Educational Consulting in Ecuador: Fields of tension

Abstract

Educational counseling in Ecuador emerges in 2013 as a function that replaces school supervision. There are practically no studies or analyses of this important function within the organizational system of the Ministry of Education. This article aims to describe and relate the areas of tension that exist in the management of educational advising. Fields of tension are those situations in educational counseling in which two extremes of interpretation can be found. In order to establish the essential aspects of the study, a documentary investigation and a voluntary survey of 30 advisors were carried out. The fields of tension are identified with the following criteria: system requirements, intentionality, context, scope, focus, characteristic and permanence. It is analyzed antinomically: central-local level, control-educational change, equal schools-different schools, accompaniment-evaluation, qualitative paradigm-quantitative paradigm, verticality-horizontality and disappearance-stability. The main conclusion is that the central level predominates over the institutional educational level in the pedagogical and administrative aspects. It is defined that it is possible to achieve a balance between the different fields of tension identified.  It is also defined that the educational consultancy is the human team that can achieve this balance through its high-level technical management and expertise. The idea is that the political decision makers of the system will strengthen the consultancy together with its complementary function, which is the educational audit.