussions, presentation and evaluations, I uses the
“Flipped Back” concept. Firstly, student's oral presentation is recorded (video A) and uploaded. Secondly, teacher
record his oral comments on video A, that is while he is watching the students’ presentation (video B). In other
words, video B is the combination of the visual image of students’ oral presentation (video A but just mute) and
teacher’s oral comment. Student can evaluate his own presentation and receive teacher’s comment in the same
video. With the help of video function, such as “volume adjustment”, “fixed mirror” and “fast forward”, students
can identify their problems or merits and follow the advice of teachers. Progress is obvious in oral presentation
and pronunciation.
6. Conclusion
Facing the new challenges of the new century, the teaching method of Chinese in universities must also be
changed. CLEP offers nearly thirty Chinese courses all ten faculties of the University of Hong Kong. Although the
information technology is massively used, much attention should be paid to the relationship between learning and
teaching. The “I” and the “T” in the “IT Teaching” should be redefined as “I” am a “T”eacher by following out the
idea of “Tailor-made teaching” from the perspectives of professional Chinese, Language proficiency, delivery
mode and pedagogy.
43
References
Bishop Jacob Lowell and Matthew A. Verleger (2013). “The flipped classroom: A survey of the research”, ASEE National
Conference Proceedings, Atlanta, GA, Vol. 30, No. 9, p. 2.
Hmelo-Silver C. E. (2004). “Problem-based Learning: What and how to do students learn?”, Educational Psychology Review, Vol. 16,
No.3, pp. 235–266.
Carl Reidsema, Lydia Kavanagh, Roger Hadgraft and Neville Smith (2017). The Flipped Classroom: Practice and Practices in
Higher Education, Singapore: Springer, Singapore.
Colin Coles (1997). Is Problem-Based Learning the Only Way? The Challenge of Problem-Based Learning, Psychology Press, pp.
313–324.
H.S. Barrows (1996). “Problem-based Learning in medicine and beyond: A brief overview”, New Directions for Teaching and
Learning, Vol. 68, pp. 3–12.
Jacob L. B. and Matthew A. V. (2014). “The flipped classroom: A survey of the research”, Flipped Learning, assessed on 15 August
2017, available online at: http://flippedlearning.org/definition-of-flipped-learning.
Jeong-Bae Son (2008). “Using web-based language learning activities in the ESL classroom”, International Journal of Pedagogies
and Learning, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 34–43.
Maggi Savin-Baden (2004). Foundations of Problem-based Learning, Maidenhead: Open University.
Nedra Reynolds and Elizabeth Davis (2014). Portfolio Teaching: A Guide for Instructors, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Nielsen Lias (2011). “Five reasons I’m not flipping over the flipped classroom”, The Innovative Educator, assessed on 15 August
2017, available online at: http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.ca/2011/10/five-reasons-im-not-flipping-over.html.
Phillips R. (2005). “Challenging the primacy of lectures: The dissonance between theory and practice in university teaching”,
Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, Vol. 2, No. 1.
Sandi Findlay-Thompson and Peter Mombourquette (2014). “Evaluation of a flipped classroom in an undergraduate business course”,
Business Education & Accreditation, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 63–71.
44
Doi: 10.15341/jmer(2155-7993)/01.08.2018/006
Visitors’ Interests for the Croatian Natural History Museum Publications
— Analysis of Visitors’ Attitudes on Museum Publications
Renata Brezinščak
(Croatian Natural History Museum, Croatia)
Abstract: Museums, among others, are known for its publishing content. Croatian Natural History Museum
has diverse publishing activities, but the interest in it is poor. Although intended for pupils, students and the
general public, it is interesting that these categories show the slightest interest for it.
Today, museums are trying to keep visitors longer in their location by offering them new contents, such as
special areas where they can see, read and buy museum publications, or book-promotions, meetings with authors,
presentations, organization of attractive sales points, sales action, etc. All these activities are characterized by a
high level of organization and involvement of visitors in the museum events, which represents a novelty in the
standard museum offer.
The aim of research is to find out about the visitor's views on the museum’s publications. This research was
conducted and based on a survey of the museum visitors, during weekends and in the course of two months. The
results provide basic indicators in line what the visitors think of these publications and is shown the need for a
more comprehensive research project on this topic.
Key words: museum, museum publishing, museum visitors, survey
1. Introduction
The topic of the paper is to examine the attitudes of museum visitors regarding their interest in the offered
topics of the publishing editions of the Croatian Museum of Natural History (HPM), or basically their usefulness.
The current social topic1 is the lack of interest of a larger part of the public for reading and for purchasing books
in general, which is also reflected in the purchase of museum publications. The attitudes of an individual or group
are formed during the socialization process, through direct or indirect experience, by learning from the
environment and the associated social environment. Attitudes can be directed towards individuals, groups or ideas.
Therefore, precisely this topic of researching museum visitor attitudes towards publishing museum editions
deserves a more detailed analysis of the apparent poor interest in purchasing natural science publications as well
as museum publications in general. The basic task of a research (Šola, 2001, p. 141) is that “someone is positioned
on the market”, and the goal of the research is to find out, to detect weaknesses and develop a new strategy. For
the museum, it is important through research (surveys are the most preferred), to find the reasons of the
Renata Brezinščak, dipl. ing. geol., Museum Adviser for Education, Croatian Natural History Museum; research areas/interests:
geology in museum education. E-mail: renata.brezinscak@hpm.hr.
1
https://www.tportal.hr/kultura/clanak/zasto-51-posto-gradana-bas-nista-ne-moze-uvjeriti-da-kupuju-knjige-20160422.
45
weaknesses, which in this case are the poor sales of museum editions, as it can only develop and improve services
that would in the future contribute to the better use of museum publications. The survey was conducted on
weekends for two months, from 1 March 2017 to 25 May 2017, when the museum usually has more individual
visitors (parents with children, tourists) and less organized school groups.
The paper deals with museum visitors and their interest in museum publishing activities. It also provides an
analysis of visitor attitudes on the museum’s natural history publications along with a discussion of the research
results and the conclusion.
2. Publishing under A Museum
The museums, Šola believes (2001, p. 64), are designed to meet human needs, the needs of the society and
the needs of communities in which they operate. That is why it is important to explore why museum visitors, in
spite of their interest in the topic of the exhibition, are not interested to buy the offered prints related to the theme
of the exhibition. The contemporary museum, apart from storing and exhibiting the fundus, also has the function
of recognizing different groups of users and their needs and designing more targeted and efficient communication
with them. The museum can communicate with users at different levels and through different media. The central
and most important form of museum communication is definitely an exhibition. Other ways of museums
communicating with users include: workshops, lectures, internet, social networks, but also publications,
newspapers and posters. In addition to researches and exhibitions, an important segment of every museum are its
publishing activities, whose goal is distributing both professional and scientific information, information on the
educational activities and work of museum, and the popularization of museum material and cultural heritage as
well (Grdenić, 1966).
One of the main functions of museum publications are the realization of a kind of museum communication
with the public (including education, offering information, etc.) and the promotion of museum's activities and
mission, the presentation of museum objects, and also creating interest for its visitors. Eventually, if the marketing
of the museum is successful, this communication is then achieved and there are exchanges between the museum
and the user and profits are made by their sales. The following publications are specific for Croatian museum
publishing (Radovanlija Mileusnić, 2001, p. 16): informative museum flyers, brochures and museum guides,
catalogues of permanent exhibitions and catalogues of occasional exhibitions.
Publishing is the activity of publishing and distributing printed, audiovisual and electronic material intended
for the public. It includes the acquisition and selection of manuscripts, editing, graphic art formatting, printing or
other forms of production, promotion and distribution2. The modern era in which the internet offers great
opportunities for getting to know the world and researching various topics and content does not benefit publishing
museum activity. The greatest and most important value of the museum is intelligibility. That is what attracts
visitors to the museum. Understanding and accessibility of museum contents is an important factor in creating
interest for other museum contents as well. The museums publish their publications primarily for the promotion of
knowledge, but in recent years also for the purpose of obtaining financial profit because museum publications are
sold, and museums use the money to print additional publications or to promote other programs.
According to Šola (2002) museum publications are divided into two categories:
(1) Publishing as a part of a complex museum product (catalogue of permanent exhibitions which without it
2
Note of the Publisher, Proleksis encyclopedia; http://proleksis.lzmk.hr/58192.
46
is difficult to follow the exhibition).

