NORMAL SCHOOLS: CHALLENGES, ISSUES, AND DEBATES IN TEACHER TRAINING IN COLOMBIA.

Abstract

Teacher training in Colombia has been key to the transformation of the country's education system. The “Escuelas Normales”, whose origins date back to the 19th century, were the forerunners of Colombia's faculties of education. Despite political, religious, and cultural biases that often disconnected them from the realities of their context, this essay aims to highlight the challenges, issues, and debates surrounding the maintenance of urban and rural normal schools since their inception. These schools focused on training teachers to combat illiteracy, drawing on Western educational theories such as the Lancasterian and Pestalozzian schools of the mid-20th century. During the 1960s, teaching processes were modernized through active pedagogy with a program called centers of interest, also known as the New School of Dr. Decroly. The methodology used to develop this topic incorporates sources that provide accurate information on the history of normal schools during the period of bipartisanship and educational policies—events that shaped their development. In our times, finding important findings from these centers in the training and identity of teachers from “Escuelas Normales”, it is important to recognize that the teacher is trained by vocation, not by political construction seeking an emancipation from political power through autonomous training, with humanist, understanding, restorative, resilient principles to the effects of an education imposed by the state, with a vision of freedom for the future of a critical and proactive people.