Becoming a technical teacher in high school. Life stories between machines and pedagogy in Ecuador 1980 – 2017

• In Event: The emergence and transformation of occupations

Abstract

Technical secondary education aims to link academic training with the acquisition of specific job skills during high school. In many countries of Latin America, and particularly in Ecuador, these modalities of secondary education go back to the beginning of the 20th century, with very important links to the construction of the nation state, as well as visions of development, modernity and industrialization in the second half of the 20th century. On the other hand, the sociology and the anthropology of education have paid large attention to the construction of identities through the biographies of teachers, their academic and professional trajectories. But the teacher of vocational technical training, which teaches job skills at the high school level, has not been analyzed from these perspectives, and there are significant gaps in knowledge regarding their vocation, their training, their work trajectories and their relationship with the content of his teaching, namely, machines and instruments. In this sense, this research seeks to delve into labor trajectories, with the aim of understanding how to become a teacher of technical education in Ecuador, and the intersections between these biographies with the projects of nation and industrialization, neoliberal policies and the relations with the productive sectors, the factory and the technological development, in the period between the 80s until the end of the period of the “citizen revolution” that arose in response to the neoliberalism of the 90s and early 21st century.

Author

• Maria Pia Vera Toscano