(2) Publishing where the goal is to present the product of the museum, popularize it, make it attractive or to
follow it up for better understanding or income (museum newspapers, leaflets, posters and other publications
where the goal is to inform the public of the existence of exhibitions).
“The boundaries between these groups are not always clear, as there is no catalogue that is not a museum
advertisement, and there is no promotional material that is not part of the museum substance” (Šola, 2002, p. 63).
The goals of museum publishing and the role of museum publications can be understood within the
following museum activities (Standards and norms for museum activity, 1990):
(1) publishing results of professional and scientific work on the museum building
(2) publishing data and information about museum documentation
(3) museum publishing as a segment of museum market business.
Organized museum shops offer museum publications with replicas of sculptures or museum items, toys or
jewellery made in original design as well as original works of art. Postcards, reproductions, posters, and posters
with museum motifs are favourites if they are well-chosen and whose original can be seen in the exhibition. In
recent years, the museum offer has been complemented by museum editions for children and youth. With its
editions, museums are trying to get closer to more ingenious publications — picture books, workbooks and
notebooks, colouring books, models, as well as a variety of souvenir offerings such as jigsaws3, mosaic pads or
page markers. McManus believes (1994, p. 70) that museum staff caring for program activities, public relations
and propaganda have additional needs for visitor information, their habits, interest, and needs.
3. Croatian Natural History Museum
3.1 Publishing of CNHM

The Croatian Natural History Museum (hereinafter: CNHM), by its fundus, is one of the largest Croatian
museums, and is the largest natural science museum in the Republic of Croatia. At 750 m2 of exhibition space
there is a zoological permanent exhibition, a mineralogical-petrography permanent exhibition and a thematic
exhibition. Although it is a spatial museum (spread over 3 floors), there is no museum shop in the museum where
museum publications and souvenirs could be displayed. For now they are in the showcase next to the ticket sales
spot. The selection of publications in the museum is large and thematically diverse, and a wide range of museum
themes are presented in various publishing formats, from classical publications, computer laser prints to exhibition
catalogues to monograph encyclopaedia type editions or contemporary electronic publications. Everything
presented, from scientific publications to depliants, as well as the entire small print assortment (the museum prints
large amounts of such small prints for the purpose of museum promotion (such as bookmarks, calendars,
schedules, magnets, etc.). In addition, the museum has various accompanying, promotional prints marking
museum anniversaries, points of some significant museum projects, and alike.
3.2 Visitors to the Museum
Due to visibility of the analysis regarding the perception and purchase of museum publications, one should
first consider who are the visitors of the Croatian Natural History Museum. According to data, the museum had
3
Example: The Museum of the City of Kaštel printed in 2007 a museum publication in the form of a puzzle Educational map —
model of the Vitturi Castle in Kaštel Lukšić, author, Maria Klaića, available online at:
http://www.muzej-grada-kastela.hr/pedMapa.html.
47
23,143 visitors in 20154, of which 20% were preschool children, 45% were schoolchildren (high school students
make up only ten percent within the category), while adults account for 35% of the total number of visitors5. Out
of this reason, it is evident that this museum is mostly visited by primary school pupils and parents with children.
In accordance with this knowledge, most of the museum publications are intended and adapted to the interest of
children and school curricula in order to use them as a supplements (or clarification) for the knowledge gained at
school. Contrary to the high numerical potential of visitors6, there is little interest in the offered museum
publications. Is that just an assumption? Do museum visitors find the publications useful for their education or
maybe hobbies? Are offered publications written in a too professional manner rather than customized, fashionable
and with interesting topics for them? Why would the publications be interesting to them? Responses to these
questions are being researched.
4. Material and Methods
4.1. Survey Research

The research was conducted by a survey method. This is a process that researches and collects data,
information, attitudes and opinions about the subject of the survey based on the survey questionnaire. As Zelenika
states (2000, p. 368), with the help of a survey, data and information about the experience can be found and more
information can be obtained in a short matter of time, which would reduce costs and therefore make the survey
more economical. The value of the survey is limited because the information it can give us depends on the honesty
of the questioned person and their capability to answer the given questions. The reliability of this method is as
great as the reliability of the information gathered with this method, and it is used in cases when it is not possible
to collect certain data and information in another way (Zelenika, 2000, p. 366). Good and detailed preparation and
defining the purposes and goals of the research is necessary for a scientific method of surveying. This research
used the written survey, which, according to Zelenika (2000, p. 371) has certain advantages in regards to an oral
survey because the responses are anonymous, there is no influence from the surveyor, less time and effort is
needed and the costs of the survey are minimal. The survey was filled out by the visitors. The time necessary for
filling out the survey was not limited, but the responders needed 10–15 minutes. The survey used questions of a
closed type (Vujević, 1988. p. 96) or questions with offered answers and questions with offered answers of
intensity. So the survey would not only be a questionnaire but also an introduction and instructions (Zelenika,
2000 p. 373), the respondents were given an explanation of the problems and the goal of the research which
motivated them to answer the questions consciously and honestly. The survey questionnaire was put in an
approachable place for the visitors at the entrance to the museum so that oral instructions for the survey could be
given as well. The survey was conducted individually and in groups when opportunity was given.
This research was conducted in the museum area during the period from 1 March 2017 to 25 May 2017 on a
sample of 328 visitors who wanted to participate in the survey7. The data was collected personally by the author.
The survey research was conducted due to a number of advantages of such a research: simple organization, price
4
Official information for 2016 are not yet published, so here as an example is the information for the year 2015,
http://www.mdc.hr/UserFiles/Image/izdavastvo/izvjesca/2013/zg/Hrvatski%20prirodoslovni%20muzej%202013.pdf.
5
Internal information of the museum obtained according to categories of the sold tickets.
6
2015. Croatian Musuem of Natural History was visited by 23.143 people, available online at: http://www.mdc.hr/files/file/muzeji/
statistika/Posjet-hrvatskim-muzejima---statistika-broja-posjeta-(2014.-g.).pdf.
7
According to internal information, for the period when the survey was conducted, the total registered number of visitors was 732.
48
(not expensive), ability to obtain more information at once, obtaining current information, and alike. The problem
that had occurred in the research was the difficulty of choosing questions, their quantity, fear of respondents
refusing to participate and that, given the different age of respondents, some answers would be unusable. As
mentioned earlier, research will show whether there is a need for a more comprehensive exploration of this issue.
The age structure of visitors participating in the survey was satisfactory and as expected; the museum was
visited by several adults (n = 252) in comparison to children and higher grade students (n = 103), a total of 328
visitors. This was expected because parents and children, young people and tourists are the most frequent visitors
on weekends. For the purpose of this research, a survey questionnaire was used containing socio-demographic
questions (age, gender) and questions related to the attitudes of permanent museum exhibitions and occasional
exhibitions and museum publications. The questions that were asked were clear, unambiguous and usable. The
research was conducted after visitors visited the museum and were informed that some of the offered publications
could be purchased at the ticket desk of the museum. The survey was filled only by visitors who wanted to fill it
out and there was no need for it to be filled out by all museum visitors during that period. The surveys were filled
out anonymously and without time constraints. After completion, the surveys were submitted to the author
personally or they are put in the provided survey box. The survey was a one-time survey. The research used a
non-experimental method, meaning a survey where the basic source of data was personal testimony of opinions,
beliefs, attitudes (Milas, 2009, p. 395).
The following main problems were formulated according to the goal of the research:
 To test the general attitude of visitors according to the interest of the exhibition of the Croatian Natural
History Museum and interest for natural history.
 To test their book reading and purchasing habits.
 To test the attitude of the visitors regarding museum publications and souvenirs.
 To test the reasons why they purchase or do not purchase museum publications.
5. Results and Discussions
After processing the survey, results were obtained whose interpretation was descriptive and graphical. The
questions in the survey related to gender, age, interest in natural history, motivation for coming to the museum,
attitudes about the museum's exhibitions, do they have habits of reading and buying books, is there is interest in
the offered publications and their reasons for buying or not buying museum publications. In total 328 visitors of
different ages were surveyed. The research was mostly carried out by adults (225 persons). Of the surveyed
respondents, 225 (69%) were adults, and 103 (31%) were children, students of higher grades (Figure 1). More
women (202) compared to men (126) participated, which was expected because mothers come with children to the
museum more frequently (Figure 2). When asked if they are interested in natural sciences, Figure 3 shows that
adult visitors are interested in natural sciences (54%), while children are interested in natural science at a very
high percentage (82%), and only a small percentage of children of are not interested in natural sciences and they
are there “because they have to”. Participants in the questionnaire survey were asked whether the museum
exhibitions were interesting. Figure 4 shows that surveyed visitors mostly indicated that the museum’s exhibitions
were very interesting for them, especially for children. An almost negligible percentage considers the museum not
interesting and even boring. When asked about their reading habits, whether they read and purchase books, Figure
5 shows, which is completely expected, that most of the adult museum visitors are likely to read and purchase
49
books (85%), while students in the highest percentage respond that they do not like to read (68%), which is quite
disconcerting. When asked what they think about museum publications, several answers were offered. Figure 6
shows that 55% of visitors believe that the museum has a satisfactory offer of publications, 20% think the
publications are unattractive, and only 15% stated they did not know. When asked whether they purchase museum
publications or the reason for their purchase (Figure 7), 55% purchase it because of the need (because of
schoolwork, papers, etc.), while only 23% of visitors purchase publications because they are interested in a
particular natural science theme, and 23% does not buy anything.
Are publications of geological or biological topics more interesting? A slightly higher percentage (48%)
opted for biological topics, 33% would buy a publication of geological themes, and 29% do not know (Figure 8).
Figure 9 shows that 29% of visitors believe that publications are expensive. According to the types of publications,
visitors mostly buy catalogues along with exhibitions or museum guides (38%), publication for children purchase
64% of visitors and the smallest interest in monograph editions (8%), which is understandable because it is a
specialized, expensive publication (Figure 10).
31
Adults
odrasli
Children
djeca
69
Figure 1 Age of Visitors (%)
43 Male spol
muški
57 Femalespol
ženski
Figure 2 Sex (%)
100
80 Yes
da
60
No
ne
40
20
0
odrasli
Adults Children
djeca
Figure 3 Interest for Natural Sciences (%)
50
80
70
60
50
40 Adults
odrasli
30
Children
djeca
20
10
0
Veryjako Interesting
zanimljivo nezanimljivo
Not interesting
interesting
zanimljivo
Figure 4 Interesting Objects of the Museum and Exhibition (%)
90
80
70
60
50 Yes
da
40
No
ne
30
20
10
0
odrasli
Adults Children
djeca
Figure 5 Reading Habits (%)
60
50
40
30
Publication offer
ponuda publikacija
20
10
0
Satisfactory Notzanimljive
zadovoljavajuća nisu interesting Ine
do znam
not know
Figure 6 Offer of Museum Publications (%)
51
80 Reasons for buying

