Repensado la escuela con Justa Ezpeleta (1979-1986)

Justa Ezpeleta del Huerto has developed a critical perspective on schooling which has influenced studies in the Department of Educational Research of the Cinvestav to this date. In this essay, I propose to highlight her collaboration in a project on the realities of elementary schooling and teachers’ work that we co-directed during the early 1980s. I acknowledge her conceptual contribution, which recovered the important critical legacy of the Pasado y Presente group, founded in Córdoba, Argentina, during the sixties and seventies and continued in her exile in Mexico. I attempt to reconstruct the conceptual debates that allowed us to formulate a new object of knowledge, focused on the confluence of the social processes that unfold in schools, which capture its complexity and historicity. I describe some findings which these new concepts helped us achieve. Finally, I pose some questions regarding the relevance of this perspective for understanding educational realities that have changed considerably since those years