LABOURING TO TEACH: ACCOUNTING FOR POLICY TRANSFORMATIONS IN TEACHERS' LABOUR AND INSTITUTIONAL REGIMES IN CHILE BETWEEN 1980-2021

This dissertation explores changes in teachers’ work in Chile between 1980 and 2021. It focuses on the cultural and structural mechanisms through which teachers have been made accountable, with an emphasis on state transformations and ideational resources. Aimed at providing a comprehensive and explanatory account of transformations of teaching, I introduce the notion of teacher accountability policy ensemble which aims to broaden and strengthen traditional conceptualisations by including a labour perspective, contributions from relational sociology and historical institutionalism. These additions help to elucidate how teacher accountability policies are sustained through, and redefine, those social relations binding teachers’ work with the educational sphere within capitalist production and social reproduction. The research draws on a critical realist approach to Process Tracing, and examines the events, actors, and social forces that converged to shape the current teacher accountability policy ensemble. It combines policy analysis with corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis and conjunctural analysis, and it delves into forty years of education policy making in Chile through looking at national policy documents, national influential newspapers, and archives from the country’s main teacher organization. The thesis contributions are twofold. While I theorise teaching as labour, this theorisation enables me to empirically show how the teacher accountability policy ensemble has been built and shaped over time. The findings reveal four critical juncture moments that left key material and ideational legacies in the formation of current teacher accountability. By analysing hegemonic media sources as an analytical vantage point, I further the understandings and explanations of the teacher accountability policy ensemble and its articulations. I highlight layering as the primary mechanism through which changes in teacher policies have occurred, and I argue that articulations are partially built upon ideational resources that have gone go through focusing closely on synchronic configurations in teacher mobilisations and in educational debates during the Covid-19 pandemic as moments of crises that further elucidate practical manifestations of critical junctures. Overall, through a systematic investigation into the underlying processes, mechanisms and ideational sediments shaping teachers' work, this work aims to offer insights to teacher organisations and other actors in the education sector to disassemble policy arrangements that hinders the transformative potential of teaching and education and visualise alternative policy paths. Finally, in addition to addressing debates on the teaching profession and teacher accountability, this research engages with feminist labour studies by examining the connections between labour regimes, value generation, teaching, and education, and it offers a novel methodology for tracing change in policy studies.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Fernandez Ugalde, Rocio

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Robertson, Susan

• Teachers’ work
• Education policies
• Accountability,
• Chile
• Labour process and regimes
• Critical Realism
• Critical Junctures
• Process Tracing
• Corpus Linguistics
• Critical Discourse Analysis
• Conjunctural Analysis

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/ca33ff64-011c-483f-b80b-07809b1a465a/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.116060

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/380443