publications
70
60
50
40
30
Schoolwork Personal interest I do not know
20
Figure 7 Reason for Buying Publications (%)
Theme interest
Geological topic Biological topic I do not know
Figure 8 Thematic Interest for Buying Publications (%)
Price of publication
Expensive Appropriate I do not know

Figure 9 Price of Publication (%)
52
Type of publication
Catalogues Publications for Monographs

children
Figure 10 What Type of Publication is Purchased Most Frequently (%)
6. Conclusion
Today museums are trying to keep visitor in their areas with the goal of a more quality adoption of the
offered content. Special programs are being designed, so even the Croatian Museum of Natural History follows
the world practice and strives to offer museum visitors publications of interesting, current themes that are adapted
to different ages — from preschool children to professionals of various profiles. Considering that the survey was
conducted on weekends, more adult visitors were expected to attend, with fewer children (students), and more
women than men. Furthermore, research has shown that the museum is visited more over the weekend because of
parents with children, the student population and tourists. Some 50% come to the museum because they have to
(“to entertain the children” or “because of school”). Surveys have shown that the general attitude towards the
museum and its exhibition is positive, and adults and children consider it interesting. The survey shows that
museum visitors like reading, they have reading habits, and they buy books. This is encouraging for selling
museum publications as well. A large number of visitors consider that the museum has a good offer of
publications, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and it is apparent that they are interested in publications and
purchase them. However, the survey showed that publications were purchased because of school-related needs,
and a very small, almost negligible percentage of visitors buy publications of their own interest. Visitors are more
interested in publications of biological themes than geological. More than half of the respondents, 58%, believe
that publications have an acceptable price. Research has shown that poor sales of publications are certainly not a
result of high prices or lack of interest. Another reason for this is that children do not like reading and read less
and less. Also, the poor interest in museum publications from visitors requires a deeper, more extensive analysis.
A possible solution is to pay more attention to the advertising and marketing of the publishing itself.
The obtained results were satisfactory and somewhat expected. Although, according to the results of this
research, there is interest in museum publications, and it has proved to be interesting to visitors with a good
presentation of content, a variety of themes adapted to various age groups and interests, however, is not enough. In
order to improve the situation, it is necessary to devise a marketing strategy. In the museum, part of the museum's
activities will focus on even better visibility of these publications with visitors by applying new, interesting
53
programs such as promotions, mingling with curators — authors, travel agents, photographers, presentations,
lectures etc. The most fundamental views on the interest of visitors to the Croatian Natural History Museum for
the purchase of museum publications will only be obtained after a more extensive research involving more visitors
to the museum for a longer period of time.
Reference
Grdenić P. (1966). Departments of the Technical Museum in Zagreb, Short Guide, Technical Museum, Zagreb.
McManus P. (1994). “Evaluation; describing and understanding museum visitors, their needs and reactions”, Informatica
Museologica, Vol. 25, No. (1–4), pp. 70–73.
Milas G. (2009). Research Methods in Psychology and Other Social Sciences (2nd ed.), Publisher Slap, Jastrebarsko.
Museum reports, Museum documentation centre, available online at:
http://www.mdc.hr/UserFiles/Image/izdavastvo/izvjesca/2013/zg/Hrvatski%20prirodoslovni%20muzej%202013.pdf.
Proleksis encyclopedia, available online at: http://proleksis.lzmk.hr.
Radovanlija Mileusnić S. (2001). “Overview of typologies, formal and content features of museum publications: Results and research
of Croatian museum publishers”, Informatica Museologica, Vol. 32, No. 3–4. pp. 14–18.
Standards and Norms (1990). Bulletin on Computerization of Museum Activity SR Croatia, Vol. 1, MDC, Zagreb, pp. 9–13.
Šola T. (2001). Marketing in the Museum or About Virtue and How to Show It, Croatian Museum Association, Zagreb.
Šola T. (2002). “Marketing and museum publishers”, Informatica Museologica, Vol. 33, No. 1–2. pp. 61–66.
Vujević M. (1988). “Introduction to scientific work in the field of social sciences”, Informator, Zagreb.
Zelenika R. (2000). Methodology and Technology of Creating Scientific and Professional Work (4th ed.), Economic Faculty, Rijeka.
54
Doi: 10.15341/jmer(2155-7993)/01.08.2018/007
Self-Directed Learning Ability of the Students in Ho Chi Minh City
University of Technology and Education Vietnam — Reality and
Development Direction
Truong Minh Tri , Bui Van Hong, Vo Thi Xuan

