Teacher activism: struggles over public education in Chile

Abstract

While much has been written about student movements against the neoliberal privatisation of education in Chile, less attention has been given to teacher activism around similar educational matters. In this article, we contribute to the field of teacher activism as a social movement to resist the global education reforms of neoliberal education policies/practices. Data for the study were generated through yarning, photo-yarning and testimonios, methods often deployed in Indigenous and mestiza feminist research. Basil Bernstein’s theoretical work on pedagogic rights and democratic formations, initially developed in Chile, was used to analyse the data. Teacher activists argued that their collective struggles over what constitutes the public of public education, has interrupted the neoliberal agenda. However, battles over public education, its purposes, who should it serve, remain ongoing. New ways of privatising education are being enacted in Chile that are harder to resist, challenge and change.

Keywords:

• Teacher activism
• pedagogic rights
• democracy
• neoliberal education
• Chile

Introduction

The radical neoliberal model of education introduced in Chile under the Dictatorship (1973–1990) took on a ‘laboratory policy format’, in other words, a ‘terrain of experimentation’ that has been ‘fundamental for the development and transfer of neoliberal policies around the world’ (Inzunza et al. 2019, 490). Neoliberal education policies include the marketisation of education, high stakes national testing, scripted pedagogy and curriculum practices and technicist models of teacher education (Carrasco et al. 2021; Sadlier 2019). These education policies, initially starting in Chile, have spread across the globe under the auspices of the global education reform movement (Sahlberg 2012).

Despite numerous democratically elected presidents, the consequences of the Pinochet dictatorship are visible in a range of societal tensions that still exist in Chile. Pinochet, the commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army, led a coup against democratically elected president Salvador Allende in 1973 and continued to lead Chile for close to 18 years (Espinoza, Piper, and Fernández 2014; Tome 2015). Since Chile’s new democratic era, most elected presidents have represented leftist parties. Piñera was the only president who represented a right winged coalition. The changes instilled during the Pinochet dictatorship, which continue to be felt today, included a neoliberal socio-economic model that ‘privileges the private sector in welfare provision, resulting in a highly criticised, privatized pension system, and segmented education and healthcare, with lower-quality public services for the majority and expensive private ones for the well-off’ (Somma et al. 2021, 2).

Challenges to the marketisation and privatisation of education in Chile have been ongoing for several decades (Blair 2019; Fernández 2013). Initiated by high school students, activism against neoliberal education policies and practices intensified during two periods, specifically after the election of a right-wing government in 2010–2014 and again in 2018–2022 (see Table 1).

Table 1. Chilean presidents from 1970.

President/person in charge	Period of election
Salvador Allende/Democratically elected president	1970–1976
Augusto Pinochet/Commander in Chief of the Chilean Army who led the coup d’état of 11 September 1973 in Chile.	1973–1990
Patricio Aylwin/Democratically elected president	1990–1994
Eduardo Frei/Democratically elected president	1994–2000
Ricardo Lagos/Democratically elected president	2000–2006
Michelle Bachelet/Democratically elected president	2006–2010
	2014–2018
Sebastian Piñera/Democratically elected president	2010–2014
	2018–2022
Gabriel Boric/Democratically elected president	2022 to ongoing

In addition to student activism, other activist groups such as labour unions, environmental organisations and feminists along with gender dissidence representatives have demanded national educational change. Indigenous groups such as the Mapuche have a long history of activism regarding the right to education, freedom of teaching and Indigenous epistemic rights (see De la Maza and Bolomey 2019). Cristian Cox and his coworkers (Cox, Jara, and Sánchez 2022, 315) described these social movements in the following way.

In 2010, the first right-wing government after the restoration of democracy was elected (2010–2014). A year later (2011), large scale demonstrations, protests and social movements emerged… Later, regional mobilizations (2012), demonstrations against the privatized pension system … and massive feminist demonstrations (from 2017 onwards) arose … Then, in 2019, the most critical moment in recent decades took place as a series of massive demonstrations and severe riots known in Chile as the Estalllido Social.

These social movements aimed not only at reclaiming education but also other public services as a public good in Chile. Given the spread and ‘fusion of neo-conservative values and neoliberal market values’ (Säfström and Månsson 2022, 126), research into these activist social movements is significant not only for Chile, but for other countries that have embraced such values within education policies and practices.

