Challenges to the formation of communist consciousness in higher education: theoretical thinking and the desire for practical achievement

Abstract

The article aims to present the contributions of Historical-Critical Pedagogy and Historical-Cultural Psychology to educational work in higher education based on the relationships between teaching, learning and human development. It is understood that if Pedagogy guides the selection of content and teaching procedures, Psychology reveals who is the specific recipient who will appropriate the content, through teaching procedures. The discussion is based on two interconnected movements of analysis; the first focuses on the teacher and his teaching activity in its political-pedagogical dimension; the second focuses on the student, highlighting the formation of consciousness, which occurs through the movement of apprehension of the multiple determinations of social reality, through the appropriation of theoretical-conceptual systems, highlighting the collective activity of study, research and intervention in the areas of University education. In both teachers and students, the formation of “revolutionary consciousness” in its psychological dimension can only be known concretely through the unity between social consciousness and personal consciousness. Therefore, it is argued that higher education needs to provide conditions for the student not only to appropriate explanatory theories about the objects studied, but to experience their use through the incorporation of conceptual systems, theoretically mobilizing psychic processes in deciphering and intervening in reality.