(HCMC University of Technology and Education, Vietnam)
Abstract: During the university period of students, self-directed learning ability plays a really important role.
It promotes the self-awareness and positiveness that can take up the students’ knowledge. Fostering self-directed
learning ability of students is a significant duty in all the universities. In this writing, the writer mainly focuses on
the issues which are related to the conception of self-directed learning ability, assessment of practice of
self-directed capacity of students from Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology and Education (HCMC UTE),
enhancement in self-directed capacity of the students, especially for solutions of teaching methods according to
the approach of self-directed learning of lecturers for students. Therefore, it can help speed up self-directed
learning ability of students which contributes to the innovations of teaching methods.
Key words: self-directed learning, self-directed learning ability, self-directed learning exercise, Ho Chi Minh
City University of Technology and Education Vietnam
1. Introduction
Under the strong influence of science and technology nowadays, an education is required to bring the
learners basic skills, knowledge and creative thinking. All will create a lively picture of education while the
traditional education methods cannot satisfy. Accordingly, the studying is an acquisition and make use of skills
and knowledge in a positive, active and creative manner; it is called self-directed learning ability of students.
Teaching activity is an organization, instruction and inspection to impulse lecturers’ teaching for teaching goals.
Self-directed learning ability is an indispensable trend because education process is really a process which
changes the learners from educated objects to educated subjects. Self-directed learning can help to improve the
academic performance of students and education quality of schools, the obvious evidence of the innovation of the
education methods in the establishments. Self-directed learning ability is mentioned by some internal and foreign
writers for some related topics with other researches (Nguyen, 2011; Vu, 1994; Hiemstra, 1991; Malcolm, 1975;
Morell, 2014; Huey, 2017). The researchers are mainly concerned with the characteristics of self-directed learning
ability which show the conformity of this kind of teaching for students during the period of international
integration of our country nowadays.
Truong Minh Tri, Master, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology and Education Vietnam; research areas/interests:
self-directed learning for technical students. E-mail: tritm@hcmute.edu.vn.
55
Self-Directed Learning Ability of the Students in Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology and
Characteristics of self-directed learning ability:

Characteristic 1: Each individual can become more powerful (self-control) and be more responsible for
different decisions related to academic efforts.
Characteristic 2: Self-directed learning ability is acknowledged as a ceaseless development of the individual
ability beyond the normal thinkings of traditional orientation or familiar contexts.
Characteristic 3: Self-directed learning ability can be flexible and meet knowledge and research skills from
other situations.
Characteristic 4: Self-directed learning ability can involve in the activities and resources like participating in
research groups, internships, studying group, electronic dialogue, writing feedbacks, so on.
Characteristic 5: The roles and effectiveness of lecturers in the fostering self- directed learning ability are to
give examples; to improve critical thinking, to guarantee human resources and to assess according to outputs of
subjects and curriculums, so on.
Characteristic 6: Some academic institutions are finding ways to support the model of self- directed learning
with the purpose of enhancing self-directed learning ability through some programs like E-Studying LMS,
Blended Studying, Studying by doing, Deep studying, so son as well as choosing studying method for each
individual, non-traditional courses and the other innovation programs, so on.
Self-directed capacity of students can decide the academic performance at schools and the ability of
competence development in the future. Each student has his ability and different academic demands, thus the
development of self-directed capacity will remarkably depend on teaching methods of lecturers. Teaching by
self-directed learning approach is an individualized model which the learners can set studying goals; determine
studying resources, selections and implementation of suitable studying strategies, evaluation of studying
performance with the research of Engineers' Council for Professional Development (1947). From that, it can
promote the positiveness, activeness, self-awareness during cultivating knowledge and skills for students.
2. Research Method
The research method was implemented by us in this topic is to survey the ideas of students. Specifically,
the research group has conducted a survey of 630 students of all technical engineering (Electrical, Machinery
Mechanical, Auto Mechanical) which are belong to high quality training system of HCMC UTE via
questionnaires. The structure of questionnaires consists of 10 questions with 50 criterias in the two kinds of ideas:
evaluation with 5 levels (5: vey high, 4: high, 3: average, 2: low, 1: very low); choice with all available answers;
providing information. The surveyed subjects are applied according to the form of choosing random sample. All
surveys are updated and analyzed by the software SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences).
3. Results and exchanges
3.1 Self-directed Learning Ability

3.1.1 Ability
Ability is the psychological and physiological quality of a human being which can ensure to implement any
activity with the research of Nguyen (2011). Ability is also stipulated as “a complex personality attribute,
including skills, necessarily high skills which are formed basing on knowledge; being attached with relevant
motives and habbits” with the research of Vu (1994). In the training, the ability always links to performance and it
56
is a combination of all attributes (knowledge, skills and attitudes) which are hidden inside each individual. In
particular, skill is a component of ability which is expressed through practices of certain activities and they can be
observed. Therefore, the ability of any certain activity will go together with relevant component a skill which
shows an acceptable level through actions.
3.1.2 Self-directed Learning Ability
With other researches (Morell, 2014; Moor, 1972; Huey, 2017) have mentioned many skills of
self-orientation in the effective studying. The core studying skills are problem addressing and solving, collection
skill, information processing, decision making skill, memorization skill, reasoning, analysis, generalization, so on.
By this meaning, the writers determine that self-directed learning ability is expressed through the following skills;
they are the most basic skills of self-directed learning.
3.1.2.1 Skill of Goal Determination
Skill of goal determination is the most important in self-directed learning, showing the characteristic of
self-directed learning ability comparing to other studying capacities. This skill helps students to choose the most
important targets for the most suitable strategies to obtain them.
3.1.2.2 Skill of Planning
Skill of planning helps students to establish the orders and time to perform works under given conditions. It
is also required that the learners must make planning by themselves to perform studying duties with the best
results and meet required demands.
3.1.2.3 Skill of Self-management
Skill of self-management helps students to control their studying activities according to the schedule. The
process of self-directed learning system allows the learners to feel more comfortable in their study but it also
brings them more challenges. So, the learners must know how to self-manage their studying and organize their
practice in the concrete conditions.
3.1.2.4 Skill of Self-observation
Skill of self-observation in the self-directed learning brings the students skills of examination, adjustment of
studying style and studying methods to align with the studying process. The self-control in the study requires the
learners to self-observe to decide whether self-directed learning practice is understood in a correct way and
performed as set plan or not.
3.1.2.5 Skill of Self-assessment
Skill of self-assessment is a final and an indispensable way in the self-directed learning. Students do
assessment by themselves to determine their ability and strength to have proper studying targets. In the process of
self-directed learning also requires the learners to review their performance periodically for suitable adjustments.
Self-directed learning ability is both a way and a result of self-directed learning. During the studying,
students can make use of skills of self-directed learning to perform their duties and gain knowledge. By studying,
self- directed capacity are formed, practiced and developed.
3.2 Reality
3.2.1 Survey ideas of the students
The nature of studying according to self-directed learning is to personalize the studying of learners. Students
are allowed to determine studying targets for the most suitable studying strategies, studying schedule of all
courses as well as the academic schedule of each semester which are aligned with studying competence and
57
concrete situations, mean that each student can self-directed, self-manage, self-observe and self-assess his
studying to complete set targets. Our survey results related to students’ ideas for teaching conceptions in the
approach of self-directed learning (as Table 1), Self-directed learning ability in studying (as Table 2) follows:
Table 1 Students’s Ideas for Teaching Conceptions in the Approach of Self-directed Learning
Criteria
No Level Individualize Students etermine Students actively Students Students xamine
studying studying goals make planning perform duties planning
1 Very low 7.2 8.2 9.9 9.6 6.2
2 Low 8.4 16.6 26.7 14.0 13.6
3 Average 49.7 35.7 36.9 38.2 37.7
4 High 23.3 26.5 17.8 28.1 29.7
5 Very high 11.4 13.0 08.7 10.1 13.8
Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
*Source: Data is directly surveyed for technical engineering students, HCMC University of Technology and Education Vietnam, in
2018, with more than 630 samples
50
45
40
35
30 Very high
25 High
20
Average
15
Low
10
5 Very low
0
Individualize Students Students Students Students
studying determine actively perform examine
studying make duties planning
goals planning
Figure 1 Teaching Views by Self-directed Learning Approach
Teaching in the approach of self-directed learning helps students become more dynamic and adaptable with
quick changes of the modern society and industrial revolution 4.0 with the research of Nguyen (2011). For
traditional teaching, students are completely positive and follow the teacher’s teaching plan while for teaching in
the approach of self-directed learning system; students must be active to build the studying target, planning and
suitable strategies to bring the best effects. Based on the survey related to this method, there are 39.6% agreement
in the average level; 29.9% agreement in the high level; 11.4% agreement in very high level. So, total of ideas
which agree with three levels accounts for 80.9%. It is shown that students are aware of conceptions of
self-directed learning.
58
Table 2 Students’ Ideas on the Self-directed Learning Ability