The remainder of this article is presented in five parts to explore the topic of teacher activism in the context of marketisation and privatisation of education in Chile. First, we review literature about the student and teacher activist movements for educational change in Chile. Second, we develop a theoretical framework drawing on the concepts of pedagogic rights (Bernstein 2000), everyday democratic acts and emergent publics (Säfström and Månsson 2022). The concept of pedagogic rights was developed by the British sociologist Basil Bernstein in collaboration with his then doctoral students Cristian Cox (Cox 1984) from Chile and Mario Diaz (Diaz 1983) from Colombia (see Bernstein 1988, 2000). Third, we explain the methodology deployed to document teachers’ testimonios of struggles against the machinery of neoliberal, privatised models of education. Next, we focus our data analysis and reportage on teachers’ contributions about what constitutes the public in public education, as opposed to privatised models of education. Finally, we summarise our argument about everyday democratic acts, the interruptive potential of public schooling and pedagogies, and collective struggles of teachers in Chile against neoliberalism policies and practices in education.

Social movements for public education: challenging neoliberal policies

There is now extensive scholarship on the importance of student movements to challenge and change the extreme forms of neoliberal education policies introduced under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (see Hernández 2019; Bellei, Cabalin, and Orellana 2014; Vera 2011; Williams 2016). The neoliberal reconstruction of Chilean education altered the field of policymaking, excluding teachers and students, who had actively participated in the construction of the Chilean education project before the civic-military coup of 1973 (Inzunza et al. 2019). Student protests about education in Chile have been described as social movements because they involve: (1) collective hard actions (e.g. occupying buildings, demonstrations, protests, sustained marches, and blockades); (2) taking physical risks to bring about social change through non-institutional means (e.g. hunger strikes) and (3) connecting local struggles to international audiences by occupying organisational offices such as the United Nations building (Inzunza et al. 2019; Mariano and Tarlau, 2019).

The student or penguin movement, named after the black and white uniforms worn by high school students who protested alongside college and university students, started as a small-scale movement in one town. It then escalated across the nation with over 80% of high school students mobilising and resisting police actions of repression. The students rapidly gained sympathy from different organisations, such as teachers’ unions, workers’ unions and the general population in Chile (Somma et al. 2021). Collectively, these social movements questioned the neoliberal policy framework adopted by the government calling for the elimination of discriminatory policies which segregated schools along socio-economic lines. Students and their allies demanded a fully funded public education system for all Chileans, and their actions forced significant educational reforms and drove nationwide debates around the idea of education as a ‘public good’ and the importance of ‘democratising the education system’ (Williams 2016, 41). Over several decades, the student movements and their allies, attempted to build spatial geographies of ‘radical possibility’ (Hernández 2019, 483) and re-inserted themselves as actors in the educational policy process by ‘problematizing the policy-making process itself’ (Inzunza et al. 2019, 491). In more recent times, former student leaders of protest movements have sought to change neoliberal policies from inside the system as members of parliament (Hernández 2019).

It is important to note, however, that student protests and activism have been met with significant resistance by class factions with vested interests in the marketisation of education. After the first wave of student protests in 2006, different groups of the political and economic elite classes strengthened ‘the commercial model and increased privatization of education’ (Inzunza et al. 2019, 490). Navarro’s (2019) research study highlighted how difficult it is to undertake processes of educational de-privatisation when large sections of the population, who bought into the school-choice mantra, feared the erosion of their privileged positions.

Despite over two decades of social movements against the neoliberal market-driven model of education, ongoing contestations remain. According to Inzunza et al. (2019), these battles over public education in Chile are around the following sets of questions:

1. What is the conception of the public in education?

2. How can covert or endo-privatisation be undone?

3. Can public education be strengthened by increasing individual rights and regulating the function of private institutions?

