Reading-writing process, texts and curriculum: Exploratory study of criticality in three didactic experiences

In view of the social problem provoked by the information explosion in communications and the poor critical skills of university students, the investigation was designed and conducted with the purpose of exploring the critical didactic experiences of three professors of literature. We started from their ideas and didactic practices in terms of three macro concepts: the reading-writing process, the texts and the curriculum. Criticism, principal mega concept of the investigation, was addressed as a problem when contrasting the theoretical statements of the critical pedagogy and the critical practice of the participants.; A qualitative exploratory approach with the methodology of profound interview was used. Interviews were transcribed ad verbatim, then the data was segmented and categorized, the obtained categories were related with the theoretical framework, findings were discussed and analyzed and vignettes elaborated. Three vignettes were presented and then an inter-textual analysis of the three didactic experiences was conducted in a discourse first expositive-argumentative then narrative from which implications are derived for the curriculum and for the investigation of criticality.; The responses of the participants were not given in a vacuum but from the space of their particular localities. Their examples, anecdotes and reflections were brought from the classrooms where they teach. Among the outstanding findings are: (a) criticism derived from the literature were validated; (b) new categories of criticality were obtained in each macro concept of the investigation; (c) several metaphors emerged on the critical practices of the docents which were related or contrasted with the current theory; (d) not only do they construct their voices from their practices but also from those of their students through the structure of studied texts, assessment activities and workshops in creativity; (e) redefine their critical teaching as something consubstantial with passion, as art itself; (f) for the three professors the text is a texture of many threads and they conceive their interpretation as the result as an activity of the reading-writing process connection in which the reader plays an active role; (g) the formulation of the questions and the writing as instruments to generate critical distancing from the text so that the students perceive their construction and artifice; (h) the participants showed a clear adhesion with the current of critical thinking from the teaching of language and reading more problematic with the social, the political and the philosophical.