De la exploración ingenua a la consolidación del saber.: Un relato autobiográfico sobre la propia construcción del saber profesional en relación al espacio-ambiente

Abstract

This paper presents an autobiographical narration of my own story concerning one of the core concepts of Early Childhood Education, the concept of space-environment. The story begins when I was an Education student in 1984/85 and ends at the present stage, when I have tried to apply to the university experience the knowledge acquired regarding the space-environment. I have achieved this by creating a workshop where future Preschool teachers have the opportunity to design different learning environments and work proposals that they then perform with children of the schools near the University. Between the beginning and the end of this story, three other important moments are narrated: my trip to Reggio Emilia in 1990, my stay at a nursery school and my experience as a teacher between 1991 and 1994, which gave me the most valuable knowledge, practical knowledge, since the school became a true laboratory for experimentation with space. The penultimate section is dedicated to the fulfilment of my doctoral thesis whose main contribution was to design an assessment framework of the space-environment in a preschool classroom and conceptualize the term of the learning environment as a perfectly interrelated 4-dimensional construct (the physical, functional, temporal and relational dimensions). In the last section, from Preschool to university teaching, several images are included about the workshop that we are building in the Teachers’ Training School of Lugo.