87
From theoretical training to epistemic
thinking in postgraduate Education in
Latin America
César Correa-Arias1
To reference this article / Cómo citar este artículo / Para citar
este artigo: Correa-Arias, C. (2024). From theoretical training to
epistemic thinking in posgraduate education in Latin America. Revista
UNIMAR, 42(1), 87-102. https://doi.org/10.31948/ru.v42i1.3850
Date of reception: April 25, 2023
Date of review: May 31, 2023
Date of approval: September 28, 2023
Abstract
The development of skills and capacities for research in educational sciences
represents a narrative-reective environment for the construction of autonomous
and self-managed theoretical and epistemic thinking. Narrative processes
are the connection between life literature and scientic literature, connecting
the postgraduate educational path and the subjective and intersubjective
construction project of the students. This paper aims to analyze the diculties
and opportunities that the students in these programs have in constructing
their theoretical frameworks in the development of their dissertations in a way
that allows them to move from a theorizing exercise to epistemic thinking. The
research uses a qualitative participatory methodology with a phenomenological
orientation. The main important ndings showed the need for more narrative
skills to use analytical categories in conceptual construction. The theoretical
foundation in the development of their postgraduate studies in educational
sciences represents a narrative laboratory for the construction of plural
epistemologies, epistemic hospitality, and equity which enables the transition
from a theoretical foundation to an epistemic thinking through a hospitable,
equitable, and inclusive dialogue.
Keywords: Theoretical foundation; hospitality and epistemic equity; epistemic
thinking; educational research; higher education.
1 Doctor in Education, Universidad de Toulouse Le Mirail II. Université Jean Jaurès. Researcher-Professor Full time in the Universidad
de Guadalajara, México. Member of the Research Group (Academic Body) Ecología Cultural y Sociedad. UDF-CA-1177. SEP-
Universidad de Guadalajara, México. Member of the National System of Researchers, CONACYT, México. E-mail: cesar.correa@
cucea.udg.mx
Article resulting from the research entitled: Construcción categorial y fundamentación teórica en estudiantes de posgrado en
Iberoamérica, developed from 04/11/2020 until 25/11/2022, in the Universidad de Guadalajara, México and the Universidad de
Granada, España.
Revista Unimar Enero-Junio 2024
e-ISSN: 2216-0116 ISSN: 0120-4327 DOI: https://doi.org/10.31948/rev.unimar
Rev. Unimar Vol. 42 No. 1 pp. 87-102
88
De la formación teórica al pensamiento epistémico en
los posgrados en Educación en América Latina
Resumen
El desarrollo de habilidades y capacidades para la investigación en los posgrados
de Educación en América Latina representa un espacio narrativo-reexivo para
la construcción de un pensamiento teórico y epistémico autónomo. Los procesos
narrativos son la conjunción entre literatura de vida y literatura cientíca,
vinculando el trayecto de formación en el posgrado y el proyecto de construcción
subjetiva e intersubjetiva de sus estudiantes. El objetivo de este trabajo es
analizar las dicultades y oportunidades que los estudiantes de estos programas
poseen en la construcción de sus marcos teóricos en el desarrollo de sus tesis,
de suerte que permitan el paso de un ejercicio de teorización a un pensamiento
epistémico. La metodología empleada es participativa/crítica y cualitativa, con una
orientación fenomenológica. Los hallazgos más importantes evidencian la falta de
capacidades para el uso de categorías de análisis en la construcción conceptual.
Concluimos que la fundamentación teórica de las tesis en los estudios de posgrado
en ciencias de la educación representa un laboratorio narrativo de construcción
de epistemologías plurales y de una hospitalidad y equidad epistémicas. Esto
promoverá el paso de una fundamentación teórica a un pensamiento epistémico
mediante un diálogo hospitalario, equitativo e incluyente.
Palabras clave: fundamentación teórica; hospitalidad y equidad epistémica;
pensamiento epistémico; investigación educativa; educación superior.
Da formação teórica ao pensamento epistêmico na
pós-graduação em Educação na América Latina
Resumo
O desenvolvimento de habilidades e capacidades de pesquisa em ciências da
educação representa um ambiente narrativo-reexivo para a construção de um
pensamento teórico e epistêmico autônomo e autogerenciado. Os processos
narrativos são a conexão entre a literatura da vida e a literatura cientíca,
conectando o caminho educacional da pós-graduação e o projeto de construção
subjetiva e intersubjetiva dos alunos. Este artigo tem como objetivo, analisar as
diculdades e oportunidades que os alunos desses programas têm na construção
de suas estruturas teóricas no desenvolvimento de suas dissertações, de forma
a permitir que eles passem de um exercício de teorização para o pensamento
epistêmico. A pesquisa utiliza uma metodologia participativa qualitativa com
orientação fenomenológica. As principais conclusões importantes mostraram a
necessidade de mais habilidades narrativas para usar categorias analíticas na
construção conceitual. A base teórica no desenvolvimento de seus estudos de
pós-graduação em ciências da educação representa um laboratório narrativo para
a construção de epistemologias plurais, hospitalidade epistêmica e equidade, o
que permite a transição de uma base teórica para um pensamento epistêmico
por meio de um diálogo hospitaleiro, equitativo e inclusivo.