Clarke et al. (2022) suggest that what is public about public education needs to consider several overlapping domains which includes the purposes of education, questions about accountability, the relative weight given to consumerist, regulatory and professional considerations and issues of funding and matters of governance, ownership and control. Sadlier (2019, 454) suggests that three themes have surfaced from studies of social movements and neoliberalism in Latin American and Caribbean education, namely: ‘contested terrains, concretisation of struggle; and (trans) localised lines of contagion’. To illustrate contested terrains we could pose these questions: what is the conception of the public in public education? and what constitutes quality teaching and quality education? The term concrete struggles refer to mass mobilisations of people across time (several decades) and space (local-regional-national-global). The phrase contagion refers to the connections between social movements, including borrowing and mobilising tactics and strategies from other social movements. It is from this contested terrain and contagion that we shift the attention from student to teacher activism and struggles over public education in Chile. In the following section, we weave together the concepts of pedagogic rights, everyday democratic acts and thick and thin resistance to think with and about the stories produced by activist teachers in Chile.

Theorising teacher activism: pedagogic rights and everyday pedagogies

We propose that Basil Bernstein’s undeveloped work on democracy and pedagogic rights, presented at a 1986 conference in Santiago de Chile during the period of the Pinochet dictatorship, has relevance to teachers’ current struggles against neoliberal models of education (see Bernstein 1988). Key elements of Bernstein’s work were originally developed with some of the South American doctoral students under his supervision. As previously mentioned, these doctoral students were Cristian Cox from Chile and Mario Diaz from Colombia. The pedagogic rights model attempted to theorise conditions for democracy and the context in which democracy was or could be created in the midst of an important period of political transition from dictatorship in Chile (Frandji and Vitale 2016). According to Frandji and Vitale, the project during this period of the birth of Chile’s fragile democracy allowed Bernstein to reflect upon and propose political and social implications for his model. Bernstein (2000) described three pedagogic rights for teachers and students: enhancement, inclusion and participation. He detailed the conditions needed for these rights which included confidence, communitas and civic discourse and explained how these rights might be exercised at three levels (individual, social and political). The exercise of these rights for teachers implies confidence, inclusion and participation at the individual, social and political levels to challenge and change what is taught in schools (curriculum), how it is taught (pedagogy) and how it is evaluated (assessment).

Central to Bernstein’s (2000) theory of pedagogic rights is the idea of democracy as a representative electoral system in addition to a contestable form of practice that has to be re-invented and practised every day. Thinking about democracy as practised through everyday democratic acts forces attention to those moments when the thinkable of neoliberal education policies and practices is challenged by students, teachers and others with a stake in schooling. According to Maguire, Braun and Ball (2018, 1061), such everyday challenges can be viewed as modes of activism which equate to ‘thin resistances’ and are ‘typically located in … everyday micro-political interactions’. In contrast to thin resistance, thick resistances ‘challenge major structures’ through ‘spectacular forms’ of collective movements such as street marches, occupy movements and so forth.

Enacting democracy in and through thin and thick forms of resistance/activism is based on the democratic principle of the presumption of equality. As Ranciere (1992, 60) argued,

…the only universal in politics is equality. But … equality is not a value given in the essence of Humanity or Reason. Equality exists, and makes universal values exist, to the extent that it is enacted. Equality is not a value to which one appeals; it is a universal that must be supposed, verified, and demonstrated in each case.

Rather than contending that neoliberal educational policies and practices deny equality, we argue that these policies wrong equality. In this view, everyday political acts are the ‘place where the verification of equality is obliged to turn into the handling of a wrong’ (Ranciere 1992, 59). Teacher activists by engaging in thin and thick forms of resistance as they reclaim and redefine the public of public education are verifying their equality. These activists, who have been denied a voice/space in the policy making cycle, are verifying their equality to speak, write and enact education policies.

Neoliberal education policies can only be enacted with the consent of teachers and others with a stake in education. According to Maguire, Braun, and Ball (2018, 1071), technologies for the ‘management of consent’ sit alongside mechanisms that ‘simultaneously erode teachers’ capacity to resist’. However, teachers do find ways to build ‘relational forms of power through everyday resistances such as humour, foot-dragging and the like’. Teachers can also negotiate the enactment of neoliberal policies by withdrawing ‘their good will and ultimately their labour’.

Following Bernstein (2000), we suggest that teachers may practise their activism within schools through the three message systems of curriculum (what they teach), pedagogy (how they teach) and evaluation (how they recognise students’ acquisition of knowledge). Primarily a theorist of social reproduction, Bernstein’s sociological corpus also focused on the possibilities for interruption or disruption in and through the message systems of schooling. The selection and organisation of knowledge as school curriculum is a crucial site for social disruption/interruption. This interruptive potential of schooling in Chile was explored by Cox, Jara, and Sánchez (2022, 323) in their study concerned with ‘teacher beliefs and preferences as citizens and professionals regarding two forms of political participation: formal political participation (e.g. voting) and activist and social movement (legal and illegal)’. Specifically, they were interested in how teachers’ beliefs influenced the design and enactment of citizenship education curriculum, and in turn, how this might influence students’ modes of political participation (formal vs. activist; legal vs. illegal).

