Whole Education: An Approach from Research

In this article, the results of a research inquiring about representations that primary education English teachers from some public institutions in the city of Medellin, Colombia, have about ideal of comprehensive education are presented. From a qualitative research approach, an open-ended question survey was implemented to 19 teachers and subsequently an in-depth interview was carried out to 5 teachers. Information collected was subject to the technique of critical discourse analysis by Teun Van Dijk (2003). The main findings revealed that these representations show five main thematic areas: (1) whole education for a multidimensional human being; (2) education of a valuable human being; (3) whole education, foreign language learning and different culture approaching; (4) whole education, foreign language teaching and autonomous people; (5) whole education and communicative competence in foreign language. It was found that teachers' representations about whole education have a marked ethic and moral, values and rules emphasis-and that it, being analyzed from foreign language teaching, must not be limited to basic linguistic structures usage in daily and immediate communication contexts. Adapted from the source document