Palavras-chave: fundamentação teórica; hospitalidade e equidade epistêmica;
pensamento epistêmico; pesquisa educacional; ensino superior.
Revista Unimar Enero-Junio 2024
e-ISSN: 2216-0116 ISSN: 0120-4327 DOI: https://doi.org/10.31948/rev.unimar
Rev. Unimar Vol. 42 No. 1 pp. 87-102
From theoretical training to epistemic thinking in postgraduate Education in Latin America
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Rev. Unimar Vol. 42 No. 1 pp. 87-102
Introduction
The theoretical construction that only
results from colonial practices, leading to a
hegemonic education in educational research,
or in opposition to the former, represented in
emancipatory practices and inspired by de-
colonial turns, cannot represent the totality of
epistemic horizons, not only because of the
confrontation and replacement or overlapping
of one epistemology with another, not only
because of the confrontation and replacement or
overlapping of one epistemology with another,
nor because of the epistemic violence that
suggests the defense of an aeternum statement
against a dominant ideology, but because, on
the one hand, it is essentially a human right
to construct narratives that can be concretized
in autonomous, innovative, situated, and
sustainable social projects; and, on the other
hand, because theoretical construction is
generally insucient in research training to
generate autonomy of thought and freedom of
conceptual innovation.
The objective of this work is focused on analyzing
the diculties and opportunities that students of
these programs have in the construction of their
theoretical frameworks in the development of
their theses, in order to allow the passage from
an exercise in theorization to the improvement
of epistemic thinking. Therefore, it is necessary
to consider the decisive formative role that the
didactics of teaching educational research plays
in the autonomous and ethical-political thinking
of new researchers who, at the end of their
studies, can be, as a formative horizon, critical
citizens with autonomous thinking, participants
in just and democratic societies.
The research was carried out in ten postgraduate
education programs in Latin America. A
participatory/critical methodology was used,
with a phenomenological, qualitative orientation
and positioned in a socio-cognitive-analytical
paradigm. This allowed several reections on
the logical construction of the object of study
approached, as well as on the logic of construction
in the process of theoretical foundation of the
graduate students’ theses.
General situation of doctoral studies in
Latin America
Grosso modo, we can distinguish, among others,
two specic areas of analysis: a) the general
structure of postgraduate education in the face
of the dierent challenges and opportunities
of the educational and social sector in Latin
America; and b) the processes of postgraduate
education in this region.
In the publications of the European Higher
Education Area (2005), the European University
Association (2007), Enders (2004) and Cumming
(2010), it is stated that, at least in Europe,
advanced higher education has undergone four
trends that, taken together, have necessitated
the implementation of the following urgent
transition processes:
The growing number of applicants for
postgraduate education, as well as the
apparent diversication of this potential
population;
The role and function of scientic and
applied research in the so-called ‘knowledge
economy’;
The internationalization of academic
provision; and,
The State’s concern for this level of higher
education.
Cruz (2014) identies the following purposes
that underpin doctoral degrees in the European
model:
1. The advancement and shifting of the
frontiers of knowledge.
2. Intensive training in research.
3. Highly specialized education and training
in a professional eld, although master’s
degrees are intended to serve this purpose.
4. General, personal and intellectual training
to provide students with the tools to
adopt a more open, exible and critical
attitude towards an object of knowledge,
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Rev. Unimar Vol. 42 No. 1 pp. 87-102
to communicate better and beyond the
boundaries of their own discipline, and to
demonstrate intellectual autonomy.
5. Responding to the needs of the labor
market. This purpose tends to modify the
traditional centralism of the curriculum,
oriented only to the needs of the students.
However, barely a decade later, with the
emergence of Remote Emergency Education
(REE) (Bozkurt et al., 2020), due to the
contingencies of the last pandemic and the
subsequent digitization of the lifeworld, new
horizons of problematization are opening up:
Digitization of higher education, while
improving the connectivity of teachers
and students to generate greater coverage
and diversication of professional training
(Correa, 2021).
A uctuating knowledge economy based
on information shared by multiple nodes
of digitized and low-cost information. Its
applications in systems and ecosystems
of demographic information, political
opinion, environmental, cultural, etc.,
have generated technological, social
and nancial innovations, but also
environmental tensions and consumerism
(United Nations Educational, Scientic and
Cultural Organization, UNESCO, 2020).
Innovations in digital or blended
internationalization from virtual learning
environments, collaboration and academic
and research action.
Linkage and exercise of rights to diversity
of students related to the connection
and disconnection within the educational
processes (Comisión de Rectores de
Universidades Españolas, CRUE, 2020).
Co-responsibility of teachers and students
in the teaching-learning process.
Promotes transdisciplinary training for
teachers and students, based not only on
thematic and research lines, but also on
research agendas.
UNESCO (2020) has outlined some of the
reforms and challenges for education at all
levels and around the world:
Select more relevant tools, considering
Internet connectivity and digital literacy of
students and teachers.
Combine appropriate didactic and curricular
approaches and standardize the number of
applications and platforms.
Create open and better-connected
knowledge communities.
Implement measures to ensure the
inclusion of all students in distance learning
programs.