Cox, Jara, and Sánchez (2022, 323) found that ‘most teachers justify legal forms of activism (e.g. protests, demonstrations, going on strike)’ and, more than half of those surveyed, indicated that illegal activism (e.g. student occupation of schools, barricading streets) was ‘sometimes justified’. In addition, the teachers surveyed claimed ‘to be citizens highly involved in both formal and activist politics.’ The authors emphasised the central role of teachers in constructing and enacting curriculum and pedagogy for democratic participation within, rather than outside, of official/formal structures and systems. In a different study, Cox and García (2021, 208) also explored the role of Chile’s citizenship education curriculum in addressing the ‘legitimacy crisis of democracy’ and the low participation of young people in the formal, electoral processes of democratic governance in Chile. They argued that the citizenship education curriculum should emphasise

… that without citizens who participate in voting, there is no legitimate democracy possible, and that for voting and participation to increase, education must try to counteract the socio-cultural tendencies that point towards the ‘abandonment of the agora’ …. by developing pro-participation competencies in the formal processes of democratic political institutions. (Cox and García 2021, 222)

Decolonising methods to generate activist stories

The data discussed in this article were generated by the lead author who drew on decolonising methods, including yarning, photoyarn and testimonio. Yarning is a research method consisting of building respectful relationships and conversations (Bessarab and Ng’andu 2010). Photoyarn is an arts-based method that places the participant at the centre of the process. This method includes a conversation and a photo (Rogers 2017). Testimonios, part of the American Indigenous genre, are reflexive narratives used for liberation (Reyes and Curry Rodríguez 2012; Smith 2003). A testimonio is a first-person text type used ‘to inform people outside a community/country of the circumstances and conditions of people’s lives’ (Haig-Brown, 2003). Hearing or reading a testimonio motivates others to act towards social justice (Villenas, 2019). Testimonios are told by a narrator, testimoniante, who seeks ‘empowerment through voicing their experience’ (Reyes and Curry Rodríguez 2012, 527).

Twenty-six mestiza/os teacher activists in Chile contributed to this research study. Mestizos is the name given in South America to those of Indigenous and European heritage [Spanish in the Chilean case] (Montecino 1996; Waldman 2004). Mestizos make up one of the largest ethnic groups in Chile. The lead author/researcher, a teacher activist in Chile, and all of the teacher activists participating in this study belong to this group. A little under half of the activists (12) talked explicitly about the ways in which their activism was about reasserting the public of public education in struggles against neoliberal privatisation of schools and growing inequalities. The following pseudonyms are used to identify these activists: Violeta; Lenka; Isabel; Lautaro; Veronica; Rayen; Matilde; Paula; Eloisa; Vicente; Amanda and Ines. During the photoyarn process, the teacher activists were invited to share a photograph as a starting point for a conversation about their activist work. Their testimonios were created in oral and written forms as they preferred. Before meeting with the participants, the teachers were sent a set of sample questions and an example testimonio to familiarise them with the activity before co-producing the data. The questions used to guide the photoyarn sessions included the following:

1. Why did you select this image for our discussion about social/public activism in Chile? When was the image taken, and how does it connect with other public activism work that you have engaged in?

2. What are the main issues you are protesting about, and how do you see them reflected/connecting your activist and teacher identities?

3. What do you hope that your public activism labour might achieve? How is this connected to the labour of teaching? Where do you see your activist and teaching labour in 20 years?

The guide for the testimonio was: Please tell/write a story (half to one page) where you narrate an important situation that happened to you in your teaching role. This story needs to be about an episode where there was some connection, encounter or relationality between your activist and pedagogic identities. The following questions guided the conversations around activism, teachers’ work and education:

1. What pedagogical strategies do you use to encourage free thinking among your students?

2. How do you take these strategies into practice?

3. What kind of pedagogies discourage free, critical thinking – are you expected or encouraged to use these? What issues within the schooling system prevent teachers from participating in activism?

