InterCambios. Dilemmas and Transitions in Higher Education

Challenges of educational inclusion in the Faculty of Psychology (Udelar)

2025-04-10T18:50:59+00:00

Educational inclusion requires permanent review and is therefore a permanent challenge. The reference context is the University of the Republic of Uruguay, historicizing the legal process that accompanies, enables and makes possible educational inclusion as a fundamental right. Subsequently, the focus will be on the Faculty of Psychology, detailing experiences and modalities in which educational inclusion materializes, presenting the space that is established for the singular approach: The Teaching Renewal Program (PROREn). This program addresses various areas within the framework of educational inclusion: people with disabilities, diagnosed with dyslexia, ADD, SLI and others; people deprived of liberty, people who are going through health or life situations that may compromise their educational path, gender diversity, social vulnerability and migration. Each situation requires a specific institutional response articulated with the life scenario of each student. Also think about the institution and anticipate situations that compromise the due inclusion of each singularity.

Students in focus: Move towards design

2025-06-09T17:42:31+00:00

The Laboratorio de Vidrio is one of the eleven materials laboratories within the Área Tecnológica of the Escuela Universitaria Centro de Diseño, which belongs to the Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo at the Universidad de la República. It has been a space for teaching glass as a design material since 2010. Its curricular units have been offered as electives for students from other programs within the Área de Tecnologías y Ciencias de la Naturaleza y el Hábitat, in line with the Universidad de la República’s Movete en la Udelar initiative. This text presents the methodology and part of the results from the research project “Estudiantes en foco: Movete hacia el diseño”, conducted in 2023. The study explored a component of the “Prácticas contemporáneas de diseño en vidrio 2020-2021” project, which was approved in the call for Innovaciones Educativas en las Distintas Modalidades de la Enseñanza de la Udelar. It analyzed the perspective of Industrial Design students regarding the integration of entrepreneurs and students from other disciplines in the classroom. A qualitative methodological approach was employed through focus groups composed of Bachelor’s in Industrial Design students who worked alongside these individuals during 2020, 2021, and 2022. Additionally, a quantitative analysis was conducted on the integration of these teams across various courses and timeframes. The focus groups highlighted a positive assessment of the inclusion of other participants in the classroom, where theoretical and practical knowledge is combined to create joint solutions. The importance of effective communication, coordination, and adaptability in teamwork was emphasized. This aims to improve teaching and learning practices not only in the curricular units linked to the Laboratorio de Vidrio but also in others impacted by the Movete en la Udelar program.

Help me look: The year of entering the Faculty of Psychology

2025-06-09T17:52:41+00:00

The present paper presents the findings of a research focused on generating knowledge about some particularities of student permanence in relation to admission and access to universities from the perspective of the right to education. The object of study is the student experiences that occurred in the year of admission to the Faculty of Psychology of the University of the Republic in Uruguay. In general terms, it proposes to deepen the knowledge of the subjective qualities of student experiences that put three dimensions of subjectivity into dialogue: intrasubjective, intersubjective and transubjective. The specific objectives study subjectivity in each of the defined dimensions. The research is nourished by multi-referential theoretical frameworks: sociological contributions regarding equality/inequality in education, studies on higher education, and psychological contributions regarding education, social and institutional psychology and psychoanalysis. The concept of continuity-discontinuity of educational trajectories that is presented emphasizes the diverse modes of student permanence. This places the pedagogical and relational strategies offered by the institution in a decisive position. The methodological approach is qualitative, flexible in design, with a narrative focus that adopts the perspective of an instrumental case study. This article summarizes the results of the intrasubjective dimension of the student experience, which finds that the subjective effects are located in the order of being.