Plan study schedules in advance,
considering socio-economic, cultural, etc.
contexts.
Adapt and improve continuous and distance
assessment systems.
Ensure the security, privacy and data
protection of students and teachers.
Support teachers and parents in the use of
digital tools.
Dene the times, forms, and purposes of
distance learning as hybrid education.
In general, and at a global level, postgraduate
studies maintain a formal structure that
includes objectives, specic characteristics in
terms of schools of thought, teaching-learning
models, duration and intensity of programs,
and disciplinary orientation that identies and
socially legitimizes them. However, because
of the importance they can have in deepening
professional work, social interactions and the
construction of ethical-political positions in the
face of social realities, it is expected that the
graduate program be oriented by a dialogical
space through which learning is evidenced
beyond the correlations between content and
learning experience, highlighting narratives
of learning from experience, in the key of
life stories and training (Pineau, 2005). This
politics of subjectivity (Tedesco, 2012) allows
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us to narrate ourselves in the rst person and
note the tensions with the models of university
education, the performance of teachers, the
processes of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity
of students, employability and full awareness of
the system of the world we inhabit.
For his part, Ardoino (2005) states that
education begins with participation, which
means transforming knowledge for oneself.
Involvement is closely linked to the processes
of subjectivation and inter-subjectivation,
which represent a dierent perspective to the
canonical method of learning and place the
cognitive subjects in a horizon of planetary
socio-cognitive co-responsibility and socially
sustainable action.
Critical orality and literacy in the
construction of epistemic thinking in
postgraduate programs in education
Theoretical construction appears as one of the
greatest socio-cognitive challenges for Master’s
and Doctoral students, due to the low acquisition
and incorporation of one or more scientic
languages and research skills that allow the
development of a coherent, argumentative
and meaningful theoretical foundation in the
elaboration of their theses.
The reading of academic and/or scientic texts
appears as the rst didactic tool that a thesis
director generally uses in the construction of the
state of the art and the theoretical foundation.
Rosales (2016) declares that:
First, reading is the reader’s encounter with
the text, understanding that it is a complex
process in which internal and external
factors intervene; [...] the reader interacts
with the text through prior knowledge and
context, which contribute to the reader’s
construction of meaning in relation to his or
her experience, knowledge, and linguistic
skills. Reading invites [...] to live a personal
and foreign experience that combines all this
knowledge, so that it is not only practiced to
increase a specic knowledge, but also allows
the reader to identify, to engage and to feel.
The critical reading of a text allows us to know
the place and the logic from which it was written,
the way in which the main ideas and conceptions
were constructed, the historical considerations
of the subject who produced the text, the way in
which this text has been disseminated through
the cultural and scientic domain and, above
all, how this text has transformed our practice.
In this sense, Freire (2004) expresses that
The true act of reading is a dialectical
process that synthesizes between the
knowledge-transformation of the world and
the knowledge-transformation of ourselves.
To read is to speak, it is the act that allows
men and women to distance themselves from
their practice (codify it) in order to know it
critically, to return to it to transform it and to
transform themselves.
Reading and dialogicity put the issues in context
and lead to reection and action. We read not
only to understand, but also to act. Freire (1992)
arms that the word has two inseparable
constitutive aspects: action and reection, since
both, in a dialectical key, establish the praxis of
the word,
Both, in a dialectical key, constitute the praxis
of the transformative process. Reection
without action is reduced to sterile verbalism,
and action without reection is activism. The
true word is praxis, because man must act
in the world to humanize, transform and
liberate it.
The reading of reality leads us to consider it
as a tributary of the constitutive processes of
literacy and orality in its critical nature, oriented
to the generation of socio-cognitive and ethical-
political processes in the exercise of scientic
work. Cassany (2009) denes literacy as
The mastery and use of the alphabetic code,
the receptive and productive construction
of texts, the knowledge and use of the
functions and purposes of the dierent
discursive genres of each social sphere,
the roles assumed by the reader and the
author, the social values associated with
these roles, which include identity, status
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and social position, and the knowledge that
is constructed in these texts and circulated
in the community, and the representation of
the world that they transmit.
Contrary to the instruction reected in the
subjects that recite quotes from authors, literacy
and orality, both of a critical nature, promote
in the graduate training process the ability
to generate semantic innovation by reading,
dialoguing and reconguring the texts read,
to build an ethical-political stance on an object
of interest to the sciences. In this regard, the
Ministry of Education of Ontario, Canada (cited
in Iñesta, 2016) denes literacy as:
The ability to use meaningful and diverse
forms of oral, written, or visual expression
to read, write, listen, speak, visualize,
represent, and critically reect on a variety
of ideas. This ability enables them to share
information, interact with others, and make
sense of things. Literacy is a complex
process by which a person acquires new
knowledge and a better understanding of the
world around them based on their culture,
experience, and background. These aspects
are essential for personal growth and active
participation in the life of a democratic
society. Literacy helps build bonds between
individuals and communities.
