Dissenting from what? the rupture of Chilean teachers with the long-term consensus on teacher professional development

ABSTRACT

This article examines the division within Chile’s main teacher organisation caused by a dissident movement during the development of the new National Teaching Policy (PND), which occurred between the years 2014 and 2016. It focuses on the teachers’ collective awakening and the internal logic of neoliberal teacher policies. Through interviews and policy analysis, the study concludes that the dissident teacher movement has made visible the exclusion of teachers’ experiences in PND discussions, undermining the so-called consensus on teacher professional development. However, while we argue that these findings illustrate the importance of teachers’ unions as policy actors, we also suggest that this latter role is limited if they do not develop, in addition to the necessary critique, a shared political-pedagogical project.

KEYWORDS:

• Teachers’ movement
• teachers’ policy
• performance-based accountability
• dissent
• Chile

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the valuable comments received at the CITSE-UCSH writing meeting, especially from Paula Guerra, Andrea López, Maribel Calderón, César Maldonado and Juan Pablo Queupil.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Presently, municipal public schools comprise about one-third of total schools, while privately subsidized schools make up over half.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo: [grant no 72200421 / Becas Chile].