The data generated from the project was crafted into a manuscript and sent to each participant. The manuscript included 33 testimonios produced during the data generation phase so that the teachers could review and revise their contributions. The data was produced in Spanish and later translated by the lead author into English.

The data production processes followed participatory and collective frames where the utilised methods could capture the richness of the teachers’ experiences. Bernstein’s (2000) metaphor of boundary, which he operationalised through the concepts of classification and framing, was used to analyse the data about teachers’ pedagogic rights activism. Classification and framing principles generate the symbolic categories that help people such as teachers to store, manage and make sense of education policies and practices. Shifting classification and framing principles can change the ways in which teachers enact educational policies in everyday practices. Specifically, we considered how teachers through their activism challenge neoliberal conceptions of the terms enhancement; inclusion and participation to give them a radical edge and second, how they reclassify the terms from discourses of neoliberalism and reframe them to envisage education in and for democracy. In the next section, we reconstruct the participating teachers’ activism stories around pedagogic rights in and for public education and against neoliberal models of education. We organise our discussion around Bernstein’s (2000) three pedagogic rights: enhancement, inclusion, and participation.

Pedagogic right one: enhancement

The first pedagogic right, enhancement, is about the right to experience ‘social, intellectual and personal’ limits, consider the past and improve potential futures (Bernstein 2000, 20). Enhancement here does not refer to what is vested in each individual, but rather, is understood from ‘a relational perspective where, without confidence, neither students nor teachers can act’ (Frandji and Vitale 2016, 15). It is about pushing against boundaries, experiencing ‘tension points, condensing the past and opening possible futures’ and exploring them and having the confidence to do so (Bernstein 2000, 20). From this perspective, enhancement is about recognising, questioning, and challenging the arbitrary construction of boundaries around the three message systems of schooling – curriculum; pedagogy and evaluation. Enhancement is about questioning the purposes of education and whether schooling in its current design and enactment is achieving these purposes for all students. Biesta (2020, 92–94) identifies three domains of the purposes of schooling – qualification; socialisation and subjectification. Under the neoliberal education agenda, qualification is the main ‘justification for schooling’. Socialisation corresponds to the explicit or implicit representation of cultures, traditions and practices in and through schooling. Under neoliberal and neoconservative policies, there have been concerted efforts to erode the gains made in the name of social justice by feminist, Indigenous, LGBTQI+ and other groups. The last purpose of schooling, subjectification refers to ‘freedom as human beings and, more specifically, our freedom to act or to refrain from action’. According to Biesta, the promotion of this freedom in schooling is about students becoming ‘the subjects of their own lives’. This last purpose of schooling is central to democracy, that is, providing the conditions for students to think and act or refrain from action. Subjectification then equates with Ranciere’s (1992, 60) democratic principle, that is, equality is a ‘universal that must be supposed, verified, and demonstrated’. Biesta (2020, 93) explains further.

Freedom viewed in this way is fundamentally an existential matter. It is about how we exist, how we lead our own lives which, of course, no one else can do for us. Put differently, freedom is a first-person matter. It is about how I exist as the subject of my own life, not as the object of what other people want from me.

Enhancement, from a relational perspective, suggests then that students attain qualifications for employment purposes and making a living, socialisation to become part of the public or society, and subjectification to exercise freedom to think and act and take responsibility for how they live their lives with others and the world. In the following segment, we examine the data produced with the teacher activists. We investigate how they talked about the purposes of schooling and the conditions for democracy.

The activist stories were full of trust in the interruptive potential of education to make a significant difference at the individual level. This view was reflected in phrases such as the following by Violeta, a primary teacher.

A teacher leaves a mark on you, making things click in your head. They help students to see things that perhaps, in their reality, they couldn’t see before. And this work is transversal, no matter students’ backgrounds. For instance, in the most vulnerable sectors, teachers might push their students to change their reality, to go to university, or break the cycle of poverty.

