On alterations and digital alternatives in the teaching of professional practices

Abstract

This essay takes as a trigger the inclusion of digital simulators as didactic material for the university level during the COVID19 pandemic, in the search to identify alterations and questions to the methodological structuring of the teaching of professional practices in public universities today. In this context, the teaching of content associated with professional practices at the university has been the subject of special attention and debate between views on what was or was not possible to offer students to continue their careers while the pandemic was going on. Numerous teaching teams were engaged in testing non-face-to-face alternatives, mediated by digital technologies, to offer their students approaches to professional intervention. Such was the case of the design and/or inclusion of computer simulators of professional situations and virtual laboratories. From this trigger, a critical review of the current implications of the use of these resources is carried out. What can we think about this trend? What learning does it promote? How does it question the teaching of professional practices in the canonical curriculum (current and healthy in our territory) organized in disciplinary and application logics? The essay closes recognizing that there is something of the sensitive experience in the exercise of a professional practice that ¿still? escapes the digital simulators for the teaching of professional practices. And that the possibility of teaching to elaborate new questions and make creative decisions in unprecedented situations -for now- remains in the realm of human intentionality.