Criteria
No Level Skill of
Skill of Skill of Skill of
determining Skill of planning
self-control self-observation self-assessment
studying goals
1 Very low 32.5 22.4 16.1 26.0 25.3
2 Low 45.3 41.7 36.2 34.3 52.7
3 Average 15.8 26.0 33.8 28.5 19.4
4 High 05.0 08.9 12.3 09.4 01.4
5 Very high 01.4 01.0 01.6 01.8 01.2
Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
*Source: Data is directly surveyed for technical engineering students – HCMC University of Technology and Education Vietnam - In
2018, with more than 630 samples
60
50
40
30
Very high
20
High
10
0 Average
Low
Very low
Figure 2 Students’ Ideas on the Self-directed Learning Ability
Self-Directed Learning
Ability
Skill of goal Skill of planning Skill of Skill of Skill of

determination self-managem self-observation self-assessment
Figure 3 Flowchart of Self-directed Learning Ability
Studying skill is the most important element to determine whether the learners’ studying is effective or not.
That’s the reason why each student must self-equip necessary and adequate skills during their studying with the
research of Engineers’ Council for Professional Development (1947). Self-directed learning ability includes basic
skills which can bring the studying with the best results. Our survey results for self-directed learning ability of
59
technical engineering students: 24.7% in the average level; 7.4% at the high level; 1.4% at the very high level. So,
total of ideas which agree with three levels accounts for 33.5%. With this result, it is shown that students don’t
have experience of forming self-directed learning ability in their study.
3.2.2 Lecturers
Currently, most lecturers of all universities have not yet trained and don’t have experience in teaching by
self-directed learning approach.
3.2.3 Evaluation
With the rapid development of knowledge economy in the 21st century, it is required that teaching contents
and teaching methods must be innovated. The innovation of teaching methods in the university level must direct
towards the teaching methods which can enhance positiveness, activeness and creativeness of the students during
their studying to create dynamic and independent persons in the society.
International integration for studying, exchanging, improving education level, competence of the students are
really reasonable, however integration, exchange and studying of the students lack self-orientation. This can make
external positive effects which are easily generated and spreaded with the Vietnamese students, especially for
morality and lifestyle. This is the challenge in training and educating the Vietnamese students.
In my country, after nearly two decades of “innovation”, changing from centrally planned economy to
socialist-oriented market economy, the industrialization and modernization in the beginning time and during the
development period, so on “gradual development of knowledge economy” has obtained many achievements. In
the period of international integration and industrial revolution 4.0, the country has not only its innovation but also
integration and globalization.
Studying quality is the combination of many elements like lecturers, learners, teaching procedure,
management regulation, facilities to ensure training, life, studying time, so on which the lecturers and learners
play really important roles. There are also shortcomings like the students don’t determine goals, motives,
motivation, suitable studying schedule, proper studying method for each subject with the research of Nguyen
(2011). Thus, orientation in the approach of self-directed learning has not yet brought positiveness, activeness and
creativeness of the learners.
Through above practice, researchers have given some ideas:
1st: Students still keeps studying method of high school education and don’t have any habbit and conception
of new self-directed learning.
2nd: Activeness and positiveness are limited. Motives and awareness of science are not clear and the motives
of forming self-directed learning ability are not high.
3rd: Innovation of teaching method in the approach of self-direction in learning of students is not widely
implemented in the academic institutions.
3.3 Development Methods
It can be said that our international context has created its new period. It has made univerisity education to a
new stage which has given new characteristic of missions, structures, functions, so on. These new characteristics
have stimulated the changes of motives, contents ans teaching methods in the universities. Three above elements
are sometimes separated but sometimes combined together with the research of Duong (2007).
It can be said that nowadays for the modern teaching methods in the university level are perfomed according
to the trends: positive promotion of the awareness; concretization of technologization of teaching methods;
60
application of arithmetic in teaching. These methods not only ask the transfering knowledge to the students but
also teaching them how to become creative and find new knowledge for themselves with the research of Nguyen
(2011). The lecturers not only provide information but also apply modern technology, methods which can help the
students to learn and research in an active manner through books, documents, internet, so on and life matters. The
lecturers only plays a role as “scientific consultants” with the research of Duong (2007).
From theoretical characteristics of teaching in the approach of self-directed learning as above, the researchers
can draw up some methods as follows:
3.3.1 Method 1: Introduction of Self-Directed Learning Model for Students from the First Year of University
High school education has created habbit of positive studying. So, changing their thinking, attitudes and
studying habbits are not simple. At the transitional period between studying according to traditionnal methods of
high school and method of studying of university, the students still keep their thinking and studying methods of
high school, and don’t have habbits and conceptions of new self-directed learning. It is agreed that the awareness
and attitudes of students are still weak resulting from previous high school system. It is suggested that there
should have teaching method to change attitudes and habbits of students when they just go to school. The
introduction teaching in self-directed learning model; is personalized activity of orientation. Teaching is based on
demands, competence of the learners and performed according to the directions and strategies which are
determined by the learners. To implement well teaching of self-directed learning, it is required that the lecturers
must have deep knowedge of specialized science, usually update knowledge, self-promote the professional skills,
enhance foreign languages and teaching methods to be able to support and guide the students. Besides, the
lecturers must have skill of organization to supervise and manage studying activities of their classes.
3.3.2 Method 2: Introduction of Self-directed Learning Ability for Students
During the studying, determining purposes and building motives, selecting methods and suitable studying
methods are necessary. However, the most important thing is that the students must know how to learn. This is
very important for the students because to obtain occupational skills, there must have independent working skill
by promoting the awareness to gain knowledge with the research of Engineers’ Council for Professional
Development (1947). Because knowledge is the product of activity, so as to master knowledge and skills, practice
of studying skill frequently and seriously must be considered when they are students. To be self-directed learning,
students must master and apply studying skills as follows:
*Skill of determining goals:
To be able to determine goals, it is very important to know how to establish them, because determining goals
is a long-term process which begins from careful consideration of the desires of the students in their study. Criteria
are defined as follows:
- Goals must create motives.
- Goals must be concrete, measurable, feasibe, compatible and within a timeline.
- Make action plan
- Follow up closely the plan
*Skill of planning
Academic planning is one of the most important skills which helps students to achieve the highest level of
education. Steps of planning are:
-Draw up short-term or long-term plans
-Verify weakness, strength of ourselves
61
-Make planning of goal implementation

*Skill of self-management
Skill of self-management helps students to control their studying activities as set plan. Skill of
self-management consists of:
-Manage ourselves by practicing studying skills and self-studying
-Time management: Skill of time self-management means that students take use of time for planning,
organization, observe, examination and assessment usage of time optimally and scientifically to master scientific
knowledge, skills, professional skills to gain studying goals.
Students must know how to manage their studying and how to organize the implementation in the concrete
conditions.
*Skill of self-observation
Self-control requires the students to self-observe to determine whether self-directed learning is understood in
a correct way and implemented as set plan or not. Skill of self-observation really means self-examine to adjust
studying style and studying method to align with studying process.
*Skill of self-assessment
Self-assessment is a method to help students to establish skills, professional skills and address weakness and
strength like a studying method to find corrective actions. To gain skill of self-assessment, the students must:
- Determine goals, contents of lessons
- Verify relevant contents in the reference documents
- Remember again relevant knowledge which is transferred
- Build as lesson plan (or presentation)
- Do exercises as required
- Prepare questions and answers in advance
- Make presentation in front of group (class), discuss with friends
- Check, adjust, complement unsuitable contents
Therefore, to make studying activity of students effective, the students must gain self-directed learning
ability which they are knowedge and self-directed learning skill with the research of Hiemstra (1991). This skill is
an internal condition for students to change studying motives to concrete results and make students become
confident, foster and develop motivation, maintain positive awareness in their self-directed learning acivities.
3.3.3 Method 3: Organization of Teaching Experimental Classes and Comparison for Scientific Foundation
of Orientation in the Approach of Self-Directed Learning
The implementation of teaching in the approach of self-directed learning for students to enhance positiveness
and activeness is feasible. Self-directed learning is an indispensable trend because education process is really a
process which turns educated objects into educated subjects. Self-directed learning helps to raise studying results
of students and education quality of the schools, is an obvious evidence of the innovation of teaching method in
the academic institutions.
Experimental results show that: teaching in the approach of self-directed learning plays a very important role
in the context of international integration of our country when knowledge is improved more in the society.
Self-directed learning helps students to self-master, strengthen, widen knowledge, and practice occupational skills,
professional skills with the research of Bui (2006), promoting studying positiveness and developing independent
and creative thinking, form competence, motivation, habbits, methods, Changing training process into self-trained
62
process for long lasting studying.

