Ángel R. Villarini Jusino is professor at the General Studies Faculty of UPR, RP and an Honorary Professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo. Beside him is the bust of Eugenio María de Hostos.

by Suzanna Engman

Ask educators about putting educational theory and research into practice and most will answer that it isn’t a straightforward task. The educator’s job is to develop observation skills and critical thinking in students—skills that promote lifelong learning. But how does an educator teach students to observe and think? One way is to create a culture of research, sa ys ángel R. Villarini Justino, Ph.D., director of Proyecto para el Desarrollo de Destrezas de Pensamiento (Project for the Development of Thinking Skills) at the Department of General Studies, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. Villarini sees research as the basis of competency-based education.

Describe the project that you direct.

The project was originally created in 1987 by UPR’s central administration to foster faculty development and curriculum innovation. Our work takes place within a particular theoretical framework, a humanistic, historical-cultural, critical and liberatory perspective, which includes the ideas of three educators: Eugenio María de Hostos, Lev S.Vygotsky and Pablo Freire. Hostos was a 19th century Puerto Rican philosopher and educator. We see our work as a continuation of his ideas. In a book published in London and New York by Routledge (2002), he is listed as one of the 50 greatest educational thinkers in history, alongside as such educators as Socrates, Jesus, Comenio, Rousseau, and Pestalozzi. Vygotsky was the creator of the historical-cultural perspective in psychology and education. And Paulo Freire is well known for his theory of liberatory pedagogy.

What is competency-based education?

From our critical and emancipatory perspective, competencies are self-regulatory capacities, forms of consciousness, or ways in which we intervene in the world by seeing ourselves as active subjects, constructors of the cultural world we inhabit. Competence means for us the capacity to understand, criticize, and transform the world according to an ethical-political goal of creating a society in which every single human being is granted the material conditions for full human development.
Competency-based education fosters the development of better qualified workers and professionals who pose critical problems and produce systematic, creative, and socially responsible solutions. These workers will strive to live lives that fully honor human dignity in all people, and they can become competent, reflective, and critical citizens who actively participate in and create new forms of participatory democracy. In our work we have identified 10 general competencies whose development we see as the main goal of education. Research is one of these competencies.

Will you describe research competence?

Research is our capacity to construct what an academic community considers to be valid knowledge. Every competence has six main components: cognitive, skill, affective, creative, experiential—which enables students to effectively and efficiently apply research competence to different tasks—and metacognitive, the students’ capacity to be critical of the research activity, including its assumptions, values, interests, goals, procedures, and cultural and social conditioning.

At the K-12 level and at the university level, students have usually received knowledge but not encouragement to develop their own capacity to produce and use knowledge. The teaching of research is an example. We often think that at the undergraduate level students are not ready to do research. Then at the graduate level it is taught as subject of study, not as an activity that needs to be appropriated by the student as a human capacity.

Therefore, we pay a lot of attention to the conceptual aspects of research (knowing what) and little or no attention at all to research skills (knowing how) and attitudes. As a result, we have students who have ideas and can talk about research but lack the skills and attitudes to conduct it or the interest and will to do it. At the graduate level students take a course on research and do the required research to graduate, but after that they don’t care about it. We are graduating hundreds of students at the master’s and doctoral levels in education who, within their lifetimes, will only conduct one research project—the one necessary to graduate—because research is taught as a subject and not as a human capacity.

In our work we are studying and conducting projects on how we can transform teaching from a pedagogy of information to a pedagogy of formation, on how can we transform the curriculum from a depository of information into an experience of human and professional development of competencies for lifelong learning. Research should become part of the capacity of students to construct and use knowledge as they need it.

How does research develop competency?

Research provides an approach to knowledge construction in any human, social or professional area. Students learn to formulate hypotheses, ask critical questions, construct conceptual frameworks, design research methods, interpret data, and draw conclusions based on the data. If research is taught and learned as a form of consciousness and as a dimension of the students’ future professional practice, conducting research will become a form of personal satisfaction and professional achievement. Students will be able to make connections between research, society, and their future professional work. If research is consistently practiced in schools and universities, students will apply it for problem-solving throughout their lives, making them more competent human beings.

How can research competency be integrated into education?

Competencies as general or professional human attributes develop throughout the whole lifespan via social interactions in which students participate. The basis for research competence—students’ attitudes of curiosity and the skills of observing, asking questions, and collecting information to construct answers to their own questions—must be fostered from the primary level on. At intermediate and high school levels, the attitudes and skills for inquiry procedures in the natural, human, and social areas should be fostered by creating a community of inquiry. At the undergraduate level, students should be initiated in the concepts, attitudes, and skills of disciplinary and interdisciplinary research of the academic community and its creative, critical, and experiential dimensions. We need to view the curriculum as a program in which, starting at the undergraduate level, students are helped to gradually develop their capacity for conducting research, not just in one course, but through practice and reflection in all core and concentration courses. At the graduate level, research must be practiced to enable students to integrate and apply all of what they have learned, in order to understand, appreciate, or transform aspects of the world.

Specifically, how can teachers foster research competence?

First, they need a conceptual and operational model of research, not merely as a subject to be taught but as a capacity to perform a particular activity. Then they can share this model with their students by designing and implementing a teaching, learning, and assessment system that fosters research competence.

We need to radically change the methods we use to teach research. At the university, we have traditionally believed that research is a subject that can be taught by lecturing on it or by having discussions about it. This practice needs to be transformed by viewing research as a dimension of human and professional formation, a form of consciousness, and a general human ability that needs development throughout a lifetime through human interaction. This can only happen if the classroom is transformed into a cultural space in which students have the opportunity to practice research as construction of knowledge at complex levels and in meaningful contexts through a combination of seminars, workshops, and research projects. In this cultural space, the teacher is no longer a dispenser of knowledge but a promoter of its construction.

As mediators of competence development, teachers can suggest relevant themes of research, conduct workshops on research as a competence, model the competence, help to create a research climate of curiosity and autonomy, and act as consultants in assessment and self-assessment of the research activity. Teachers can also help students to become critical of their own research activity by fostering in them the awareness that they are constructing facts within historical-cultural values and power relation contexts. Teachers can ask students, “what can we do so that our particular interest or cultural framework does not interfere or interferes as little as possible with our research?” Then students will begin to realize that we are all in power relations and ask themselves what place, what role do these power struggles have, and how do they influence the way we conduct research?

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