Lenka, a preschool teacher, demonstrated confidence in education as a way to break the cycle of poverty in her statement, ‘I am convinced that in all levels of education but mostly in the initial ones, we [teachers] can contribute to breaking this cycle of poverty’. Most of the teachers chose to work in government-funded schools, as they felt they could make a difference in these places. Their struggles over public education were often directed at challenging the dominance of the neoliberal market model and the way that it was privatising public education, and how students and teachers experienced poor conditions as a consequence of this model. Most of the teacher activists worked with large classes of students (up to 47). They felt that they could not attend to the needs of all students. Ines, an experienced primary teacher, provided a clear example of this frustrating position. ‘In our school we have 45 pupils per class, can we give good education to those 45 children? With this number of students, it is difficult to learn their names, how can you then attend to their personal needs?’

In addition, teachers’ salaries were low, although Isabel, a primary teacher, joked saying, ‘I will never become a millionaire in teaching’. Yet, despite the poor salary, she still chose to be a teacher because teaching, to her, is a vocational calling. Despite most teachers finding other ways to compensate for their low salaries, they still acknowledged their poor work conditions as challenges to effective pedagogic work. Instead of silently and submissively accepting these working conditions, these teachers mobilised themselves at every opportunity to challenge and change these conditions. For example, Lautaro, an experienced primary teacher working in a rural school in the south of Chile, self-funded his professional learning internship in Israel to learn more about students’ special educational needs. In the 1980s, teachers in rural Chile didn’t know much about this topic. With the knowledge he acquired in Israel, he ‘started working in that space, talked with the regional department director of education and developed the first school integration project in the area.’ Lautaro provided another example of teachers addressing student poverty and impoverished schooling environments.

Because the municipality did not have funds for us in our school, during the whole summer, other teachers and I raised funds to renovate it. The corridor joining the preschool area to the primary school had no roof, so everyone got wet every time it rained [often]. We gathered 14 million out of 15 million [pesos required], and although we had done most of the work, we were still criticised. So, how I do my work does not always get rewards. Despite trying our best, we get headaches because of the thin line between the allowed and unallowed. As teachers, it was not our responsibility to raise the funds, but our students needed it, and the satisfaction we gained after accomplishing our goal was bigger.

In Chile, students attending publicly funded schools are mainly from low-income families. The teacher activists wanted to help compensate for the students’ unequal access to resources with hard work and good ideas. Lautaro expressed how he wanted his efforts to be amplified across the teaching profession so more students could have the opportunity to overcome the boundaries they faced.

I want the ideas of what I do in my activism to be contagious with other teachers and educational communities. I know that this might not be achieved overnight. It might happen while I am alive; it might happen later, who knows. But sometime, it might.

Lautaro knew his goal would not be immediately achievable, but he had the hope that someday the world would be different.

Pedagogic right two: inclusion

Inclusion is ‘the right to feel socially, personally, and intellectually included [not excluded]’ (Bernstein 2000, 20). This right operates at the level of the social and involves communitas, that is, the possibility of groups of people coming together as equals. Communitas, not community, is based on the presupposition of equality. Using the metaphor of boundary, we can think of the pedagogic right of inclusion as signalling ‘the right to challenge and to change spatial, temporal and conceptual boundaries, and to do this while being included in, and with, a community of equals’ (Heimans, Singh, and Kwok 2022, 77–78). Inclusion at the social level, then implies the emergence of social groups and social subjectivities or group identities. What does it mean for social groups to emerge, challenge and change boundaries that determine who is included, when, where and why?

The teachers talked about their activist work alongside students’ work and their fights over public education as well as alongside Indigenous, feminist and environmental groups. Moreover, many teachers were part of collectives, either feminist collectives, teachers’ unions or school syndicates. Teachers Lenka, Matilde, Paula, Eloisa and Rayen were open about their feelings regarding the feminist events. Through their organisational participation, they ‘collectively fight for the same rights’ (Matilde). Participation makes them feel ‘like they belonged to something bigger’ (Rayen).

Teachers saw themselves as collectively fighting over definitions of what constitutes the public of public education. Although, explicitly, teachers did not make a distinction about the two definitions of public, namely publicly funded schools, and education as a public good, these ideas were underpinning most of their activist work. Given the issues of large class sizes, limited resources, and poor teacher salaries, the notion of public in publicly funded schools seemed to be a major concern for the teacher activists. The teacher activists want equitable access to high quality education for all students. Without exception, the teacher activists recognised that achieving equity within the existing system is a long-term struggle. This struggle is complicated by ideas about what elements of education can/should be publicly available and what elements are justifiably privatised and only available to those who can afford them. Everyday democratic acts are the small steps that teacher activists can take to educate the next generation about equity, equality and social justice.

