Social Intelligence development: Curriculum designs, urbanity and rurality

Abstract

This article is the result of research whose purpose is to understand the contributions of curricular designs for the development of social intelligence in two educational settings (urban and rural), using a qualitative approach. To collect the information, semi-structured interviews were applied to teachers and administrators. Two interactive techniques (patchwork quilt and Sociodrama) were used with children from first to third grade of elementary school. The research participants belong to the San Juan Rural Educational Center, San Jorge headquarters (San Roque, Antioquia) and the Castilla Baptist College (Medellín). The results allow us to affirm that, although there are standard models in the curricular design of both areas, their implementation differs markedly. Likewise, those academic skills are explicitly forged within the real curriculum, while social skills are part of the hidden curriculum. Furthermore, that social intelligence has been an implicit topic in the interaction between teachers and students, but specific content on this topic has not been developed in the formal curriculum. The above allows us to conclude that it would be pertinent to think about explicit contents for the development of social intelligence, taking into account the particularities of each context.