Del juzgar al comprender: Una lectura del quehacer docente para el acompañamiento humanizante de niños, niñas y adolescentes en riesgo escolar

This essay reflects, from the teacher’s own practice, on the importance of a humanizing accompaniment of children and adolescents (NNA) at school risk, considering the real circumstances of a student caught in a situation of vape consumption. It seeks to argue that purely techno-legal and protocol-based responses, focused on judging the offense, prove insufficient when the family, contextual, and emotional causes underlying the student’s behavior are not addressed. Drawing on the ideas of Paulo Freire on education as the practice of freedom, Max van Manen on pedagogical tact and authority as moral service, Urie Bronfenbrenner on the ecology of human development, and Howard Zehr on restorative justice, as well as on the Colombian regulatory framework (Decreto 1278 of 2002 and Ley 1620 of 2013), it seeks to propose some keys for a classroom teacher’s accompaniment, based on what is proportional and humanizing, among them: the recognition of the student as a subject, pedagogical sensitivity, the balance between rigidity and humanization, and the exercise of a proportional pedagogical authority. This essay concludes that moving from judging to understanding requires shifting the question “why did you do this?” toward “what led you here?”, as a condition for a truly humanizing pedagogy.