tHE post-pandemic university curriculum and teaching at the University of the Republic (Uruguay): impulse and brake

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze the main curricular and teaching processes developed by the University of the Republic (Udelar, Uruguay) in the period 2020-2022, within the framework of a public macro-university scenario of unrestricted access that resolved the non-interruption of their activities throughout the health emergency. Our premise implies that the curricular and teaching policies promoted centrally and common to the entire university since the 2000s, based on diversification, flexibility and curricular articulation that placed students at the center of the educational process, enabled educational continuity in the pandemic. During the years 2020 and 2021, political measures and follow-up studies were implemented which indicate not only the support of the right to education, but also an advance in reflection and institutional pedagogical renewal. In the year 2022, and in the absence of consensus about the possibility of tending towards a diversification of modalities of study, and fundamentally of evaluation, there was a return to a decentralized decision-making of the faculties, institutes, schools and regional centers. This process generated a certain brake on the developments that occurred previously and fundamentally obstructed the possibility of carrying out a careful collective assessment of an unprecedented institutional experience that surely implied valuable learning and pedagogical advances, regardless of some impoverishing practices that were not sustainable over time.