Bautista Guerra , Juanita B.
Juanita is a Colombian woman who received her entire formal education in her home city, Bogota, before arriving to MSU. She studied at Colegio Nueva Granada, where she received her Bachillerato and High School diplomas; studying in a bilingual school provided her with a foreign language (English) and developed a certain curiosity towards the American society. That and the opportunity of visiting several countries in four continents make her believe that amidst cultural diversity, humankind is significantly interrelated in what the physicist Fritjof Capra would call “hidden connections”.
She obtained her Law degree from Universidad de los Andes, where she also minored in U.S. Studies. She completed the coursework for the Masters Program in Hispano-American Literature at Universidad Javeriana and went on to work, initially as an instructor, at Universidad El Bosque. At El Bosque, where she worked since 2004, she had considerable educational experiences: she was an instructor for the College of Education’s Bilingual Education B.A. Program and for the Department of Humanities; she was a student and obtained two Specialization degrees (one in Higher Education Teaching and another one in Philosophy of Science); she was a regular participant in the research seminars on History of Sciences and Complexity Theories; and, for the last couple of years, she was the Director of the Department of Humanities, Editor of the Revista Colombiana de Filosofia de la Ciencia, and a member of the University’s Committee in Ethical Affairs in Research.
She believes that understanding the complexities that underlie the role of education in a society is a vital enterprise. From her previous experience and at her present intellectual and spiritual stage, she is interested in providing more people with more significant educational opportunities. She might accomplish that by researching in one or several of the following: the cultural role of education, history and philosophy of education, legitimizing knowledge in a global society by means of educational policy, and the incidence of educational policies and practices in migratory processes.
