Ideational Sediments, Articulations and State projects: The multiple Layers of Teacher Policies in Chile

• In Event: Continuities & Disruptions: Exploring Historical Legacies in Latin American Education Today

Proposal

Within a global and regional context of continuous control and scrutiny over teachers’ work and labor unrest, much of this matter has been attributed to policies emerging from neoliberal framings such as new managerialism and performance-based accountability. In Chile, 50 years after the coup d’état that initiated a profound reorganization of the state, the term ‘neoliberal experiment’ continues to express the privatization and commodification of public sectors, such as teaching and education. However, these phenomena certainly did not start entirely with neoliberalism. The concrete manifestations of ongoing education policies are rooted in larger trajectories and forces that can be traced back to the origins of the Chilean state.

This presentation delves in cultural and structural dimensions of education policies. Specifically, it focuses on the historical legacies and traces that have led to current policy formations on teachers’ work. It explores the ideational articulation and stabilization of national educational reforms aimed at shaping and controlling teachers’ work. Theoretically, the research is based on the premise that teacher and education policies are part of state and hegemonic visions and projects, which are in constant need of rearticulation and stabilization (Jessop, 2018). These policies are not purely juridical but are highly ideological and cannot be reduced to economic relations. The linkage between these policies, as political projects and cultural work surrounding the organizing of teachers’ labor, is where the connection between hegemony and culture gains attention. The kind of cultural and ideological work needed to build and retain hegemony- include constant renegotiations, articulations, and rearticulations of available resources (Gramsci, 2012, Hall and Massey, 2010), as such, it is the uniqueness and distinctiveness resulting from every process of rearticulation that provides the basis for hegemony.

Consequently, the paper focuses on the work of hegemonic media whose alignment with the country’s elites and extension across the country situate them as a powerful actor in the design, implementation and dissemination of teacher and education policies. These provide, as this presentation argues, an analytical vantage point to further understand policy arrangements and articulations.

Methodologically, this presentation draws primarily on a Critical Realist approach to Process Tracing, and on semantic networks created by using the tools of Corpus Linguistics combined with the Critical Discourse Analysis framework. Data includes policy documents and media news between 1980 and 2021. This combination serves as a tool for historical exploration, as it enables the gain of insight into changes in both structuration and elaborations of discourses over time.

The findings show how these articulations are partially built upon two ideational resources that went through a process of sedimentation over time in the form of layers (Koselleck, 2018). These sediments are: i) a shift from building the nation to teaching nation’s added value; and ii) a transition from framing towards tightening teaching outcomes. Finally, the conclusions reflect on how these sediments are long standing threads that constitute resources of the neoliberal project that need to be taken into account for materializing new possible teacher policy paths.

Author

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