Highlighted Session: Secondary education in Latin America: reforms and youth experiences in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and post-pandemic

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

For much of its history, secondary education in Latin America, particularly regarding the final years (upper secondary school), has remained at the mercy of public policies in the educational field that proposed experiences that were sometimes more academic and sometimes more professionalizing, without, however, committing to a general education and cultural training accessible to all. It is undeniable that there has been an expressive, albeit slow, process of expanding access to secondary education in different countries, with impacts on the trajectory of young people historically excluded from the right to access school and remain there for a longer period. However, indicators of school exclusion and challenges related to the quality of education persist. While past educational reforms were more associated with political changes in the respective countries and national education systems over the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century, they began to be driven by the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), shaped by "networks of national and transnational organizations that brought together people dedicated to politics, business, academia, and research who, together, accumulate sufficient political, economic and cultural power to effectively influence the global field of production and adoption of educational policies" (Peraza, 2020, p. 23). With the support of, among others, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank, several Latin American countries have implemented reforms guided by global education policies aimed at developing modern and competitive economies. These reforms have not made the nation-states less powerful, but have redefined governance models, including other actors who have taken an active role at the policy and educational levels. The urgency in implementing the reforms by these actors did not even consider the crisis caused by covid 19 on a global scale, like the country of Brazil who has approved a new high school reform in the middle of the pandemic period, when schools had migrated precariously to remote education and many students did not even follow the classes in the years 2020 and 2021. For these actors, the concern to streamline the approval processes of curriculum proposals in all Brazilian states persisted, causing the States and Federal District Council Opinions to remotely approve curriculum changes in their respective states and the Federal District. In this panel, we will discuss the directions of secondary education in some Latin American countries, considering the impact of reforms, the pandemic, and the post-pandemic period on the daily lives of young people attending school. Secondary education represents a formative stage in young people’s lives, not only intellectual-cognitive but also a time to build identities and the sense of belonging to groups, of creating life projects that take place based on very distinct socioeconomic conditions and biographical-family paths. Thus, it becomes important to learn about this stage of basic education, what and how learning and teaching are taking place, as well as the strategies developed to face the inequalities among schools in different regions and localities, particularly for this generation strongly affected by the pandemic in their school career. The challenges of this level of education require an analytical deepening that escapes ready and hasty answers around an expressive youth disengagement from school and that we propose to carry out through this panel.

Sub Unit

• Latin America SIG

Chair

• Maria Carla Corrochano, UFSCar

Individual Presentations

• Trajectories of young people in high school education in the post-pandemic period COVID—19: events, experiences and interruptions - Ana Miranda, FLACSO Argentina; Augustina Corica

• Formative itineraries and life projects in the new high school reform: processes, proposals and subjects - Wivian Weller, Universidade de Brasília - UnB

• High School Reform in Brazil: questions from the relationship between young people, studies and work - Maria Carla Corrochano, UFSCar

• High Scholl: where the problem of social time and educational trajectories is expressed - Veronica Filardo

Discussant

• Dalila Andrade Oliveira, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais