A study of the professional characteristics of the university teacher to attend to the diversity

Abstract

This paper presents a mixed descriptive research whose main objective was to determine the professional features to the attention to the diversity of a group of professors from the Facultad de Agronomía y Veterinaria (FAyV) of the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí (UASLP). To achieve this, we carried out a theoretical review in order to identify a range of professional features required in university teaching to enable an education based on respect for differences of students, which are: communication with students, motivation from contextual factors, the integrated teaching mentoring, reflective practice, learning management through the active involvement of students, promotion of collaborative learning, planning based on differences, collaboration with other teachers to build learning strategies and sustained improvement in practice. From this position, it is designed and applied a methodological procedure based two phases: a quantitative basis to assess the professional features by applying a tool to a group of teachers; other qualitative through categorical analysis of a field journal developed during the research process, and a content analysis of institutional documents. The results of this process enable a proposal for the intervention for teacher training prepared to deal with diversity in a student population whose main characteristic is heterogeneity.