Teachers repeatedly gave examples of how, through their everyday pedagogic acts, they made a difference to students’ lives. For instance, most teachers talked about how strengthening public education would improve other aspects of society. Matilde, who worked in a Catholic upper-class school, said ‘I want to teach children who can help their employees and other people to emerge, to get ahead, and I want them to offer jobs where employees receive respectful treatment and fair conditions’. She wanted her students to be adults who treated their surroundings respectfully and empathetically without taking advantage of others. Ideally, these students could also see rights such as education and health were for everyone, not just those who could afford them. Therefore, they would send their children to public education because, in an ideal world, there would be no difference between systems.

Pedagogic right three: participation

According to Bernstein (2000, 20), participation is ‘the right to participate in the decision-making mechanisms through which social order is built, maintained, and transformed’. Participation is not just about ‘joining in’, but it is ‘the right to participate in procedures whereby [political] order is constructed, maintained and changed’. Participation… ‘involves much more than having the right to be a part of something; it involves the right to create change and for this change to be meaningful’ (Heimans, Singh, and Kwok 2022, 78). The pedagogic right of participation, then, is a political act of not only being invited to join into meetings, but the right to participate in the procedures where social and educational orders are constructed, maintained and changed.

The teachers experienced an intense struggle against the ways in which they were excluded from educational policy making processes. Lautaro mentioned a slogan going around called ‘never again without teachers’ which he said ‘is a deep feeling we have as teachers because of the exclusion we regularly live’ as a result of the decision-making processes. This catchphrase was part of the teachers’ mobilisations back in the mid-2010s. Yet, according to Lautaro, teachers were not the only ones excluded from decision-making processes. Citizens in other areas also asked for greater participation in this area. He claimed, ‘the only way to improve what we have is to include everyone’s opinions, fit the needs, and include the voice of those who are protagonists’.

During our photoyarn, Lautaro spoke about a letter written by several Teacher Union members that was published in an online Chilean newspaper. The article used the popular slogan, ¡Nunca más sin los profesores! (Never again without teachers!). The letter began: ‘The eternal prejudice of looking with mistrust and contempt at teachers and the preconceived idea of holding them responsible for the diseases the Chilean education system suffers…’ (Chilean Teachers’ Union 2014, para. 1). This letter demonstrated teachers’ recognition of the neoliberal campaign blaming them for social inequity and related problems. Furthermore, the letter highlighted recognition of how teachers’ work was being externally driven and reorganised at the same time as their collective and individual professionalism were being questioned and eroded. Reclaiming their own professional voices through reasserting a collective professional identity was central to speaking back to this neoliberal discourse.

The feeling of being left out seemed to be generalised and persistent across the group of teacher activists. Importantly, ‘the feeling of exclusion has been happening for years and years’ said Amanda. Teachers demanded inclusion in the decision-making processes relating to their working conditions, students’ admission rules and educational projects in their school communities. The teacher activists used strategies to attract public attention, such as the mentioned letter, strikes, mobilisations and parades. A further issue of concern was teacher professionalism which needs recognition by the State. Lautaro said, ‘we, as teachers, are those who know firsthand what is going wrong in the classrooms’. He added, ‘teachers have needed to learn how to resist to be seen’. One of the teachers in the group, Gabriela, a secondary teacher with experience across educational sectors (e.g. public, subsidised and private) shared a photograph showing the word ‘resiste’ and images of a pot and a spoon, which according to her showed how teachers (and citizens) resisted, by pot-banging. During Allende’s government (1970–1973), cacerolazos, the act of pot-banging expressed the discontent towards the government and the lack of food in the market. During Pinochet’s regime it symbolised an act of protest against the lack of civic freedom, repression and human rights violations (Márquez 2020). Vicente, a secondary teacher and Teachers’ Union representative, shared a photograph of himself and his colleagues holding a sign asking teachers to stay strong and encouraging them to support the 2019 national strike. Through this imagery, he demonstrated that one condition for the teachers’ participation in decision making was collective strength and agency.

