Psychopedagogy

Psychopedagogy or psychopedagogy is a discipline that studies people and their behavior in teaching-learning situations. Among its fields of intervention are: the management of learning difficulties, vocational guidance, support for special educational needs (environmental, socio-cultural, cognitive) and the structuring of the curriculum and educational environments in various contexts. In it, evolutionary psychology, learning psychology, pedagogy, sociology, didactics, epistemology, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, general psychology, among others, are interrelated.

Its contributions are relevant in the fields of pedagogy and in the fields of special education, educational therapies, curricular design, design of educational programs and educational policy, it is also an aid for children in their teaching and learning process. It can also intervene in the following fields: forensic, health, education, research.

Psychopedagogy developed as a scientific discipline from the second half of the XX century, with an interdisciplinary approach and combining knowledge of education and mental health.

Exponents

Some of the most influential authors in this field are: Jean Piaget (psychogenetic theory), Ausubel (meaningful learning theory), Lev Vygotsky (sociocultural theory) and Jerome Bruner (sociohistorical theory).

Main areas of work

Psychopedagogy is developed not only in the educational context, but also includes family, business, adult education centers, education and training centers, recreational centers, addiction treatment and prevention centers, labor and community associations.

Its action is aimed at orientation in: development of self-schemes, parenting guidelines, compensatory education, prevention of disruptive behaviors, evaluation of administrative actions. For this reason, the psycho-pedagogical action is directly linked to the analysis, planning, development and modification of educational processes.

The areas of work of educational psychology are:

• La attention to diversity: encompasses the development, adaptation and implementation of didactic methodologies taking into account the characteristics of the study inherent in its heterogeneity and its particular educational needs.
• La academic and vocational guidance: seeks to enhance vocational maturity in the student body by working on self-knowledge of the students, exercising decision-making strategies and providing the necessary information.
• La action tutorial: is the orientation raised directly from the classroom. It focuses on values training, conflict resolution, social skills learning, social awareness work, among others. It is the link between the concepts of academic training and education in the educational system.

Psychopedagogical intervention

One of the areas of action of the educational psychologist is guidance. In which models and strategies are used to support the process of interpretation and performance. This process is directed at individuals, fields, aspects and contexts.

The conception of psychopedagogical intervention is considered as an integrative and integral process, it supposes the need to identify possible actions according to the objectives and contexts to which it is directed, it must have three basic principles:

• Principle of prevention.- Conceives intervention as a process to anticipate situations that can hinder integral development in people.
• Development principle.- The modern conceptions of psychopedagogical intervention have integrated this principle to that of prevention, since the individual has during all stages of the life cycle with constant changes of evolutionary development.
• Principle of social action.-defined as the possibility that the subject will make a recognition of contextual variables and in this way make use of competencies acquired in the intervention, to adapt and cope with them in their constant transformation.

To carry out psycho-pedagogical interventions for students with high intellectual abilities, it is important that they be carried out in conjunction with the professionals of the center where the evaluated person attends. In addition, it must be carried out in a complete way, reviewing the family, social, and in general personal areas of the evaluated person. Due to the great complexity of the psychopedagogical evaluation, different information collection techniques must be used and these can be complementary to the evaluation. For example: The general academic performance of the student, tasks and documents in general that can support the evaluation.

The importance of the psycho-pedagogical intervention lies in the possibility that it offers us to open, build and reconstruct objective and subjective spaces of authorship of thought, necessary to make certain contents thinkable.

Consequently, the meaning of any psycho-pedagogical intervention is to provide a space where it is possible to recognize oneself as thinking simultaneously with oneself as desiring, in other words, to make the unthinkable thinkable. Not thinkable that it is established from a significant amount of anguish that can cover, block, inhibit or disturb the desire for knowledge. Thus, a learning modality is configured that, as a relational mold with the object of knowledge, is disturbed, broken, and hindered.

Psychopedagogy aims to promote thinking power, displaying the necessary aggressiveness, implicit in all creative activity, showing in such a challenge a differentiation that accounts for the presence of a drive for mastery and the consequent experience of satisfaction revealing joy. In short, psychopedagogy works with the notion of author «as author of the work and reciprocally as he himself has created for the work that he is creating».

Functions of the educational psychologist

• To empower and rehabilitate children, youth or adults, with learning problems, through the delivery of knowledge in a striking way to motivate their learning and by teaching them specialized methods of study that facilitate understanding.

• Identify learning problems by various factors, such as cognitive immaturity, lack of learning motivation, family and/or social problems (internal/external factors).

• Try to prevent learning difficulties from developing cognitive, emotional and social capacities.

• Finding, when diagnosing the problem, a indicated treatment, if necessary, can also lead to other professionals; such as psychologists, psychiatrist and neurologists depending on the situation and severity.

• Consider the critical position of itself.

• Assess and intervene psychopedagogically.

• Identify the child's learning possibilities.

• To guide teachers and families.

• Provide resource and skills teachers to respond to the needs of the learner with learning problems.

• Promote the link between the institution and the family.

Problems with educational psychology practice

An important point when carrying out a psycho-pedagogical intervention are the difficulties that sometimes arise when working with teachers, particularly to establish a collaborative relationship. It has been observed that there are difficulties in establishing professional relationships through the resources available to both parties. In addition, difficulties have been observed in the technical use to tackle or define the problem that is presented to the student. Finally, the lack of a general consensus among educational institutions to deal with the various learning problems of students also makes it difficult to deal with the problem and/or find a solution to improve student learning.