3.3.4 Method 4: Getting Approval of Governing Body
Getting approval of Ministry of Education and Training to facilitate the academic institutions for teaching in
the approach of self-directed learning model. Moreover, it is necessary for lecturers to attend fostering classes
related to knowledge and experience of deploying the orientation in the approach of self-directed learning.
Promoting and recapitulating all above methods will be the best choices to heighten self-directed learning
ability in studying as well as to create motives and basic foundation which can help to education field to complete
assigned duties and reach the new achievements in the context of international integration and development.
4. Conclusions
Self-directed learning ability is the essential factor of the success of students in their study. Although teaching
in the approach of self-directed learning is considered as a new method, it has been a hundred of years and
confirmed its advantages in many famous universities all the world. For the Vietnamese universities, teaching
method in the approach of self-directed learning is still new. In addition, the resources of education according to
self-directed learning method have lots of shortcomings. So, its implementation also has many difficulties. With
the orientation method in the approach of self-directed learning and flexible education management in the
individualized manner based on determining goals, planning, implementation, the positive application of teaching
methods and give self-control authority to the learners is one of the essential issues to guarantee the success of this
method. Through the survey of the students’ ideas of teaching in the approach of self-directed learning, especially
for methods to develop self-directed learning ability of students, we hope to contribute partially to improvement
of education quality in HCMC UTE as well as in all domestic universities, as well as to elevate the national
university education system in the direction of self-directed learning and integrate with advanced university
education system of the world.
Reference
Bui Van Hong (2011). “Flexible approach and application into studying”, Educational Journal, No. 276, pp. 17–19.
Dương Phuc Ty (2007). Teaching Method of Industrial Technique, Hanoi Science and Techniques Publishing House.
Engineers’ Council for Professional Development (1947). Canons of Ethics for Engineers.
Hiemstra R. (Ed.) (1991). Creating Environments for Effective Adult Studying: New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education,
No. 50, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Huey B. Long (2017). “Skills for self-directed studying”, available online at: http://www.gavilan.edu/tlc/studyingcommons/
professional_studying/32skills-for-self-directed-studying.pdf.
Knowles – Malcolm Shepherd Knowles (1975). Self-directed Studying: A Guide for Learners and Teachers, Association Press.
Morell D. Boone (2014). Special topic “To become a self-oriented learner”, Lessons of coaching class of self-directed learning.
Saigon University 02/2014.
Moor M. G. (1972). “Learner autonomy: the second dimension of independent studying”, Covergence: An International Journal of
Adult Education, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp.76–78.
Nguyen Van Cuong–Bernd Meier (2011). Some Common Issues of the Innovation Methods of Teaching Methods in High Schools,
Hanoi National University of Education Publishing House.
Nguyen Trong Khanh (2011). Development of Competence and Technical Thinking, Publisher of Hanoi National University of
Education.
Vu Trong Ry (1994). Some Theoretical Issues of Studying Skill Practice for Students. Vietnam Institute of Educational Sciences.
63
Doi: 10.15341/jmer(2155-7993)/01.08.2018/008
Art, Emancipation and the Colombian Reconciliation
after the Peace Process
Sergio Bedoya Cortés

(University of Los Andes, Colombia)
Abstract: The following paper seeks to expose under what precepts the relationship between art and
emancipation can be given meaning within the framework of the Marxian theory. Here, I would like to present a
critique to Marx’s passivity in the relationship with the emancipatory potential which the aesthetic dimension and
even artist have. Also, here the spectator can see how Marcuse’s and Adorno’s theories differ just in the first view,
but both of them have seen the Aesthetic dimension as a form of increased freedom and subjectivity. The
discussion with Soviet and Orthodox Marxism is always latent here, but this will not be an impediment to be able
to address the role of the aesthetic dimension, the artist and any creator in today’s neoliberalism. All of the
theoretical approaches are a guide to the answer the following question: How art can guide Colombian society to a
freer kind of society after fifty years of war and the past process of peace that ended the longest conflict in the
Western Hemisphere?
Key words: aesthetics, peace, politics, Marcuse, critical theory
First of all, I would like to show you what inspired me to write this paper, and also to focus my master’s
dissertation on the relationship between art and emancipation: It is the important political and cultural moment we
are facing today in my country, Colombia. We are ending the longest war in western hemisphere between a
communist guerrilla and the Colombian State. Now we must figure out how we, left militants, have to change
weapons and violence to a democratic sphere. I do believe, because of the war we faced for more than fifty years,
that art and aesthetic dimension is one of those ways. Through art we can show how the war was, we can expose
the real State’s spirit, and illustrate why many people decided to fight a war that was, just in appearance, not
theirs… But also, through art, we can show different ways of how we believe society should be, with justice,
without discrimination and equality
1. Why Review the Relationship between Art and Emancipation Today?
As times have passed, the role of art has diminished more and more. In ancient times the world of art and
aesthetics had a crucial role as a form of catharsis, learning and example for society; let us remember here Plato’s
reflection in Book II of the Republic: “Are we to allow children to hear so easily any myths forged by any authors,
Sergio Bedoya Cortés, Political Scientist, Master Student of Philosophy, University of Los Andes; research areas/interests: Marx
and 20th century Marxism, social-cultural studies, political philosophy, critical theory, aesthetics and Latin-Americans philosophy.
E-mail: sergiobc937@gmail.com.
64
Art, Emancipation and the Colombian Reconciliation after the Peace Process
and that in their souls receive opinions for the most part opposed to those we think should have when you get big?
— We will not allow it” (Plato, The Republic, 1988, p. 135), or Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric as an art: “let us
understand by rhetoric the faculty of theorizing what is appropriate in each case to convince. This is certainly not
work in any other art, since each of the other deals with education and persuasion concerning their own stuff [...]
The rhetoric is also coated with the form of politics” (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1999, pp. 173–179), or remember that
Hegel, for example, is already the need for art is not explicitly uplifting. “Art should be [one] moral order,
implicitly, [so] that morality should be the ultimate, but not developed, without appearing as a doctrine, law or
precept” (Hegel, 2006, p. 75). But now, in advanced industrial society, art has lost that edifying dimension, but
even so, aesthetics rests in society and forms one of the highest moments of the spirit: absolute spirit. Similarly,
art has lost its emancipatory and cathartic paper and focused only on the dimension of consumption and
production. Marxist orthodox thought has focused on asserting that the role of art is only to express the path of
revolution, that is, to awaken the attention to emancipation in the masses, but has neglected the descriptive and
critical role of art in relation to established reality; examples of this current abound in the world of literature,
cinema and aesthetics; examples espoused by the so-called real socialism and directed by the vanguard of socialist
realism; vanguard that we will review later.
Similarly, it should be emphasized that these types of art have been used as memory mechanisms, which have
recorded political, cultural, social, etc. events, and it is in this sense that this work seeks to identify some authors
who over time have performed works of art that manage to exemplify revolutionary movements or “revolutionary
paths” in their art; as explained above is said art music, painting or literature, and that, in addition, in their works
have managed to specify pathologies or moments of alienation in society. It is, therefore, necessary to mention
that it is not a question of giving a purely normative and objective standard of the functions of art, but, on the
contrary, it seeks to show how art has served and must serve to bring humanity to an emancipation and liberation
of humanity itself, i.e., it is no longer in prehistory of man for man to start making history. Thus, we focus on the
plane of an art that was, is and will be, but not in the must be of contemporary art or any previous art form.
2. For a Genealogy of Art in Marxism
The theme and concept of art itself have played a fundamental role in the development of Marxist thought
throughout its history. It is not in vain that thinkers such as Lenin, Gramsci or Marcuse have devoted so many
pages of their writings to these subjects, which they have focused on how art presents itself before society, what is
its relation to the human being and what is their task in particular historical moment.
For Plekhanov, for example, the relation between art and emancipation is engendered in the development of
social life, but under a Hegelian budget, Plekhanov’s question for this relation does not focus on how art should or
should not denounce, or how art should be or not to be, but it concentrates in how art is and has been: where artist
observe the need for changes observed, and raises accompanies this need in their work. But, on the other hand,
there are cases where art is completely disconnected from reality and “the tendency to art for art’s sake arises
when there is a divorce between artists and the social environment around them” (Plekhanov, 1976, p. 20). For
example, during the regime of Nicholas I Pushkin renounces the relationship of his work with society? After the
catastrophic defeat of the aristocratic revolt on December 14 of 1825 against the tsarist autocracy, Nicholas I
pardoned Pushkin for his “youth activities” and went on to become his “noble” protector. Even “Nicolas expected
Pushkin works” patriotic by the style of the piece “The hand of the Almighty has saved the homeland of Kukolnik”
65
(Plekhanov, 1976, p. 11).