The exercise of epistemic hospitality and
justice
The role of epistemology as a philosophy
of science is to illuminate the conditions of
production and validity of the construction of
knowledge. This dynamic discipline, far from
sanctioning hegemonic ways of apprehending
knowledge, allows us to analyze the forms of
production and dissemination of knowledge in
particular contexts and how they are intertwined
to generate processes of understanding and
action. In this way, literacy and orality of a
critical nature represent a formative path in the
displacement of theoretical thinking towards
epistemic thinking.
How do we read? Those of us who can read
do so. We know how to decipher words, but
we do not necessarily know how to read.
Behind epistemic thinking is the urgency
of knowing how to read the contents that
everyone receives through the bibliography
of dierent authors; knowing how to read a
text does not mean limiting reading to what
we could dene as the processing of the sub-
content, [...] the processing of its conclusions
or the schematization of a set of propositions
that the author inherits in order to be able to
work with them in the realities that we want.
(Zemelman, 2005, p. 13)
This proto-interpretive reading, according to
Zemelman (2005), only allows us to know that
the parts or fragments of the text exist, but
does not represent the meaning of the text as
a comprehensive unit loaded with meanings
and senses:
In the particular case of the social sciences
and humanities [...] an additional eort must
be made, and it is none other than to read
the texts for what they are: constructions,
the construct itself; to read them from
what we could dene as their constructing
logics. [...] to try to recognize, behind the
attributive armations of a theoretical text,
for example, the problems that the author
intends to answer with such propositions;
that is, to recognize how Mr. X has constructed
his problem and how he ends up theorizing
it. (p. 13)
We learn to develop epistemic thinking as
a need to overcome the impermeability to
criticism of those theories xed by tradition.
Through socio-cognitive resources it is possible
to understand the context in which these
traditions have been built and to analyze the
way in which they have been sedimented to
become absolute truths or infallible ideological
positions. These resources, represented by the
active participation in the creation and denition
of social categories, require dialogicity to enrich
social understanding and consciousness (Freire,
1992), epistemological vigilance (Bourdieu,
1967), the historical conception of the subject
(Foucault, 1995; Zemelman, 2005), the small
ethic (Ricoeur, 1990). Critical literacy and orality
constitute, among other aspects, the substratum
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for the construction of an epistemological
hospitality, through the processes of reception
in the graduate seminars and the establishment
of hospitable pedagogies, as the foundation of
an open, inclusive and innovative pedagogical
practice.
Thus, students have the opportunity not to
remain as heirs of a tradition, as Bourdieu (1967)
notes, reproducing the unique perspectives of
their teachers, but to have access to a network
of conceptual networks that allow them to build
an autonomous and critical thinking.
In this sense, Benhabib (2006a), who criticizes
Habermas’ theory of communicative action
as an ideal and universalist proposal, argues,
using the concepts of norm and utopia (a matter
that allows her to distinguish the community of
legitimations and rights from the community
of needs and solidarity), that the structure
and orientation of the norm corresponds to
the space of legitimacy and law, while utopia
is linked to a policy of radical transformation or
realization of the dierent forms of life; nally,
to solidarity and hospitality. For this philosopher,
the community of needs and solidarity precedes
the community of legitimacy and rights, since
there is no universalization without social
participation. Universalization in this sense is
not a reproduction of concepts and actions, but
a plural social construction; and, she arms:
The project of modernity must be
reconstituted on the basis of an ongoing
dialogue with other voices that give rise
to a new universalism. It is an interactive
universalism that rationally ventilates
normative disputes, accepts that justice and
reciprocity are constituents of morality, and
maintains that dierence is a starting point
for reection and action. (p. 176)
It is through these elements that Benhabib
(2006a) supports the need to articulate access
to information, procedures of legitimate
deliberation, and plurality of modes of belonging
or association. It is thus a step from an open
public space to the singularity of the plural: “a
subject situated to project new ways of being
together, of relating to each other and to nature
in the future” (p. 175).
The connection that this author makes to thinking
about the hospitality of the concrete other with
citizenship represents the orientation of human
rights toward a cosmopolitan citizenship from
a global/private sphere; that is, a radically
dierent cosmopolitanism. Benhabib (2006b)
asserts that
Hospitality is not understood as a virtue
of sociability, such as the kindness and
generosity one can show to strangers who
come to one’s country or who are made
dependent on one’s acts of kindness by
natural circumstances or history; hospitality
is a right that belongs to all human beings
insofar as we see them as potential
participants in a world republic. (p. 30)
Thus, it is necessary to exercise an
epistemological hospitality that is not limited to
the Habermasian contractualism typical of Central
European epistemologies, nor to the opposite
extreme of particular territorial epistemologies,
epistemologies of the South, West or East, but
in the very concept, as expressed by Benhabib
(2006b), of an interactive universalism. It is
a matter of plural epistemologies that take
care of a community of needs and solidarity,
and therefore of an epistemic hospitality. So,
dierences complement the other; they do not
exclude him or her or make him or her a social
or epistemological pariah.
The educational dynamic of graduate students
involves more than the acquisition of a scientic
tradition, an own socio-cognitive way of doing
science that allows them to travel as citizens of
the world of science and not as pariahs excluded
from possible epistemic territories. That is, all
the territories of the objects of study that are
of interest to them, as a human and civil right,
acquired by the simple fact of being subjects
of reception and solidarity, as well as subjects
of rights.
