Continuities and Transformations of Argentina´s Teacher Education: Policies and Reforms since the Mid-Eighties

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Exploring teacher agency, beliefs, identity, practices and quality

Proposal

The paper examines the recent history of teacher education (TEd) policies and reforms in Argentina, starting from the mid-eighties. It seeks to understand the continuities and transformations in the governance and structure of teacher training and to examine how the socio-economic profile of TEd students changed in the period. We combine two frameworks. On the one hand, we are guided by the principles of historical research. We systematically reconstruct recent TEd policies and reforms and frame them within longer historical dynamics that still resonate and are evoked in TEd policies. In addition to the historical perspective, we are guided by a policy-analysis perspective – one that distinguishes stages in the policy process (for example, from problem recognition, enactment, design, and implementation). In our analysis of past and recent TEd policies and reforms, we essentially focus on the policy enactment and policy design stages. We examine the explicit goals that TEd policies and reforms seek to achieve, discern the policy problem they address, and trace the policy development stages. Argentina is a federal country, and we focus on TEd history and policies at the federal level.

We draw from several sources of data. First, we use primary sources, mainly laws, official publications, newspapers, and research reports addressing TEd policies and reforms, recent and past. We also draw from qualitative and quantitative accounts and materials quoted or analyzed by other educational historians, sociologists, and policy analysts. For the analysis, we developed a timeline of TEd policies in Argentina, described their main features, and recorded key contextual events. To contextualize the recent history, we first discuss the institutionalization and consolidation of a centralized TEd system, and major reforms until the mid-1980s when an era of military dictatorships ended and a period of sustained democratic governments begins.

We identify two distinct periods in the recent history of TEd. In democratic neoliberal times (1989–2001), TEd faces a new discursive and regulatory framework, characterized by the transferring of TEd institutions from the national to the provincial governments, and the establishment of new foundations for the governance and management of TEd in such a decentralized configuration. The second period (2005–2015) sees another wave of structural reforms in TEd. We show how this wave addresses the negative consequences the neoliberal reforms but also initiates a game-changing disruption that would recover a strategic role for TEd, this time within a framework of a federal education system. Overall, thus, we highlight the lack of substantial transformations in TEd spite of three decades of policy reforms. We argue that understanding recent TEd policies requires recognizing at least two longstanding historical dynamics surrounding TEd. In the paper, we discuss the role of the federal state in the definition, regulation, governance, and management of TEd and the teaching profession. The second dynamic emerges from the ideological and pedagogical debates about who could and should be a teacher and which institutions should be in charge of TEd.

Authors

• Paula Razquin, Universidad de San Andres

• Gustavo E. Fischman, Arizona State University