Collaborative Spaces in Virtual Environments: Socio-Cultural Support for the University Beginning Teacher

Abstract

At present, the integration of educational social networks are acquiring a fundamental role, the use of portable digital tools to support the teaching and learning processes that allow improving the processes of Teaching-Learning (E-A) in the university environment, it is important to highlight in the same way the concept of leadership that was developed in the beginning in the organizational environment to stimulate the workers in the achievement of the established goals, which through time gender that this term was used in other areas such as sports, management and politics. Recently, in the field of education, efforts have been made to develop leadership in a pedagogical, distributed, and transformational manner in the management and teaching teams of institutions in order to improve learning outcomes. The academic community is influenced by an environment of intellectual, social, cultural, and technological development, which converts the beginning teacher into an active agent who must deal with a global reality of uncertain changes. In this context, the collaborative virtual learning environments are assumed as the optimum scenario to board the training and development of the future trainers at university level, generating a critical and reflexive attitude for their formation in the teaching/learning process. The motivation of this paper arises from these reflections with the purpose of analyzing the collaborative spaces in virtual environments as socio-cultural support for university beginning teachers. Based on a qualitative research with a documentary phase, a theoretical comparison was developed to generate analysis categories which allowed to perform a depth interview addressed to teachers from different countries of Latin America and the Caribbean involved in this training. Concerns and expectations emerged within the formative phase of the beginning teachers, characterized by the pursuit of learning processes that do not exist in their training plan to connect them to a virtual and collaborative reality. The paper invites to reflect on the importance of this issue to build a favorable scenario for future generations.