Methodology
The study is situated in a socio-cognitive-
analytical paradigm. Using a qualitative and
participatory methodology, ve focus groups
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of eight to eleven volunteer students from
graduate programs in education were formed
in ve Latin American countries: Argentina,
Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico. In
these groups, the questions listed below were
discussed and, within the socio-cognitive
process, we recovered accounts of the students’
experiences in constructing the foundations
of their dissertations. Ten workshops were
conducted in ve doctoral programs and ve
master’s programs in education at universities
in these countries, with a total sample of 93
students. Ten in-depth phenomenological
interviews were carried out. This method of
data collection makes it possible to know the
experiences of the subjects in the process of
constructing and evaluating their theoretical
foundations within the elaboration of their
thesis.
The research was guided by the following
questions:
a) What are the main narrative diculties
of graduate students in the theoretical
foundation of their research?
b) What didactic resources do teachers use
to facilitate the theoretical-narrative
construction of graduate students in the
theoretical foundation of their theses?
c) How did the students manage to identify
the main themes, develop and give
coherence, unity and integrality to the
dierent chapters of the theoretical
foundation?
The answers to these questions were synthesized
in the content analysis.
The selection criteria for students were:
1. Have completed the second year of a
master’s degree or the third year of
a doctoral degree at the time of this
research.
2. Have completed the theoretical
underpinnings of their dissertation.
3. Be a regular student in the graduate
program.
4. Have completed all credits by the
beginning of the second or third year of
the M.A. or Ph.D. program, respectively.
A content analysis was carried out using the
Atlas.ti software, which made it possible
to dene the codes and families of codes of
the analysis of the narratives of experience
of the students of postgraduate programs in
education in these countries, facilitated by the
focus groups and in-depth phenomenological
interviews. From there, conceptual
cartographies were constructed that made it
possible to demonstrate the most important
categories for their Critical Discourse Analysis
(CDA), which makes it possible to give meaning
to the actions mentioned from a socio-cognitive
analytical framework. Some numerical values
are the result of the use of descriptive statistics,
applying measures of central tendency that
complement the qualitative analysis. The
eldwork was carried out both virtually and in
person.
Results and Discussion
The study of the responses through content
analysis using Atlas.ti software allowed the
identication and denition of four dierent
families of categories (codes) of analysis in
the construction of the theoretical foundation
through a participatory analysis of graduate
students in education in the ve countries
mentioned, participants in the workshops. From
the interviews, focus groups and eld diaries,
it was possible to stabilize and synthesize the
denitions of each of the categories, as shown
in Table 1.
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e-ISSN: 2216-0116 ISSN: 0120-4327 DOI: https://doi.org/10.31948/rev.unimar
Rev. Unimar Vol. 42 No. 1 pp. 87-102
Table 1
Denitions of categories
Categories Denition Kew-Concepts
1. Imagination and
narrative creation
Ability to produce texts with a clear,
complex, and intelligible structure resulting
from a variety of interrelationships of
meaning and sense oriented toward the
understanding of a subject or object of
study.
Dierentiation
capacity.
Complex
conceptual
relationships.
2. Narrative Identity Ability to recognize oneself in the logic of
construction, structure and mobility of the
texts produced.
Ability to make
inferences, social
recognition.
3. Theoretical autonomy Ability to combine theoretical concreteness
and regulated freedom in constructing a
text.
Narrative experience,
interpretive skills.
4. Ethical-political
positioning
Possibility to test the concepts acquired in
the reading in the world of their lives.
Ability of abstraction and
conceptual and social
correlation.
a. Imagination and narrative creation
This category was dened by the students
in the process of construction or theoretical
foundation as the ability to create texts with
a clear, complex and intelligible structure, the
result of a multitude of interrelations of meaning
and sense oriented towards the understanding
of a thematic eld or object of study.
Nussbaum (2005) has armed the relevance
of reading literary texts for the ability to
inhabit intercultural environments, develop
cosmopolitan thinking, universal citizenship,
self-determination and democracy, through the
Aristotelian perspective of telling life as a true
ction or mythos (narrative or stories) and the
intrigue or plot that underlies the story.
In the analysis of the results, it was found
that 89% of the students of the ten graduate
programs (ve master’s and ve doctoral) do
not recognize any relevant didactic device
used by their professors that allows them to
categorically order the construction of the
theoretical foundation of their thesis. Eighty-
four percent of these programs arm that
methodology classes limit the imagination
and narrative creation necessary for the
elaboration of the theoretical framework
or theoretical foundation. The blank paper
syndrome and the question of where to begin
or how to continue is a common comment
among the students analyzed.
Teachers do not guide us on how to do things,
but only correct us without having very clear
criteria as to why we need to make changes.
They tell us how to do it, but without any
awareness of why. In fact, other readers tell
me the opposite, and sometimes readers tell
us why this section or that section should
not go, or what the order should be. But we
don’t really know how to do the theoretical
framework. Just a document or a protocol
or the classic, the bibliographic cards... but
nothing else. In most cases, the only thing
that works is to trust the director (Master
student, Universidad Nacional de Costa
Rica, 2020).
