The teaching method notes for a story not always told

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to account for an absent history. For this we resort to the hermeneutic analysis of historical texts, tools usually not included among the readings in teacher training schools when the foundational ideas that lead to articulate and define the teaching method are exposed and unfolded. The first texts analyzed are from the 12th and 13th centuries: Saint Victor and Gundissalinus (Gundisalvo) who brought back to the West, through Latin translations from Greek and Arabic, the accumulated knowledge of their time that was transmitted through life in convents and monasteries. That working space, where scholasticism arises, will strongly influence the first efforts to establish a canon of teaching, that is, of the transmission of the contents of the seven liberal arts, articulated in the trivium and the quadrivium, canon of which some of its principles still underlie unconsciously in the “ways of teaching class”. In this context, we found the emergence of an apparently discrepant countercurrent to Aristotle, embodied in the works of Pierre de la Ramée, (Peter Ramus). His concern with teaching and the inscription of the concept of curriculum for the first time to show the ordering and organization that enable the transmission of the seven liberal arts, establishing the separation between disciplines for the first time. This essay pretends to be only a beginning of the untold history of the origins of the teaching methods, whose contents allowed Juan Amos Comenius to write his Didactica Magna