Persistence and ruptures: the feminization of teaching and teacher education in Argentina

Abstract

This article argues that in order to understand the feminization of the teaching profession in Argentina, it is essential to examine two key dynamics: (1) the historical and institutional life of teacher education programs and the social representations about what teachers ought to be advanced by those programs; and (2) the symbolic, economic and social relationships established between a feminized teaching workforce and the development and maintenance of a national project of public schooling. Accordingly this article will analyze the three most significant institutional structures developed to educate public school teachers in Argentina and the paradigmatic images of teaching emphasized by each model of teacher education: ‘normal school’, the ‘technical development school’ and the ‘flexible professional school’. Each of the three models had a favored social representation of teachers (‘apostles/second mothers’, ‘technicians’ and ‘adjusted professional’) which expressed in complex ways institutional responses to the social, political, and economical conflicts that structured and strained the project of public schooling in Argentina.

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