Dialogue Categories Research Articles

Hacia una verdadera relación entre un Programa de Ingeniería y el concepto de formación integral

El presente artículo propone una forma de integrar asignaturas en un determinado semestre de un programa de Ingeniería, de manera que para los estudiantes la teoría de la formación integral se convierta en práctica y ejemplo y no se quede solamente en una propuesta teórica. A partir de ello se plantea la necesidad de promover, dento de las instituciones de Educación Superior, tres tipos de diálogos: el diálogo temático, el diálogo académico y el diálogo profesional, inexistente en las universidades y necesario para hacer efectivo el concepto de formación integral en nuestros estudiantes. Para lograrlo se hace primero una relación entre la estructura general de un programa de Ingeniería y la teoría del Aprendizaje Significativo que constituye el fundamento teórico de esta propuesta y, finalmente, se hacen algunos análisis que establecen las condiciones necesarias para que esta propuesta pueda ser efectiva en programas de Ingeniería.

Science and Religion at the Turn of the Millennium

The categories of conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration have been used to organize the wealth of opinion on the relationship of science and religion (Barbour, 1997). This approach is especially useful in college or high school science courses, or special seminars, because it allows the instructor to locate his or her own opinion, and challenge students to determine their own beliefs. This effectively lays most opinions “on the table” for display in a free market of ideas. Using this approach, students can examine the strengths and shortcomings of major opinions, and it has the advantage of preserving the dignity of all religious views that reside in the science classroom, without compromising any science. The wealth and depth of new ideas that have been forthcoming from both science and theology offer the exciting promise of future wisdom that can serve both religion and science.

The Russians Reclaim Bakhtin (as of Winter 1992)

The last two in the Soviet-now ex-Soviet-Union have been so extraordinary that tracking any of its exploding parts is risky business. I will address here only one small corner of its literary culture, namely: how the Russians are reclaiming, and in the process redefining, one of their best-selling men of letters, Mikhail Bakhtin. was known, of course, to Russian literary scholars throughout the Stalinist period. But the last fifteen posthumous years brought celebrity status at a whole other order of magnitude. The Bakhtin boom, which was set off in the West in the 1970s by the Rabelais book and in the '80s by the essays on the theory of the novel, was more or less duplicated in the Soviet Union. The Russians, to be sure, had a somewhat easier time of it. They did not have to deal with the vagaries of translation, nor with the highly peculiar, site-specific ideologies that played midwife to Bakhtin's entry into Western thought-for example, the fact that Julia Kristeva popularized Bakhtin's book on Dostoevsky during her high structuralist phase, or that British Marxists have found so congenial several utopian aspects of Bakhtinian carnival. These quirks of reception, which have given his familiar radical face in the West, were not, for obvious reasons, very compelling to a post-Stalinist generation trying to live down the worst excesses of its own country's collective revolutionary mystique. We have only begun to appreciate the full force of that paradox: the Communist or ex-Communist East emulating what is conservative in the West, and radicals in the West lapping up what has been thoroughly discredited in the East. any event, Bakhtin's evocative categories of dialogue, doublevoicedness, the carnivalesque image-so reassuringly formal and taxonomic, yet at the same time open-ended and appealingly linked to the problem of consciousness-caught on faddishly both in Russia and abroad. Today, Russian Bakhtinists are as weary of the cult as we are. They, too, want to peel away ideological accretions and facile applications. As the matter was put by the editor of a 1989 Soviet collection of papers on Bakhtin: In our country, for all the mass use of Bakhtin's name in practically every printed text and manuscript . .. we more often encounter mere play with the terms 'chronotope,' 'outsideness,' insideness,' than we do serious methodological application of them (Eremeev, Rezervy 5). What might such a methodology entail? When the Revival began in the Soviet Union two decades ago, the task to be accomplished under his name was quite different from what it is today. Here as in other realms, the biggest change occurred during the glasnost years. As Gorbachev's New Thinking gained ground, peaked, contracted, outgrew its timid reformist origins and then cast off its creator