La construcción de la ciudadanía económica a partir del concepto de trabajo en el alumnado de Educación Primariaun análisis comparativo de dos estudios de caso

Abstract

This work systematizes intentional processes of economic literacy, as well as provides elements to understand its influence on the evolutioh of economic representations in primary school students. The methodology consists of two case studies, one carried out in the city of Xalapa, Mexico and the other in Huelva, Spain, based on the triangulation of observations, student work and interviews. Due to its characteristics, it constitutes an analysis of the classroom practice for being interested in both what students body think and the teacher-student interaction. The aims are: to identify and analyze the economic representations of student body on the labor field in the individual and socio-environ menta I aspects, to explore the evolution of students' economic conceptions about the world of work from the teaching-learning process in the classroom, detecting their learning difficulties and to identify difficulties and facilitators that the students body find in the construction of economic notions throughout a teaching and learning process. The categories studied are: representations regarding work and unemployment, occupational aspirations and social hierarchy and the environmental impact of economic activities, on the other hand, difficulties and facilitators obtained in the school development of economic concepts. The information collected allowed to elaborate levels of progression in the understanding of economic representations. It should be noted that the representations about the concept and purpose of the work presented by the student body of primary education follow similar evolutionary guidelines and it is worth noting that in both cases, most students recognize a relationship between working and earning money, although in some students are still seeing redoubts of magic explanations about why the bank provides money from the use of credit cards without these funds are related to work activities. A fact to highlight is the presence of a third level in the issue of unemployment in the case of Spain in which there is a greater understanding of what happens in the economy of the country at macro level, it is understood that unemployment also stems from lack of investment in the country due to the economic crisis and even the student body mention the immigration process to cities with greater job opportunities. It is noteworthy to mention that the implementation of the didactic proposals favored the students to deepen the knowledge of the world of work and allowed the emergence of underlying conceptualizations in the student body that do not become visible in the daily development of the classes according to the conventional work based on the text book. The research allowed to identify notions in the student body of these ages, the presence of stereotypes and peculiarities in the development of economic thought.