Teachers who shape hope: training of educational pastoral agents

Abstract

This article examines the formation of Religious Education (RE) teachers in the Colombian context, in dialogue with the Latin American reality, understood as a strategic sphere for supporting humanizing and meaning‑making processes in complex school contexts. Its purpose is to analyse, from a theoretical and reflective perspective, to what extent RE can become a space where faith, culture, and life are critically integrated to foster the integral development of children and young people.

On this basis, the guiding question is formulated as follows: what kind of training do those who serve in RE need in order to become agents capable of tracing hope, promoting humanizing and guiding educational processes in today’s Latin American context?

The analysis is carried out in light of the Standards for Religious Education (2022) as a quality framework, in dialogue with contemporary contributions from pedagogy, teacher education, and the psychology of religion. Teacher competence is understood as the articulated integration of human maturity, pedagogical and didactic skills, hermeneutical capacity, collaborative and synodal work, spiritual sensitivity, intercultural openness, and ethical‑social commitment.

The article concludes that RE teacher formation must aim at consolidating an integral and assessable professional profile, expressed in dimensions of suitability that can guide the design and evaluation of training programmes. In this way, the teacher is configured as an agent capable of tracing hope within the school, contributing to an evangelizing curriculum that links pedagogical quality, accompaniment of students’ search for meaning, and the promotion of genuinely humanizing processes.