VALORACIÓN DE LA PRÁCTICA PEDAGÓGICA EN LA ENSEÑANZA DEL DERECHO: Una experiencia de constructivismo social y enseñanza para la comprensión del Derecho Penal General

In the teaching practice of law in general, and specifically criminal law, there are variety of models and procedures for addressing this discipline. The diversity of methods, concepts, didactics and procedures have promoted the way laws professors assume their roles while teaching this subject. However, not all lawyer, who teach at the university level to undergraduate students or lawyers-to-be, consider pedagogy didactics as a mean of strengthening their competencies as professors.

The research accounts for the preponderance of the master lecture in the Colombian and Latin American Law Schools in teaching practices in which the main character is the professor and the student become just a passive receptor of information. In this sense, it is common to find excellent lawyers and professionals who give lessons at the law programs implementing in their classes a traditional pedagogy where teaching is more focused on transmitting theoretical, conceptual, legal points of view than in practical and real issues of the discipline itself.

As the participatory action research of this Project since the perspective of a social constructivist approach, it is a pilot tool box that promotes the meaningful learning. In this context, it seeks to improve the traditional teaching of law and promotes the reflection about comprehension not only of the legal discipline but also of the teaching as a complex act. It requires that teachers reflect on their own praxis and share all those great pedagogical experiences among themselves to build an academic community in order to better both learning and teaching. At the end, the reader will find an evaluation of the constructivist teaching and the meaningful learning of the general penal law since a different pedagogical perception, process which invites to generate real situations of collective reflection on what we teach and how we teach it, at the same time, it shows some practices for the valuation of the academic, educational and professional community of the general criminal law. 

Key words: pedagogy, legal education, law teaching, social constructivism, criminal law learning, general criminal law.