Knowledge and basic competences in pre-service teacher training

Abstract

The speed of changes in information society and our students’ new profiles demand new educational models in order to change information society into knowledge/learning society. This leads to a serious gap in our educational system where dogmatic, fixed, out-of-context contents stay with a self-reproductive memory/repetition-oriented way of teaching, incompatible with
current ideas about what knowledge should be. Applying basic competences in education involve a chance for change, as a way for coping with knowledge-society challenges in the 21st century, but a curricular debate on education and didactics still awaits. What are competences really? Do they
serve 21st century education? Which changes must be carried out in school knowledge? We try to answer these questions in this essay. The concept itself of basic competences is revised here, and the problems arisen by their use. This supposes an education approach calling into question the encyclopedic knowledge type fostered in school for a long time, though we must be careful not to let the basic skills approach make bureaucratic apparatus grow. Neither cannot we concentrate on acquisition-of-knowledge processes and accept their relativity, as that would mean to renounce the cultural heritage which is central in the construction of society.
Modern illiteracy demand opening classroom windows for information, encouraging students’ participation in the construction of knowledge, making innovation and creativity prevail over continuity policies, personal relationships over information transmission, etc. Students need
questions, rather than answers. They need to get involved in useful, meaningful, applicable tasks.