Academic Habitus and Obstacles in Teaching Practice

Abstract

The ideals of teaching practice value attributes that confer to the profession the mastery of disciplinary, didactic and pedagogical knowledge, linked to a solid professional ethic and critical capacity. Multiple researchers have identified those qualities that are considered representative of a good teacher and that have a direct impact on the acquisition of learning, but little interest has been given to the oversights and mistakes that arise at the very moment of practice. The objective of this paper is to analyze teaching practice through the notion of obstacles, which refer to the hindrances and confusions that take place in the very exercise of teaching practice, in a differentiated and stratified social space that predisposes the conformation of an academic habitus that reproduces certain types of conceptions and practices of teaching. Based on ethnographic research, we identified five obstacles that teachers face during their professional activities. One of the conclusions of the research is that the experience of many years is not enough to overcome these obstacles, so it is necessary to link teaching practice to a program of reflective vigilance that operates as a function of a critique of pure states of consciousness, alerts about errors and allows for the development of mechanisms to overcome them.