Adopt a language: A step towards the education of a reflective technology practitioner

For the last 15 years, we have taught an elective course on programming language concepts and paradigms whose main objective has been to introduce the future professional to the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of programming languages, with the goal of furnishing the student with critical thinking related to paradigms of programming and programming languages. To achieve this goal, the course's format is based on the notion of “reflection-in-action” proposed by Schön for the education of future reflective professionals. In order to measure the impact of this course on the professional activity of our graduates, we conducted a survey inquiring former students on how the concepts learnt benefited their professional lives. This paper presents a description of the course and the results of that survey, which shows that this approach is a good step towards the development of a reflective technology practitioner.