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The training of researchers in the development of educational competencies is the central issue of this study. The process for research training is described. Training researchers in the development of educational competences is advocated and a profile of research skills developed. Training for research is different from training for the teaching profession. Researchers need diverse skills, and must be able to understand and tackle problems, as well as assimilating and generating new knowledge. Researchers must have skills that are logically linked. This integration of skills is made possible by a focus on competences, which can be thought of as a step forward in the development of the person, and as one of the best means that society has of preparing the researchers that are needed in the present day. [For the complete Volume 20 proceedings, see ED622631.]

The Mexican educational reform is based on transformations towards the conception of a new world, as a result of technological advances and new knowledge communities, where the parameters are established mainly by various international organizations, and where countries implement, evaluate, integrate and describe the necessary conditions for education. The multigrade classroom and the elements that are developed in it are conceptualized. The critical pedagogy of Gramsci and Freire should be part of the teaching preparation. [For the complete Volume 19 proceedings, see ED613922.]

To satisfy the imperative need for developing life skills in basic education students throughout the country, it is important to think about continue educational inclusion, which is to be understood as the idea of Education for All. Education for all should satisfy the basic needs of learning while developing the individual and social welfare of each student. From this perspective, it is necessary to reflect on how to make students citizens who make decisions and assume consequences, so that they can act with critical judgment. For this, it is necessary to inspect and reconstruct the essence of critical, creative and careful thinking, the essence of learning to think.

The intention of the present paper is to show that people have a series of educational needs in the era of information, so that they can become competent digital citizens. These educational needs are evident in the policies promoted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, which were well known to Latin American governments of the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s. Therefore, it is to be hoped that the educational reforms of 1990s have elements based on the principles of education that they advanced, which emphasises the preparation of subjects in the digital era, based on advances in information and communication technology, focusing on the teaching and learning of computer science. [For the complete Volume 17 proceedings, see ED596826.]

A reform always implies an adjustment, a transformation, or a change. But one always hopes that a reform is for the better, and that it will benefit those who will be affected by the reform. Educational reforms have been seen in this way, since the world changes and we change with it. In this line of thought, we can dare to think that when an educational reform is considered, it concerns all of us, as we are teachers, students, managers and society in general. We have great expectations in all aspects, from economics, which in the end involves all of us, to quality, social reconstruction in the reduction of poverty, providing quality of life, and reducing the gap between the rich and the poor. [For the complete Volume 16 proceedings, see ED586117.]

The policy of reorganising schools in pedagogical cycles has been restored little by little in the state schools of the city of Bogota. This reform began in the year 2008 in Codema College, which faced a number of challenges, personal as much as institutional. The reform depended upon the participation and engagement of the educational community in the reform process, and for that reason, this paper presents a positive view of the school reorganisation in relation to the theme of cycles, to balance some of the views that have been expressed previously. [For the complete Volume 15 proceedings, see ED574185.]

Educational policies are tools that the state prepares to generate conditions that allow access to and retention in schools, with the consequent reduction in school failure, increasing the external yield and fulfilling the expectations of the internal agents (teachers, students, school managers), external users (families, society, employers, industrialists) and the great expectations of the national project and the political pundits who see education as the panacea to all the evils and crises of nations. [For the complete Volume 14, Number 1 proceedings, see ED568088.]

One of the main factors in the globalization of problems and opportunities that face human society is science, which deals with matters of health, environment, competitive production, and employment, among other issues, and generally ways for promoting a better quality of life. Science has become a central part of the culture in the developed countries, where it has been made a priority in the education of citizens. Also, traditional elements of culture have been reinforced when they emphasize and maintain development and a form of democratic life like supportive pillars. [For the complete Volume 13, Number 1 proceedings, see ED568595.]

The substantive question of this study is how to develop teachers, and for what, without falling into traditional patterns of behavior, but also without losing one's sense of direction and producing a kind of informational bulimia, where knowledge is regurgitated and undigested. The transmission of information, confronts current training processes with the challenge of building signs and symbols when signals are no longer controlled by the traditional pedagogic devices, using the blackboard, the classroom and the teacher's body, but by information technology and communication, including screens, smart phones, audio devices and electromagnetic waves. The engagement with elements outside the school, whether hunger, technology, or a combination of both, or other factors, requires that the school no longer look inwards and consider itself in isolation, creating the production of subjectivities by the discipline and control classes, legitimized by means of information and communication technologies. [For the complete Volume 12 proceedings, see ED597979.]

Educational reform implies questions of social production and of state regulation that are the key words in educational reform, education and educational policies. These reforms are always on the political agenda of countries and involve international organisms, since education is a vehicle of development for social progress. A point of departure is that all reform incorporates a certain level of consensus on the part of the actors involved, but that would be an ideal which rarely occurs, and then only when there is a national or regional vision. [For complete volume, see ED567118.]

The labour markets in Mexico are characterised by uncertainty in terms of the lack of work contracts social protection, unemployment, high level of self-employed workers independently and micro-businesses, low income levels, the involuntary part-time working and low levels of unionisation. They all indicate that the labour situation currently reflects many deficiencies in the urban labour markets of Mexico. Over the two last decades, modest periods of growth and crises have taken place within a strategy of neoliberal development that promotes increased exports and foreign economic investment. Rates of unemployment have stayed low, with the exception of the devaluation crisis of 1995, but our labour markets continue to display very marked weaknesses with regard to occupations and jobs with reasonable income and other suitable conditions of work. [For complete volume, see ED567118.]

Environmental education is not merely a modern form for the didactics of natural science, but is, on the contrary, an educational process that integrates ecological knowledge, philosophy, politics, economics and sociology, among others. This is because its purpose is to change the relationships of production, social structures of economics and cultural patterns, which include both the individual and the collective, with the intention that the present generation, and future ones, should change how they live, so as to develop the members of contemporary industrial society in a new historical context of a worldwide environment. In this chapter, the authors argue it is necessary to bring introduce an environmental education which will transform and reform in educational planning, where management will be in the vanguard of change, guiding and participating in the struggle to transform the school to promote critical thinking, first among teachers and later in the studies of their students, so that they can promote activities and remedial action and raise questions about the environmental problems that result from the globalisation of the world through a consumerist economy. It is essential and urgent in the twenty first century that a new vision based on critical thinking is constructed that will promote changes in attitude that are not merely cosmetic. It follows that there is a need for an environmental education which promotes constructivist learning and helps in the rebuilding of the ways we think to bring about sustainable development to control, reduce and improve the present environmental crisis. The article goes on to explore philosophy in environmental education, environmental ethics, constructivist learning in environmental education, and the nature of environmental problems in environmental education. The authors conclude that in the governance of companies producing goods and services there have been established norms and/or laws that in many of the cases are not sufficient to prevent environmental pollution. For this reason it is necessary to investigate new strategies that allow for critical and reflective thought about our activities as human beings. This will bring about a modification in relationships of production, socio-economic structures and cultural patterns, that embraces the individual and the collective with the intention that present and future generations change the way they live, to encourage members of contemporary industrial society in a new, historic and global environmental context. [For complete volume, see ED567040.]