On the other hand, for Lenin, as practice demands of the revolutionary struggle in a particular situation, in
Czarist Russia in the early 90- lead him to emphasize the ideological function of the work of a populist writer,
seeks how to raise awareness of the class of the proletariat by means of literature, art, and that is why he criticizes
the idealization of society in art. Lenin does not pose a kind of reflection of the society in art, as this would be in
total contradiction with its theory of knowledge present in Materialism and Empirocriticism: It is necessary to
continue with the accession of the cultural project — what they called Proletkult — the People’s Commissariat of
Education as subsidiary bodies, and should reject the creation and invention of its own special culture. This is
because the proletariat as the highest expression of humanity embraces human totality, so that, although the
proletarian revolution was located at that time in some countries such as the USSR or China, it should appeal to
human totality Russian and non-Russian representation in the governing bodies of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union (CPSU), and more specifically in relation to art, in the People’s Commissariat of Instruction.
Similarly, for Mao, the state of the art, literature and the press at the beginning and subsequent achievement
of the Cultural Revolution it was precarious (Tse-tung, 1972, p. 190), so it was work of the Chinese Communist
Party (PCC ) to redirect both the content and the form of these dimensions in order to abolish feudal and capitalist
culture; which means that members of the PCC “should be kept in the Party’s position, fit the spirit of party and
politics of the Party” (Tse-tung, 1972, p. 96), so you could say that the role of art, literature and the press here is
something more propagandistic. On the other hand, it is in Mao where the question is directly asked whether art
and literature should praise or denounce. For Mao, praise or denunciation in art depends specifically on who the
art is directed to, or in other words, about the work: “In the face of our enemies [...] the task of revolutionary
artists and writers is to reveal their cruelty [...] and to point out the inevitability of their defeat ... With regard to
our various allies in the united front our attitude must be of alliance and criticism [And our own people] we must
educate them and help them, patiently and for a long period, for deriving from that ballast [petty] and fight its own
defects and errors” (Tsetung, 1972, pp. 98–99).
In Gramsci, on the contrary, “every man, considered outside his profession, awakens a certain intellectual
activity, that is, he is a ‘philosopher’, an artist, a man of good taste, participates in a conception of the world, has a
line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain or modify a conception of the world and provoke new
ways of thinking” (Gramsci, 2010, p. 15), so, one can say at first that the artist contributes to sustaining or
molding a certain conception of the world. But, similarly, intellectual — Category of which the artist becomes a
participant should appear in practical life as a builder, as an organizer, as an organic intellectual; but why organic
intellectual? If “the work of art includes [...] historicist elements, in addition to the specific cultural and emotional
world” (Gramsci, formation of the Intellectuals 1967, p. 118), and if “the historical movement cannot be done
rather than the “Collective man”, which presupposes the attainment of a cultural-social unity (Gramsci, 1967, p.
90), it is the organic intellectual, the intellectual who is part of the political party, who through “criticism of
customs, feelings and conceptions of life combined with aesthetics and art criticism.” (Gramsci, 1967, p. 108)
may establish and develop a new vision of the world, and may well generate a fight for a new culture, a new
society, but not only for the creation of a new art (Gramsci, 1967, p. 109). Thus, Gramsci gives the artist the
power to guide and to explain the masses — as an organic intellectual who is — but, unlike his predecessors like
Lenin or Mao, does not restrict this ability to the framework of the Communist Party.
66
3. The Aesthetics in Marx and Engels
Through the work of Marx is a great concern on the part of the author on the question of aesthetics; whether
in Holy Family, in The German Ideology or in the Manuscripts of Economics and Philosophy in 1844, Marx asks
about the place of art — and the artist both in advanced industrial society and communist society. Thus, for Marx,
the role of the artist in any type of society is extremely important, for if in Marxism we had to define the
characteristic that makes the human being human-being is his capacity to create — homo faber — but the human
being models his spirit into two types of objects: a first object that seeks to satisfy humanized natural needs, and
second objects that seek to satisfy new humanized needs — as aesthetic necessity — (Sánchez Vásquez, 2013).
Much of Marx’s work focuses on the criticism of the conditions and the realization of the human being who
performs objects arranged for the satisfaction of humanized natural needs — the worker — but his work touches
tangentially only on the role and development of who realizes the objects arranged to supply the aesthetic
necessity. Marx’s role in art is that of the realization of the spirit, but, he argues, that “in order to cultivate oneself
spiritually with greater freedom, a people needs to be exempt from the slavery of its own bodily necessities. That
above all it leaves time to create and enjoy spiritually” (Marx, 2005, p. 61).
For Marx, the aesthetic fact does not possess — or at least does not mention it throughout his work — a
concrete emancipatory value, but, on the contrary, Marx is in charge of discussing the role of art and artist in
communist society: It is not that “everyone can work by replacing Rafael, but that everyone who has a Rafael
inside can develop unfettered” (Marx & Engels, Sobre el Arte, 2009, p. 121). Thus, for Marx, one of the most
important tasks of the proletarian revolution is to leave the being-artistic, being-creator, but this being-artistic does
not have a clearly emancipatory dimension in capitalist society, but an emancipated character in the communist
society, so it is to our view a failure in the work of Marx the lack of the emancipatory component in the role of the
artist and the work itself.
4. The Frankfurt School and the Absolute or True Art
By relying on Marxist theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, it is thought that the relation
between art and emancipation in contemporaneity can develop much more theoretically and enrich the debate
about the relation between aesthetics and politics, so it must be said in First, the Frankfurt school — and more
specifically Herbert Marcuse — does give an emancipatory character to art, not mechanically or directly, but it
does manage to identify two emancipatory dimensions — one clearer than the other — of art: the dimension of
Clearly ideological and partisan expression — what was called in Soviet times socialist realism — and the
dimension of the description of social pathologies. Marcuse explains that for him the Marxist orthodoxy of art can
be understood as “the interpretation of the category and truth of a work of art in terms of the totality of the
relations of production ... This interpretation argues that the work of art represents the interests and worldview of
the different social classes more or less accurate” (Marcuse, 2007, p. 53), position it would seek to distance
himself in his work the aesthetic dimension because That under its interpretation is the Marxist orthodoxy who has
limited the emancipatory dimension aesthetic of the art.
Marcuse also argues that the true revolutionary work of art is presented, posed and developed “when, by
virtue of aesthetic transformation, it represents through the exemplary destiny of individuals the lack of prevailing
freedom and the forces that are revealed, Thus opening a path between the mystified social [...] reality and
67
discovering the horizon of change (liberation)” (Marcuse, 2007, p. 54), that is, that the true work of art must
represent the lack of freedom. Social, which can be represented in alienation, alienation, economic dependence,
war of the insurgents, violence, etc., so that the work of art, therefore, represents reality while denouncing, and is
that, according to Adorno, “art becomes social by its opposition to society, and that position does not adopt it until
it is autonomous” (Adorno, 2011, p. 300), but the social — is “his manifest position”.
On the other hand, Marcuse argues that one of the problems of orthodox Marxism was the annulment of the
subjectivity of the individual thanks to the massification of the community and society, which has generated some
disinterest and displacement of human beings in the project of emancipation. Human, since these were not seen as
part, nor reflected, of the revolutionary process; There was no inspiration to and with the individual, so Marcuse
and Adorno will emphasize that “the need for radical transformation must be rooted in the subjectivity of
individuals themselves, their intelligence, their passions, their feelings and their goals” (Marcuse, 2007, p. 59), so
that “the experience of art, its truth or falsity, is more than a subjective experience: It is the irruption of objectivity
in the subjective consciousness” (Adorno, 2011, p. 323), but not only in the social sphere, since if applied only in
the social sphere would give “the reductionist notion of consciousness that annuls the particular content of
individual consciousness and, with it, the subjective revolutionary potential” (Marcuse, 2007, p. 59). Thus, we
focus on the pursuit of human freedom; Emphasizing subjectivity as well as objectivity: “the transcendence of
immediate reality [would] shatter the reified objectivity of established social relations and [would] open a new
dimension of experience: the rebirth of rebellious subjectivity” (Marcuse, 2007, p. 62).
The critical reading that he proposes to make of the Frankfurt School would focus, in my way of seeing this
paradigm, in the criticism of Adorno: A criticism that focuses first on the transition that he poses of an irruption of
objectivity in consciousness subjective, because it is, in my view, a proposal that although it has to mean,
possesses a potential “little realizable” or in more concrete words a little pretentious since the objective totality —
which in terms of Hegel and Adorno is known as The Wirklichkeit — cannot be expressed at different moments of
consciousness, but in religion and art — in Hegel — where it has its highest expression (in the absolute spirit). On
the other hand, lack of a positive dialectic in Adorno generates a certain space of possibility that is invalidated as
impossibility since, if “art has the capacity to express what has not happened and what could happen” — the
utopian (Ουκ τοποσ: what has not taken place) — the same aesthetic dimension could offer a proposal in relation
to this aspect as, in the case of Marcuse, it is outlined under the concept of the emergence of rebel subjectivity.
Similarly, in the case of Marcuse, the proposal of a rebel subjectivity does offer a “positive” or propositional
aspect, but in a reduced way.
5. Conclusions
Now, after the end of the armed conflict in Colombia, in a world where democracy has been co-opted by
sectors of the bourgeoisie that seek to remain in power and do not allow the full exercise of Democracy, where
political parties are increasingly less representative and there are increasingly maneuvers by the liberal and
bourgeois governments to limit the actions of the so-called social movements, it is necessary to look for another
horizon; as Marcuse once mentioned in his classes at the Vincennes de la Sorbonne University in 1974: “the
impossible is not impossible, but very realistic”. Just as the racial struggles in the United States, the student
struggles in France, and the feminist and liberating sex struggles around the world distanced themselves from the
old and orthodox communist parties of the planet because they only saw in the world the proletarian-bourgeois
68
dichotomy , we must move from the first dimension, to a dialectical game between the third and fourth dimension,
from the first dimension that focuses on barbarism and violent aggression, to the second dimension that focuses on
liberation, the requirement of an alternative, and the construction of a democracy as a real expression of the
human dignity of all (Marcuse, 2017).
Thus, aesthetics offers us this possibility. It offers us the possibility of generating a critical analysis in a
society that manages to reflect on the more than 2700 abducted citizens, the more than 2300 selective murders, the
more than 11,000 victims of massacres during the armed conflict in the country. Likewise, aesthetics allows us to
generate memory, to generate the irruption of objectivity in our subjectivities, but, above all, it will achieve the
rebirth of thousands of rebellious subjectivities, to build a different country, to build a different society... Through
an art, which is political, which denounces and takes a stand against historical and social events, and no longer by
means of arms or through a democracy that does not allow the participation of the marginal sectors of society, a
Colombia will be achieved differently, a Colombia far from barbarism — a mixture that corresponds to both the
first (Reality of the present) (Marcuse, 2017) and the third dimension (barbarism of the right) (Marcuse, 2017) in
Marcusian terms — and increasingly closer to the utopia, the liberation and of the revolution — characteristic of
the second dimension (Concrete Utopia of the left) (Marcuse, 2017).
Let us encourage ourselves to create, to remember, to forgive, but, above all, to build a society, a country and
a better world.
References
Adorno T. (2008). Prisms I. Madrid, Spain: Akal.
Adorno T. (2011). Aesthetic Theory, Madrid, Spain: Akal.
Gramsci A. (1967). La Formación de los Intelectuales, México D.F.: Editorial Grijalbo.
Gramsci A. (2010). Cuadernos de la cárcel: Los intelectuales y la organización de la cultura, México D. F.: Juan Pablo Editor.
Lenin V. (1968). La Literatura y el Arte. Moscú, Editorial Progreso.
Marcuse H. (2007). The Aesthetic Dimension, Madrid, Spain: Biblioteca Nueva.
Marcuse H. (2015). Eros and Civilization, Ariel.
Marcuse P. (April 2017). “Marcuse’s concept of dimensionality: A political interpretation”, Radical Philosophy Review.
Marx K. and Engels F. (2009). About Art, Buenos Aires, Argentina: Claridad.
Marx K. (2005). Manuscripts of Philosophy and Economics, Madrid, Spain: Alianza Editorial.
Marx K. (2014). German Ideology, Madrid, Spain: Akal.
Plejanov G. (1976). El Arte y la Vida Social, Bogotá: Ediciones los Comuneros.
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1 The Emancipatory Process of Teacher Bacharel in Engineering in Their Training Period:

Social Science Education

27 The School Lag of Students in Poverty

33 Belonging in Time: Australian Women Playwrights in a Changing Landscape

40 Tailor-made Teaching of University Practical Language Course in Hong Kong

The Emancipatory Process of Teacher Bacharel in Engineering in Their

Training Period: 1975–2016

Magnaldo de Sá Cardoso, Maria do Amparo Borges Ferro

Understanding the habitus, according to Bourdieu (1972, pp. 178-179), as being

- its didactic evolution, in the sense of a discovery or a provisional synthesis;

- the climate and the overall dynamics of the class group;

- the interventions or individual conduct of a part of the pupils;

- the maximum time available before the next activity or play.

job market demands.

Still on the reflective teacher’s acting:

And it goes further,

Geographic Distribution of the Engineering Schools Registered

within Crea in Minas Gerais, Brazil

Table 1 Engineering Schools Established until 1950

Foundation Location Foundation Name Current

3. Results and Discussion

3.1 Engineering Teaching Policies in Brazil

Figure 1 Regional Units of CREA Minas Gerais

Figure 2 Municipalities Where There are Schools Offering Engineering Courses

Table 2 Population per CREA Regional unit X Engineering Schools

TOTAL DE ESCOLAS DE ESCOLAS DE

Figure 5 Engineering Schools Per Regional Units in Minas Gerais

The School Lag of Students in Poverty

2. The Academic Backwardness

3. The Socio-Family and Classroom Context

5. Findings and Discussion

5.1 The Aulic Context

Table 2 Correlation between Variables Socio-Family Context and Academic Lag

percentage of indigenous population, border areas, etc.).

Belonging in Time: Australian Women Playwrights

Tailor-made Teaching of University Practical

Language Course in Hong Kong

Ho Wai Chi, Vichy

Visitors’ Interests for the Croatian Natural History Museum Publications

— Analysis of Visitors’ Attitudes on Museum Publications

2. Publishing under A Museum

is difficult to follow the exhibition).

3. Croatian Natural History Museum

3.1 Publishing of CNHM

4. Material and Methods

4.1. Survey Research

5. Results and Discussions

Figure 1 Age of Visitors (%)

Figure 2 Sex (%)

Figure 3 Interest for Natural Sciences (%)

Figure 4 Interesting Objects of the Museum and Exhibition (%)

Figure 5 Reading Habits (%)

Figure 6 Offer of Museum Publications (%)

80 Reasons for buying

Geological topic Biological topic I do not know

Figure 8 Thematic Interest for Buying Publications (%)

Expensive Appropriate I do not know

Catalogues Publications for Monographs