Many, but not all, teacher activists reported positive gains from their involvement in activist work. For example, Ines said that they had ‘won’ their school time distribution due to the ongoing mobilisations. Lautaro stated that those who know best in the classroom should participate in policy decision-making. The 2014–2015 mobilisations had allowed teachers to claim this space. In contrast, Amanda, a principal and teacher in a single teacher rural primary school, felt that teachers had obtained nothing after the long walks, parades and artistic demonstrations of 2019.

Discussion

In exploring these teachers’ experiences of activism through the concept of pedagogic rights of enhancement, inclusion and participation, we should return to how, where and when they were developed. Bernstein (2000) first proposed pedagogic rights after collaboration with his former doctoral students Cristian Cox and Mario Diaz, who were researching and theorising activism in their own countries. Bernstein presented the concept at a conference in 1986 that was happening in the throes of Chile’s turn from dictatorship (Frandji and Vitale 2016) and can be viewed as an ‘attempt to link education to broader political questions about democracy’ (Heimans, Singh and Kwok 2022, 72). Bernstein’s concepts acknowledged the limits of class reproduction theories and also argued for the possibilities of disordering and disruption, of the structuring of change. Bernstein stated that where ‘codes are acquired which establish, or rather attempt to establish, a particular modality of order and perhaps exclude others in doing so, at the same time the potential of disordering is also acquired’ (Bernstein 2000, 124, emphasis added).

Such potential for interruption or disordering was evident in the teachers’ confidence that schooling could interrupt impoverished futures of their students. Such confidence – the belief in the pedagogic right of enhancement – wrought such everyday democratic acts as personal fundraising for public school resources to make these schools more like well-resourced private schools. They created communitas – the pedagogic right of inclusion – in joining unions, supporting feminist, LGBTIQ+ and Indigenous organisations and causes, and by sending their own children to public schools. The teachers spoke directly back to the Government and middle classes (who have bought into the neoliberal, privatised schooling agenda) through their published letters, strikes and protests – articulating the pedagogic right of participation – to increase their control over educational decision-making in public schooling. Where teachers in the past may only have marched alongside their students in the streets, these teachers pedagogised activism as their contemporary response to Chile’s neoliberal education turn.

The teachers in this study clearly saw their activism as a collective, communitas way to resist the ongoing implementation of neoliberal policies and their consequences via the privatisation of education, the poor work conditions (e.g. salaries, overcrowded classrooms, poor infrastructure) and their limited agency in the decision making around educational issues. These teachers demanded public education that was no different from the private or subsidised education students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds received. They fought for equitable educational resources, including class sizes and teacher time for students attending public or government-funded schools. For them, if educational justice around infrastructure and students’ treatment were achieved, public education would strengthen and, at least partially, shift back to the social/public good rather than the private or individual.

Conclusion

Research into teachers’ struggles against the neoliberal agenda of the marketisation of schooling is not unique to Chile. These struggles are taking place throughout the world where the global education reform agenda has implemented neoliberal education policies and practices (see Sadlier 2019; Inzunza et al. 2019; Sahlberg 2012). In this article, we focused our attention, through a decolonising methodology, on the experiences of 12 Chilean teachers who actively participated in different forms of activism. Although teachers in Chile often worked with and marched alongside students against the neoliberal reconstruction of Chilean education, few studies focus on the work of teacher activism.

The teachers in the study reported here discussed issues such as what constitutes public education as opposed to the privatisation of education and how they resisted the introduction of neoliberal policies. Moreover, the teacher activists pushed the boundaries to open new spaces where they could make themselves heard. This was reflected in their thick (e.g. mobilisations, strikes, marches, public letters) and thin resistance strategies (e.g. collective fund-raising to improve school spaces, refocusing the school curriculum, introducing more inclusive pedagogies). These forms of resistance show how the thinkable of neoliberal education policies and teachers’ work might be challenged, disrupted and new possibilities and potentialities of thinking and acting in new, fresh ways emerge. From a feminist mestiza standpoint, our argument has engaged with and developed out of the concepts of pedagogic rights and the potentiality of education as a disruptive/interruptive space for social change.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare. Full ethics approval for the PhD study undertaken by the First Author was obtained from Griffith University Human Research Ethics Committee GU Ref No: 2020/705.

Additional information

Funding

Funding was provided by Australian Research Council under Grant Number ARCDP190100518 for second author, and Griffith University PhD Scholarship to first author.