Abstract

Before the new education law (LOGSE) came into force in our country, educational authorities were in charge of designing the programmes that teachers would put into practice, turning them into mere technicians “consumers of curriculums”
Now we face a system characterised by an open and flexible curriculum which gives schools and teachers the opportunity to design their own teaching, selecting and organising the contents to attain the proposed goals for our Area programme.
We have tried to analyse the three main criteria that a teacher can apply to structure the contents: a) Psychocentric Criterion (where the starting point for selecting the contents are the basic characteristics of the students targeted, b) Logocentric Criterion (based on the internal structure of the subject to be developed) and c) Sociometric Criterion (which would try to find out the type of information, abilities and knowledge demanded by the social environment, selecting those contents with greater social projection.
If the present educational reform favours a pedagogy centred in students’ cognitive mediating processes and the integration of individuals with special educational needs, we feel its obviously necessary to structure teaching contents for the different
educational levels applying, first of all, the psychocentric criterion and the resulting factors, to follow later on the logocentric and sociometric criteria.