Against PowerPoint as a way of knowledge

In light of the latest and disastrous PISA report, almost no one has focused on two issues that affect the worsening of teaching results at all educational levels, from primary school to university: the underfinancing of the educational system and the jibarization of teaching methodologies.

They may seem like different things, but they are interrelated in a cause and effect relationship.

And they all tell us what is obvious: that education is wrong, and that patches to cover waterways are failing.

To understand the current situation we can go back decades, but without forgetting that, in addition to structural causes, there are temporary political decisions of which we now see the results.

In 2010, the Government of Mas in Catalonia became, with the elimination of the sixth hour of curricular training in public schools, the patriotic vanguard of the action of the governments that, from Madrid, imposed cuts in public services and education and the zero replacement rate in the public service, which wasted schools, institutes and universities.

Artur,

it all started with you

.

This recipe of under-financing and reduction of teaching hours was imposed on an educational system in full transformation towards teaching based on the acquisition of skills before (or instead of) knowledge, focused on “project-based” teaching, with almost no textbooks. text, with

tablets for everyone

and

online

autonomy of the students, without hierarchy or principle of academic authority.

And to that system, supported by precarious teachers, would be added the terrible conditions of pandemic teaching between 2020 and 2021.

All this has reinforced a tendency towards the identification of the means (the technological tool) with the end (learning).

The result is what we find today in many classrooms, including university ones, where disinterest in the sources of knowledge and their hierarchies has become widespread.

Even in humanities studies, scientific books and articles are rapidly ceasing to be the authoritative source of information.

More and more may be researched and published, but from experience I can assure you that students read less and less.

Sergio del Molino recently said that the terrible thing about all this is the inability to distinguish the hierarchy of the sources of knowledge, and he was right.

The replacement of the book and the article entails serious problems in the field of scientific reliability and verifiability.

But there is another issue that is almost never talked about: that the problem also lies in teaching methodologies.

For the majority of students in any training center, the main source of knowledge is the teacher in front of them.

And that is where sometimes the mechanism also fails.

In too many classrooms, due to comfort, precariousness or the presence of unmanageable groups, the prior learning conditions and teaching needs mean that there are teachers who abuse the technological tool, PowerPoint or similar forms of narrative encapsulation, limiting themselves to reading what which is projected on a screen and replacing the bibliographic repertoire, the scientific journal or any other reliable, tested and verifiable means of transmission with the schematic synthesis.

I'm not talking about projecting support materials, working audiovisuals or reference bibliographies, from which to expand knowledge.

I am referring to dumping the content of the subject, either in outlines or summaries, or directly explained in its entirety, so that the students can then download those same files to their own devices.

Thus, the means becomes an end and, on many occasions, the basis, and sometimes the only reference, for the study.

By doing so, you are not making the students' work easier: you are limiting their ability to structure and reason autonomously.

He is infantilized.

The answer to the underfunding of education cannot be either the cult of technology or the intellectual jibarization of the educational ecosystem.

Can the situation be reversed?

Students are already forced to navigate through

online search engines,

artificial intelligence or comments in forums.

But all of this can be qualified with classroom training, with active teachers, aware of their role in the students' educational process, updated and self-demanding.

Let's try for a moment to eliminate the transmission of content via screen-virtual classroom and teach how to use digital tools, but on an equal footing with those that for decades have been shown to also serve, and that also continue to be used.

Let's not treat students like children to whom we serve the crushed PowerPoint porridge.

Let's let them build their own content with verifiable references, let's not give it to them packaged in a document at a rate of 20 or 30 slides per topic, let's see if this way we can somewhat reverse the trend towards the disaster in which we already live.

Let's depowerpoint

knowledge: let's demand more from students, and, above all, let's demand more from ourselves as teachers.

Javier Rodrigo

is a historian, professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and coordinator of his degree in Contemporary History, Politics and Economy.

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