1000

This course offers the students the space for the discussion, studying and analysis to develop a critical attitude towards issues that take on human sexuality to identify the determining factors in terms of sexual health. The course has been designed as to answer the needs of training related to sexual health of the Colombian youth. To attain such purpose, this course allows its participants to examine the psychosocial, individual and family aspects that the research group has identified as related to the sexual decisions made by the youth. The critical analysis of these findings is done in the light of the theoretical and empirical evidence on the information available at national and international level.

In this workshop we intend the students to learn how to handle and foresee their current and future stress. To this end, we expect that through lectures and readings the students 1) understand what the stress is and some of the main factors that render easier to cope with it, 2) identify the psychological or personal resources and characteristics that ease or hinder the handling of stress and its symptoms, and, 3) learn some of the main personal strategies for the prevention or control of the stress.

Becoming a father or a mother is one of the tasks expected to occur naturally during the development of organisms. The conceptions that individuals have on what being a father or a mother means, the adequate moment of undertaking this task and the factors that can influence the raising of children are countless. The course approaches the general question of why organisms (humans and animals) become parents and how the maternity and paternity tasks are developed in different species and cultures.

The first years in people´s life become the base to establish special emotional relationships, to know, explore and learn about behaviors and skills that are fundamental for the survival and adaptations of organisms. Children should concentrate of enjoying and benefitting from the suite of development opportunities defined by the adults who take care of them. However, for many children this stage in life comes together will difficulties, abuses and risks that jeopardize their survival and optimum development. Children who are raised in such circumstances end up having problems in their adult life. Even though in recent years interest on childhood has increased around the world, there are still innumerable situations that hinder an optimum development of children and put their development at risk. The purpose of this course is to analyze, in the light of recent literature and various approaches of the evolution of children conception in different ties and contexts, and the factors that lead to and explain situations of abuse, maltreatment and risks for children in Colombia and in the world.

Currently, it is perfectly possible to see a boy/girl having 5 parents, that a woman ends her pregnancy even if she is brain dead, or that somebody is assisted to die while somebody else receives tissues and organs raised on a laboratory. These scenarios are not fiction but reality. Some other (as cloning and inter-species crossings) may barely be imagined as of now. This course takes on the different dilemmas and problems we are faced with by the new technological capacities, making special emphasis of the fashion how we understand the human being, parenthood, life and dead.

The infant development is a process of cultural nature, and therefore, most goals and achievements of development assumed as universal vary depending on the context and the culture of each community. This course will show why infancy must be culturally understood, and it will also examine the fashion how different cultures prepare boys and girls to become adults by promoting a critical vision on the cultural nature of childhood. The lectures, films and cases presented will offer different interpretations and they will question our ideas regarding childhood. Therefore, this course will allow understanding that they way how we regard childhood is as cultural, as the way how boys and girls socialize in cultures different to ours.

Our daily experience is more and more characterized by the dilemmas of our identity about ourselves and others. We are beneficiaries and victims, at the same time, of the vertiginous rhythm that new technologies impose on our existence. This course opens the opportunity to understand how the culture, the social sciences and personal identities have been transforming one another, or, in other words, the notion of oneself throughout the history of the West.

Lev Vygotsky is rapidly becoming one of the most influential psychologists of the 21st century, even though he was born over a hundred years ago, and died at the age of only 37. Vygotsky’s formulation of the project for a new, revolutionary psychology, a cultural-historical psychology, has fascinated students, researchers and scholars in the West since his work was first translated in the 1960s. Now new translations, uncensored and unabridged, permit a fresh appreciation of his ideas. In this course we will read the new translation of Thought and Language that is available in the multiple-volume Collected Works. This text, part of which was dictated by Vygotsky on his death-bed, is truly a culmination of his ideas and research. Our aim will be to achieve a deep understanding of the problem he was seeking to solve, the methodology he developed, and the project for a new psychology which he offered us.  

This course offers the initial elements for the basic training on neurosciences given to people pursuing studies on the sciences of learning. We are to present the basic aspects of anatomy and physiology of the nervous system, emphasizing on the relation of the nervous system - behavior. Within the anatomic aspects we include a quick study on the structure of the mammals’ ´nervous system, by conducting a compared study on the species. Within the physiological aspects we include the study of the fundamental principles of cellular biophysics. This course is supported on interactive-audiovisual material and also on laboratories where the students can have a first encounter to the neuroscience of behavior.

This course corresponds to the logical continuation of the course Neuroscience I. For this reason, the criteria used in that course, are also used on this one. In terms of topics, this course offers an approach to the knowledge of the basic neurobiological process (perception, attention, emotion, memory, learning, thinking, language and conscience). The revision of each topic is conducted from a compared perspective of the species, providing the bases for the understanding of the psychopathology underlying the neurobiology. Likewise, we endeavor to bring the students closer to the experimental activities on neurosciences, by the conduction of several basic experiments.

Psychology is a discipline that deals with key questions as: What is the conscience? What are emotions? How do we relate with other people and why? how do we learn? Among many other. Psychology approaches to these questions through empirical explorations subject to the logic of scientific reasoning. This course introduces the students to the psychological theories that have influenced social sciences and introduce the students to this discipline though exploration in the most representative areas of research.