LA COMPETENCIA SOCIAL Y EL CAMBIO ACTITUDINAL EN EL AULA DE SECUNDARIA

Abstract

In recent decades numerous programs have been developed trying to integrate the teaching of attitudes and values in the field of social skills, emotional intelligence and conflict management. However it seems that we are having some difficulties in promoting moral values that we consider necessary for democratic coexistence. We present a proposal for teaching attitudes and values in high school classrooms based on an experiment in a Research-in-School Area on issues related to the conflict and coexistence. In order to investigate the possibilities of changing attitudes in classroom, practical application research was carried out with a group of students in the fourth year of secondary school (ESO), during the 2010-2011 academic year, in a Centre of Preferential Attention located on the outskirts of Seville. A system of categories was stablished following a hypothesis of progression and coded information units contained in the students' notebooks, in the audio recordings of a discussion group and in the researcher's journal. Quantitative treatment and qualitative analysis of the results show the evolution and characterization of attitudes in the different values of the hypothesis of progression, the correlation between cognitive schemes and the construction of attitudes and values, and also the possibility of restructuring these towards higher levels of complexity through work in the classroom with controversial topics with research methodology.