Narrative construction is poor, and students
concentrate on following the sequences of order
that the thesis director or tutor marks for them,
without clearly understanding the logic of the
order they are making; or, if they perceive it,
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Revista Unimar Enero-Junio 2024
e-ISSN: 2216-0116 ISSN: 0120-4327 DOI: https://doi.org/10.31948/rev.unimar
Rev. Unimar Vol. 42 No. 1 pp. 87-102
they do not recognize a didactic or methodology
that enables them to learn it for themselves.
There is little autonomy in their imagination
and narrative construction. The students note
that they are not allowed, in their words, “to
relate the concepts found in our experiences
to the community, since the teachers consider
them more literature than science” (Master
student, Universidad Federal de São Paulo,
2021). The categorical construction is poor
and the students, in the workshops and in the
answers to the questionnaire, showed a greater
richness in the construction of anecdotes than
in conceptual concreteness.
Likewise, in a heterogeneous way, thesis
directors, tutors or teachers of methodology
or research seminars, when it comes to the
construction of the theoretical framework, only
guide students to carry out readings, but do not
propose didactics that allow them to navigate
through the theoretical assumptions without
losing the thematic horizon of the thesis and
the conceptual consistency.
The construction of the chapters seems to
respond more to a series of themes chosen
by the tutor than to our own initiative. For
example, at this moment, after nishing my
studies, I would write my master’s thesis in a
very dierent way. I think that a lot of pressure
is put on the fulllment of a protocol and little
on the academic and scientic preparation of
the student. There is a gap between what
some authors tell us, what the tutors say, and
what we believe in our practice as students,
and this should be discussed in class or with
the tutor when constructing the theoretical
framework. (Doctoral student, Universidad
de Guadalajara, 2020)
b. Narrative identity
The students dened this category as the ability
to recognize oneself in the logic of construction,
structure, and mobility of the texts produced. It
is common in positivist research to emphasize
the distance between the object of study and the
subject. In social research, however, the object
is a manifestation of the subject, and therefore
there can be no separation or independent
consideration of these two aspects. The subject
inhabits a world of life (Schütz, 1972) of
which he speaks, both in everyday life and in
academic and scientic work of a social nature.
Therefore, the relationship is rather between
the subject and the narrative that congures
and recongures reality.
The story congures the permanent
character of a subject, which we can call his
or her narrative identity, by constructing the
dynamic identity proper to the story told. The
identity of the story forges the identity of the
character [...]. In fact, in the narrated story,
the character, by virtue of the character of
unity and completeness conferred by the
operation of the elaboration of the plot,
retains throughout the story the identity
correlative to that of the story itself. (Ricoeur,
1999, p. 344)
When the subject identies himself as a
character of his own life, recognizes himself in
the stories of his life-world, and sees himself
as a historical subject, he is able to understand
the meaning and signicance of his actions.
This action makes him responsible for his own
history. This kind of copyright of the text revives
the author’s relationship with his action, making
him responsible for what he has written and not
a simple reproducer of texts without orientation
and commitment to action.
In this sense, most of the students state that
they nd it dicult to recognize their own
voice when writing the text, taking refuge in
the instructions of their directors or tutors and
whose conceptual security comes from aligning
themselves with this orientation:
My supervisor tells me that my research is
qualitative and not quantitative, but that is a
methodology, not a position on the problem
I am developing in my thesis. It is not the
result of reection or theoretical analysis,
but a directive from the supervisor. But I am
neither qualitative nor quantitative; not at
all! I am a researcher in training; I have to
be able to know how to make a theoretical
framework and not just do it. (Master student,
Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2021).
From theoretical training to epistemic thinking in postgraduate Education in Latin America
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César Correa-Arias
Revista Unimar Enero-Junio 2024
e-ISSN: 2216-0116 ISSN: 0120-4327 DOI: https://doi.org/10.31948/rev.unimar
Rev. Unimar Vol. 42 No. 1 pp. 87-102
The theoretical foundation links four clearly distinguishable capacities: 1) reading culture of
academic-scientic texts; 2) theoretical knowledge; 3) acquisition and incorporation of a scientic
language; and 4) theoretical and epistemic autonomy. Table 2 shows the average value given by
the students to the way they acquired and developed these skills.
Table 2
Levels of acquisition of skills for theoretical background
As can be seen in Table 2, on a scale from 1 to
100%, the students of the dierent universities
in the countries mentioned armed the
development of the four capacities through
graduate studies and especially with regard
to the theoretical foundations. In a peculiar
way, specic didactics for the construction of a
theoretical foundation necessary for graduate
training in the social sciences and humanities
are not common in Latin America. This leads to
the following problematic aspects for graduate
students: 1) A precarious reading culture of
academic-scientic texts, considering that
the average value in the ve countries barely
exceeds 50% of graduate students who have
a reading culture in general; 2) A schematic
and limited theoretical knowledge; 3) A low
acquisition and incorporation of a scientic
language; and, 4) A clear lack of theoretical
and epistemic autonomy.
