Teaching with Honest Questions: A Disruption in the Logic of Inequality?

Abstract

This article arises from a research focused on understanding the meanings of the pedagogical question in the training of primary education teachers and its connection with critical thinking. It seeks to identify the educational paradigms behind these questions, the conceptions of childhood in education and the relationship between the meanings given to the questions and the promotion of
critical thinking. In this article we wanted to present those aspects that allow us to identify the practice of honest questioning as an insurgent, creative and ethical teaching practice. The research is qualitative and based on a critical design, analyzing teachers from three teacher training centers in the metropolitan area of ​​Montevideo, using in-depth interviews and participant observation. The
results indicate that many teaching practices are situated in a logic of inequality, predominating a masterful and expository model that perpetuates the idea of ​​students as lacking subjects and teachers as wise. This distances the observed practices from a critical paradigm. The lack of planning in the questions and a disagreement between the ideologies that teachers believe they represent and the practices they actually carry out stand out. From the data, a cartography of questions is developed that contributes to the analysis, identifying four increasing levels of reflexivity in the questions asked by the teacher trainers.
This research emphasizes the importance of a creative, ethical and insurgent questioning practice in education.