Centros Infantiles y Escuelas de Quito por Dentro. Una Mirada desde la Investigación (Coordinación)

Starting in the 1960s, of the last century, and with greater force in the 1980s, educational research took an important turn: the ubiquitous quantitative paradigm gave way to the qualitative paradigm, relying on methodological contributions from sociology and anthropology. This change led to educational research gradually becoming detached from positivism and behaviorism as foundations to explain, know and understand what was happening in schools and particularly in the classroom. In addition, the long-awaited objectivity of quantitative research was replaced by the search for understanding of the complexity and on many occasions the particularity of the reality studied. Another key aspect in the qualitative research was to place the teachers as researchers, emphasizing the figure of the teacher as a professional. Since then, teaching and research have ceased to be separate paths that hardly intersect. And, the so-called action research, positioned teachers as subjects who can produce situated and contextualized knowledge and paved the way for the search for answers and possible solutions to problems typical of the teaching practice. From this perspective: that of training professionals who make decisions, the educational proposal of the initial education and basic education careers of the Salesian Polytechnic University, from the first semester of training, combines the teaching exercise in the space of pre-professional practices and the research supported from the subject of research methodology. These two subjects are a backbone that facilitates articulating learning processes where theory and practice merge. The book collects the fruits of this training process gestated in the races. The investigations carried out by the students together with their tutors, methodology professors and professors of the integrative chair, the integrative project of knowledge and theoretical subjects are the result of nine semesters of training. Each chapter not only allows us to know and understand first-hand what happens inside our children's centers and schools. Each chapter of the book tells stories, wishes, desires and projects. In education careers, contact with school life in different educational centers is important, since it makes it easier for students to enter the school world not only as future educators but as "ethnographer-researchers". Entering, accessing educational institutions, the different groups of students as the levels of training advanced allows them "not only to cross the threshold that separates the external world from the internal one, but also to cross various thresholds that indicate the path to the heart of a culture” Woods (1989, p.39).Observing, questioning, reflecting, understanding what happens in the classroom, looking for explanations of why certain behaviors, attitudes, practices of both students and teachers, generates many uncertainties and doubts in the practice spaces at the beginning; but as the training process progresses,.