Pertinencia y contextualización curricular del inglés: un estudio en la primaria rural del caribe colombiano.

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the educational management factors that affect the relevance and contextualization of the English curriculum at the Institución Educativa Departamental Agropecuaria Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, in Piñuelas, Pivijay, Magdalena. Educational management factors are understood as the set of institutional conditions, decisions, and practices that, across three interdependent dimensions—academic management (curricular and pedagogical decisions), administrative management (resources, policies, and administrative support), and community management (school–family–territory relations)—determine the real possibilities of implementing a relevant and contextualized curriculum. From a qualitative instrumental case study approach (Stake, 1999; Creswell, 2013), the study employed document analysis, semi-structured interviews with teachers and administrators, and observations of six classroom sessions in 4th and 5th grade. The results reveal a significant misalignment between the institutional curriculum and the frameworks set out by the MEN (Colombian Ministry of National Education) and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR): the absence of an area plan, the lack of defined communicative purposes, the absence of documented methodological strategies, and a complete lack of contextualization to the Caribbean rural setting. The interviews revealed that implementation is conditioned by the absence of specialized teachers, insufficient resources, a void in institutional policies, and weak school–community linkage. The observations confirmed the predominance of traditional methodologies and the absence of English as the language of instruction. Triangulation of the data identified six articulating axes of a systemic curricular fracture. The study concludes that transformation requires simultaneous interventions across all three management dimensions, recognizing the Caribbean rural territory as the starting point for a genuinely relevant curriculum.