Discovering talents in elementary education: a teaching obligation

Abstract

This is a reflection coming from the “Intellect and Movement”methodology proposed by Gabriela María VásquezVásquez. It represents a strategy to teach, learn and educate by playing, painting, dancing and philosophizing from kindergarten through fifth grade of elementary education. It pretends to recover for pedagogy the instructional and educationalvalues of expressive areas: physical education,  aesthetic  education,  rhythmic  education,  and  philosophy.  This  study  and  the  experience gained in over thirty years of teaching children allow us to assert, in very general terms, that our school system is memory-centered, sedentary, repetitive, and not very meaningful. It does not discover the many talents inside each child attending school, since the naturally expressive areas are  usually  underestimated  or  ignored.  Our  suggestion  is  therefore  to  make  contributionsfor  our  schools to really be formative, active, enjoyable, meaningful, and attractive. Subsequent evidence supports  our  statements  about  the  benefits  of  teaching,  learning  and  educatingby  means  games, expressiveness  and  the  potentials  of  children.  This  article  presents  some  of  the  achievements  ac-complished with this methodology in several primary schools in the city of Medellin.