Pedagogical and Research Projects: A Path to Empower Prospective Teachers to Face their Challenges

Resumen

Abstract

Being a teacher today embraces new challenges and possibilities for pre-service and in-service teachers as well as for prospective teachers and their contexts in order to enrich and/ or transform educational practices. Some of these challenges deal with: the need to have a knowledge base of the subject and specifically a high level of Communicative Competencein the foreign language, a general and specific pedagogical knowledge, an understanding about the conception and execution of the curriculum and an appropriation of the teaching-learning theory. The mentioned aspects constitute a base in their
professional development. Pedagogical and Research Projects in the Languages School at Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia (UPTC) incorporate these aspects in their syllabus in order to face the prospective teachers to the realities they will handle as future ones. The aim of this article is to reflect upon the challenges, knowledge and policies around teaching a foreign language nowadays and discuss what prospective teachers can understand around pedagogy and research as the bridge to link what they study and reflect in classes and the realities they have to face as future Foreign Languages teachers.

Key words: Pedagogical and Research Projects, Knowledge base, future teachers
‘challenges.