The coupling of theory and practice often operates as the common sense criterion through which we try to understand the rationales, organizational criteria, and series of dispositions around which the internal structure of a discipline or disciplinary field is organized.

From that viewpoint, it would seem that the horizon that corresponds to the idea of “theory” marks the series of abstract dispositions (how we think about something), while that of the “practice” marks the objectivable ones (how we go about knowing it). Somehow we believe, assume, or presuppose that there is a hierarchical nature in which the “practical” is subjected to, or rather subsumed by, the “theoretical”, where the practical is always a tributary or a consequence of the theoretical. In this view, “how I see” precedes how I pragmatically “know”, and this has determining and historical consequences for the ways in which we address phenomena and treat them as objects of knowledge.

Consequently, the presence of this cognitive bias implies that in the daily and ordinary work of disciplines and disciplinary fields a much greater emphasis is made on modeling and conceptualizing. In turn, and as a result, much less attention is paid to “how it is done”; that is, to the empirical exercise, the development of instruments, and what we might call “methodological work”. This is often reduced to a number of almost administrative decisions, at the expense of any possibility of methodological innovation.

Both epistemic analysis and the critical history of knowledge have shown that the two dimensions, theory and practice, are both essentially and profoundly hinged and hinging ones. How we think becomes how we do things and the other way around, and most of the times, although seldom seen, this latter inversion weighs heavily on the ways in which we think, as it has been pointed out by inductive schools of thought such as founded theory or analytical inference.

For this reason, and due to our profound concern about the hinging and the blurred role of the “practical”, this issue of Diálogos sobre educación is a proposal for self-reflection on studies in education. This means inquiring into and looking at new changes, mutations in the susceptibilities over how we design, plan, execute, and “objectivize” the production rules and technical instrumental through which we know.

This acquires great relevance in a field like ours, disrupted as few other have by the neotechnological times we live in, the urgency created and required by the ideological-political changes due to the emergence of new social subjects and sensibilities in regard to the possibilities of being and existing as citizens, the problem of a renewed social strife, the resolute calls for human rights, the insurgence of identity moorings, the increased demands for visibility, the struggle to build presence in the peripheries, and the outbreak of the struggle for inclusion in the multiple current diversities. All of the above have had implications for the learning subjects, practices, and environments, and therefore for the ways in which we do research on education.

This special issue of Diálogos sobre educación we are pleased to present features texts that, in different ways, provide us with elements for this reflection, as they contribute explicitly to show the mutations, experiential systematizations and a significant part of the challenges and difficulties encountered in this field, especially in Latin America.

In the article “Children’s technological appropriation. A Techno-Educational Ecosystem in the community school”, Diana del Carmen Madrigal Castellanos and Flor de Liz Pérez Morales approach pressing questions through a case study of the Program for Digital Inclusion and Literacy in Tabasco, Mexico, and offer a methodological addition on technological appropriation among students in the fifth and sixth grade of primary school.

The paper entitled “The multiple “graphies” of feminist research in education: towards reflexive, inter-sectional and situated methodologies” by Constanza Chamorro Marabolí and Montserrat Rifà Valls presents a research proposal based upon the convergence of different biographical-narrative methodological from a feminist as well as decolonial perspective, focusing on artistic practices for the use and design of autobiography, autoethnography, a/r/tography, cartography, and corpography.

In other areas, the text “Higher education and social mobility: a proposal for a socio-spatial analysis” by Gustavo Mejía Pérez shares with us a novel proposal to approach methodologically the social mobility processes relative to higher education institutions (HEIs) through a socio-territorial perspective. Through a relatively uncommon approach in education studies such as educational geography, the author shows us a model for study that takes territory and mobility as the center of an instrumental reflection on the implications of space for educational social processes.

In the document “Contributions of Urban Ethnography to Educational Research” the authors explore a classic theme of social sciences such as ethnography, but in this case with a renewed view of urban space, and especially of research in education. An important part of this research work focuses on a review of the traditional tools of urban ethnography and their application in research devices not often linked to studies in education, and promotes the reinvention of well-known instruments in classic problems, not only in this field but also in different phenomena studied by social sciences.

The article “Contributions of the New Literacy Studies to research on reading and writing in teacher training” by Betzaida Noelia Riascos Perlaza addresses reading and writing ethnographically through the approach of New Literacy Studies, showing how different techniques for their study are articulated.

In another analysis, entitled “Open science as a new way of doing research”, Cristóbal Lobato López, Rosalba Badillo-Vega and Jhonny Bautista-Valdivia offer a review of the main problems faced nowadays in the production of open science, describing the circuits of evaluation, consumption and circulation of global knowledge, but especially providing the reader with a route to understand possible strategies to de-center the production of science, particularly in the case of Mexico.

At the end of this journey, we trust our readers will take advantage of the proposal offered in this issue of Diálogos sobre educación, and we invite them to add to this effort with their own contributions in the near and not-so-distant future. We believe this is a common and shared task, because in the words of that great teachers’ teacher ^{Paulo Freire (2005: 92)}, “nobody educates anybody, just as nobody educates himself: people are educated in communion, and the world is their mediator”.