Appreciative Teaching of Social Sciences in Competence Based Approaches to Higher Education

In teaching the disciplines in the social-human field, we appealed to the constructionist model of education. In this model, the unity of competence represents a construct resulting from the communicative action as a deliberate act instituted by the stakeholders participating in the social construction of the professional identity. Therefore, such unity is not a given defining abstract itself for a professional activity. Each such unit of competence resulted in a process of negotiation of interpretations on the meaning of the term ‘good practice’ in a given professional activity. Experimental implementation of certain curricular innovations may constitute an element of added value only to the extent to which this pseudo-experiment takes the form of a process of co-learning and curricular co-construction both in the educational framework, and also for students to acknowledge the partnership in the educational act, and not the magisterial attitude specific to the educational model centred on the teacher. In this article we present a series of curricular innovations that targeted the expansion of the appreciative-constructionist model of learning as a basis for curricular projection and development. The method consists of using the appreciative inquiry in reformulating the experience of the subjects related to the social reality analysed, and the customisation of different contexts of the social experience.