Conditions of and for change: media’s stabilization of teacher policies in Chile

• In Event: Education Reforms in Latin America: conditions for emergency, discourses, and actors in contemporary governance transformations

Proposal

In the last decades, the so called Chilean educational neoliberal experiment progressively diminished teachers’ transformative power and influence as a political actor. The country’s previous tradition of teachers and pedagogical movements was first radically silenced by Pinochet’s state terrorism (Zurita, 2020), and later progressively controlled by managerial and performance-based accountability policies (Assaél et al., 2019). This presentation focuses on the role of dominant national media in articulating and stabilizing educational reforms aimed at shaping and controlling teachers’ work. It departs from a conceptualization of teacher policies as an institutional regime (Streeck & Thelan, 2005) which is analyzed as part of the state strategic selectivities through which political projects are advanced. Media has proven to be key as a hegemonic workplace through which strategic selectivities are advanced. The always unstable character of political projects entails persistent cultural and ideological work to produce new settlements, especially when hegemony is at risk (Hall & Massey, 2010). This paper explores the modes of ideological articulation over a fourthly year period with an emphasis on four formative moments of the teacher institutional regime. This means, at the same time, an elucidation of conditional aspects under which the formative moments of this regime came together.
For this purpose, the study combines tools from Corpus Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The overall methodological approach is founded on the premise that the interaction between structure, agency and culture over time is crucial to understanding social change (Newman, 2020). Therefore, it first traces semantic networks linked to teachers and teaching in each formative moment, together with cluster concordance to identify modes of uses of language. Secondly, it zooms into a sample of texts for the application of CDA techniques to examine the circumstances and consequences in which linguistic choices have been made over other (Baker et al., 2008). Data draws from two national media, the newspaper ‘El Mercurio’ and the financial magazine ‘Capital’. which historically has represented the interests and ideas of the dominant groups of the country and as such has had great influence on shaping education policies. Results point to different projects and levels of articulation which suggests the existence of multiple parallel policy trajectories. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the sometimes contradictory character of ideas and ideologies vis-a-vis possible teacher policy paths under the current moment of constitutional reform.

Author

• Rocio Fernandez Ugalde, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge