The hour of change for the Faculty of Medicine, University of Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia

Abstract

The Faculty of Medicine, University of Antioquia, in Medellín, Colombia, introduces a new pedagogic model for educating its students in the XXI century. When the first century of the new millennium has started and the framework that will carry us to a future laden with promises, hopes as well as surprises begins to consolidate, our Medical Faculty already has its travel suitcase packed with the provisions that the last decade advised through long and fruitful design-efforts. On this occasion change did not surprise us but the University as a whole acclimatized within itself the culture of a farsighted organization and of an enterprise that learns from its own experience; in this way, at the new century‘s break the Faculty is already testing at full speed and with responsibility the new pedagogic proposal; the latter is the ultimate of the achievements that constitute the legacy of pedagogy in the period that is ending; in it, progress did not result out of inertia but was the crop harvested from damp and painfully narrow furrows. The present study is not an odyssey of successful achievements in this enterprise that, though ripe, just starts. It certainly is the unhurried recount of long-meditated actions, and of fruits yearned for during decades, that delicatedly and barely as shoots start to sprout and wink at us; nevertheless, we will only fulfill them by joining the efforts and wills with which they were conceived and without which they will hardly forge: flexible and pertinent curriculum; all-embracing and interdisciplinary formation; critical, thoughtful and creative learning; models for selfconstruction of learning; education for citizenship, professional training, research, didactic research, and social and scientific involvement; these are just some of the generator nuclei that orient the proposal; their establishment and growth are hardly in the making or barely in seed.