The author’s voice in undergraduate students’ written productions: between others’ discourse and their own discourse

2025-06-09T17:59:31+00:00

The challenges that writing represents for university students go far beyond the mere need to textualize ideas and put them in dialogue with the theoretical approaches that support those ideas. The construction of positioning as an author is a great challenge at this stage, since it involves the appropriation of academic discourse and entry into a new community. In this context, I understand that the presence of the author is linked to the notion of personal agency, that is, with the ability to act and make decisions deliberately, where one assumes that one is the maker of that text through a mediated process for reason and takes responsibility for what was said. I present an approach to the writing process of eight monographs carried out by undergraduate students of the Bachelor’s Degree in Library Science (Faculty of Information and Communication, Udelar) with the purpose of knowing how they approach the construction of authorship of their own texts. In the findings I propose that students do not usually assume themselves as authors of their writings, in the sense in which it is conceived in this work. Based on this evidence, I propose some recommendations so that students can be deliberately accompanied on this path of building themselves as subjects who write with agency.

A cross-sectional study at the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Alicante (Udelar) in 2023

2025-07-29T13:46:27+00:00

The Faculty of Psychology at Udelar is a public, open-access institution, with an active population of approximately 12,000 students by 2022, and an annual enrollment of approximately 2,500 students. One of the problems it presents is the high percentage of failures, low performance and poor class attendance. Performance according to Tejedor (2003) is associated, among others, with academic variables related to teaching programs and methodologies. This study aimed to know the performance in Mandatory Curricular Units (UCOs) of the 2013 Curriculum of the Degree in Psychology and its relationship with teaching devices. A quantitative, transversal and analytical approach was used. We worked with the intermediate minutes describing the variables: approved, exonerated, deferred, abandoning the course and the grades obtained. The teaching and evaluation modalities of the UCOs were systematized through an online form completed by teachers. The teaching devices are divided into plenary sessions (groups of 1000 students without attendance control) and seminars (groups of 40, 60 or 90 students with attendance control and continuous evaluation). This study allowed us to identify that as progress is made in training cycles, dropout rates stabilize while performance improves. It is concluded that seminar devices favor permanence, and are related to better levels of performance and grades, which can constitute a contribution to the definitions of academic policies for quality teaching.

The specificity of English as a foreign language courses for university purposes: the case of the Universidad de la República

2025-07-29T13:47:10+00:00

Many universities include English as a foreign language courses due to the vitality and hegemony of this language in the academic and scientific areas. The Universidad de la República (Uruguay) embraces an open, plural, and diverse perspective to foreign languages. Between 2019 and 2022 courses of eleven different languages were offered – English among them, and most courses were of this language: twenty-three out of seventy-seven –. By carrying out an ethnography of discourse in educational contexts (Johnson, 2011), using different research techniques (document analysis, semi-structured interviews, surveys and classroom observations), the discursive knot (Jäger, 2003) regarding English language teaching, that includes an analysis concerning the way in which English language course are given at the Universidad de la República, was analyzed. It was concluded that, although heterogeneity exists regarding the variety of courses that are being offered, they are context-specific, as they share the university’s characteristics and prioritize the socio-cultural aspects of the language. The objectives, approaches and knowledge provided in them are linked to a university discursivity (Dogliotti, 2019) characteristic of the institution and to knowledge related to the disciplines that are studied in the faculties and centers where the courses are being taught.

TDC proposals in hybrid mode, systematic review

2025-08-05T12:28:30+00:00

The development of Teaching Digital Competence (TDC) continues to be a topic of interest for higher education, especially in the hybrid modality after the health emergency. This article aims to present the main recommendations proposed to promote the development of TDC in teachers who work in hybrid modality in higher education. This is why it is proposed to identify the teaching objectives, the proposed methodologies, the institutional strategies implemented and the results obtained with the proposals related to the development of the TDC. Following the stages of the PRISMA 2020 Declaration, a systematic literature review is carried out in three databases between the years 2018 and 2022 inclusive. Among the main findings the little literature dedicated to this topic, stand out the need to propose institutional strategies and the models detected in the literature analyzed, as well as the recommendation to start from the diagnosis of DC of teachers to propose training in flexible formats and linked to professional practice.