Dialogue is a fundamental didactic within the
formative process. We dialog essentially to
share our experiences, to exchange ideas,
contents, experiences about those contents
or experiences that do not necessarily belong
to a single theoretical, normative or cultural
tradition, but to a movement of reection-
action-reconguration. Dialogicity represents
a capacity for agreement, controversy and
argumentative autonomy, as noted by Freire
(1992). Dialogicity does not allow for closed
or inviolable texts. To dialogize is in itself to
open texts to continuous discussion, without
the limitations imposed by an academic or
scholarly institutional authority, to turn them
into pre-texts or texts in transition in order to
dialogue about them. It is the dialogue with
others that allows the forging of a dialogic and
critical narrative identity, but also a critical-
epistemic concreteness.
From theoretical training to epistemic thinking in postgraduate Education in Latin America
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César Correa-Arias
Revista Unimar Enero-Junio 2024
e-ISSN: 2216-0116 ISSN: 0120-4327 DOI: https://doi.org/10.31948/rev.unimar
Rev. Unimar Vol. 42 No. 1 pp. 87-102
The theoretical framework is ready if the
thesis director decides so, but I think I
would add or subtract some elements here
and there. It is more a matter of pleasing
the supervisor than nding a tool or model
to build the theoretical framework. However,
there is always the doubt that I could have
gone deeper or written dierently (Doctoral
student, Universidad de Antioquia, 2020).
c. Theoretical autonomy
Students dened this category as the capacity
for both theoretical concreteness and regulated
freedom in the construction of a text. The sense
of regulation comes from the combination of
epistemic vigilance, narrative freedom and
creativity, and the ability to dene sequential
paths in theoretical construction. That is, the
transitivity between one conceptual category
and another. “How and why to move from
one concept to another in order to elaborate
the chapters of the theoretical framework”,
as expressed by a Master’s student at the
Universidad de Guadalajara (2020).
The analysis of this category showed that, on
average, 74% of the graduate students from
the ve countries maintained in the workshops,
questionnaires, focus groups and in-depth
interviews that the research methodology
allowed them to have a conceptual mastery,
inherited from the knowledge of the authors
and the guidance of the tutor. However,
when asked about their particular theoretical
position, they responded by quoting authors
and little about their position in relation to
what the authors were saying. The research
revealed that, on average, 30% of the graduate
students are able to construct an epistemic
way of thinking from theoretical categories,
translated into an autonomous way of thinking,
detached from the impositions of a particular
epistemological tradition:
I am aware that Nussbaum has a liberal
position on education and her intertwining
with the cultivation of humanity through
the arts and the social sciences and the
humanities, but if you ask me ‘why’, I couldn’t
tell you; or, beyond that, the reality is that my
theoretical position, I don’t know, I know that
education is emancipatory because of what
I learned from Freire, but my position I still
can’t make it concrete; I think that’s what
the master’s and doctorate are for. (Master’s
student, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2022)
The security of theoretical concreteness and
autonomy is expressed in the closeness to
their tutor, who usually has a relevant scientic
career, with aliation to research groups,
research councils, projects and publications.
Students also expressed that “tutors see and
hear little about the development of their
research” (Master student, Universidad Federal
de São Paulo, 2021).
Students feel much closer to what their tutor
or director tells them about the theorists they
should read than to the problems they study.
This means that sometimes, when they meet
other students in colloquia or in national or
international events, they discover theoretical
gaps that have limited their understanding of
the problem or problems to be analyzed:
I have discovered many topics that were
not covered by the teacher of the research
seminars or by my tutor in the congresses I
attended. I nd them very interesting. They
represent a dierent world of learning, which
is absolutely necessary for doctoral training.
Sometimes even my tutor doesn’t know that
I’ve been to an event and tells me where I
found a text or why I’m working on it. Attending
national and international congresses should
be a requirement for postgraduate training
(Doctoral student, Universidad de Antioquia,
2022).
Students identify the dierent themes when they
read the texts, but they recognize that there is
no didactic to help them organize the concepts
that run through the theoretical foundation.
d. Ethical-political positioning
Finally, the ethical-political positioning in relation
to the theoretical construction was dened
by the graduate students as the possibility of
testing the concepts acquired in the reading in
From theoretical training to epistemic thinking in postgraduate Education in Latin America
99
César Correa-Arias
Revista Unimar Enero-Junio 2024
e-ISSN: 2216-0116 ISSN: 0120-4327 DOI: https://doi.org/10.31948/rev.unimar
Rev. Unimar Vol. 42 No. 1 pp. 87-102
the world of their lives. It is related to the way
in which the concepts work in the experience of
their own existences and whether they have the
same meaning in the context in which they were
constructed. This disposition of the students
is the epistemological principle of the dialog
with knowledge. It is precisely an ecology of
knowledge (De Souza-Santos, 2013) that seeks
“analytical objectivity, but at the same time the
development of the ethical-political dimension
that considers that there is also a global
cognitive crisis” (p. 32), a crisis oriented by a
conceptual hegemony without consideration of
multiple other epistemologies.
In this case, the political and ethical positioning
of the students with respect to the conceptual
and categorical construction is quite scarce; only
21% of them can explain what the positioning
suggests in ethical-political terms with respect
to the theorists they cite in the thesis. Moreover,
they do not know the socio-cultural context from
which the authors come. Many concepts such
as colonialism and epistemic neocolonialism,
ecology of knowledge, decolonial turn, and
epistemologies of the South are not widely known
to them. In a heterogeneous way, the students
know the approaches of the cited authors, but
they do not achieve a real positioning in front of
the categories used and dened by them:
I am not very familiar with all the works of
the authors I cite in the thesis, or with the
development of their works. In reality, there
is little time, too many tasks in the program,
but I think that later I will have more time
to delve into the authors that I liked a lot
in the Master’s program. (Master student,
Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, 2021)
In general, it can be armed that the lack
of ethical-political positioning generates a
conceptual relativism, a lack of knowledge
of the context in which the categories are
produced and mobilized, and a lack of critical
and autonomous thinking:
It is necessary to know the origin and the
evolution of the authors’ thinking; I am
afraid of people who read many authors but
know nothing about the context, the time,
and the way people thought at the time
they developed these theories. There are
some colleagues who repeat quotes from
authors, but when asked for their opinion
on an issue, they contradict what they wrote
in their projects and the authors with whom
they worked on their theoretical framework,
or they are ambiguous in any case. (Master
student, Universidad de Antioquia, 2022)
By removing the concepts from the socio-
cultural construction in which they originated,
the subjects lose their historical condition, and
thus epistemic violence is generated, which
appears as a lack of epistemic hospitality and
as an obstacle to the dialogicity necessary for
the construction of epistemic thought.
In general, students fail to see the product
of the process of constructing the theoretical
foundation as a cohesive, inferential and
argumentative unit of meaning. The perception
of the structuring of the text is provided by the
feedback of the tutor or the readers, but not
particularly by the learning of a didactic that
allows the students to organize a thematic
sequence that makes it possible to reach this
totality of meaning of the text.
The focus groups revealed that students need
a theoretical base that allows them to acquire
academic and scientic language, but they
note that studies are more oriented towards
obtaining a degree and writing a thesis than
towards developing epistemic, autonomous
and critical thinking. Many students note that,
in the end, it is important to graduate, but that
they see that “colleagues who have not fully
dedicated themselves to graduate studies still
graduate” (Doctoral student, Universidad de
Guadalajara, 2022).
From theoretical training to epistemic thinking in postgraduate Education in Latin America
100
César Correa-Arias
Revista Unimar Enero-Junio 2024
e-ISSN: 2216-0116 ISSN: 0120-4327 DOI: https://doi.org/10.31948/rev.unimar
Rev. Unimar Vol. 42 No. 1 pp. 87-102
Conclusions
Theoretical grounding is a challenge for graduate
students in education, especially those who
have not had a strong research training prior
to entering a graduate program. This research
has shown that, in general, students have
diculties of a narrative nature (narrative
creation and identity, theoretical concreteness,
and ethical-political positioning) at the time of
theoretical grounding in the development of
their graduate studies.
Likewise, there are few didactic resources that
students identify in the teaching of seminars,
research courses or research methodology for
the theoretical construction and development of
epistemic thinking.
The role of literacy and orality in graduate
education is signicant because it allows for
interactive universalism (Benhabib, 2006a) and
epistemic hospitality (Correa, 2021) in ways
of thinking, speaking, deliberating, and doing.
This facilitates the construction of critical-
ethical-political thinking within academic and
scientic training.
Critical literacy and orality allow for a training
oriented to an ethical-political positioning, an
aspect that is presented in this research on
graduate students as a task still in its infancy.
It is necessary to think about practices that
arm a pluralist epistemology and the exercise
of hospitable, just and critical pedagogies
in the training of educational researchers in
Latin America, linking epistemic hospitality as
a guarantor of the passage from theoretical
thinking to epistemic thinking; more precisely,
a bridge of epistemic inclusion and solidarity.
Narrative imagination and creation, the
foundation of critical literacy and orality, have
been present from bedtime stories to texts used
in primary education, where literary genres
such as fables or stories allow for a categorical
education of young children. However, in the
education of students, by displacing the world of
narrative creation by the theoretical constructs
of positivist thought and a scientism vision,
away from social studies and the humanities,
they have managed to minimize the didactic-
pedagogical value of narrativity, from high
school to undergraduate and graduate studies.
The research shows the profound diculties
graduate students have in creative imagination,
categorical construction and analysis, and the
elaboration of conceptual cartographies from the
analysis of academic texts, necessary for textual
comprehension and theoretical concretization.
It is a fundamental task of teaching in
postgraduate education to combine critical
literacy and orality with an epistemological
pluralism that comes from dialogic didactics
and a categorical construction based on the
habitation, experience and appropriation of the
constructed concepts and thematic sequences.
In the present research, it seems to be a pending
task to promote a sense of logical structuring,
internal coherence and global vision of the
theoretical foundation of graduate students, as
well as a transition from theoretical thinking to
epistemic thinking. A follow-up of the graduates
of these programs is necessary to observe
how the practices as junior researchers allow
the enrichment and complementation of skills,
abilities, and theoretical and epistemological
competences that were not developed in their
graduate training processes.
Conict of interest
The author of this article declares that he has
no conicts of interest with the work presented.
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Contribution
César Correa-Arias: sole researcher, author of
the text.