Abstract
Initial teacher formation is a permanent focus of attention on the part of research, as the value of education for the progress of society is well known. However, given the naturalization of instrumental criteria as common sense acquired in today’s society, on occasion, initial teacher formation reproduces a technocratic perspective of education, not assisting a transformation into a fairer, ethically healthier, and politically more democratic society. This article is the result of doctoral research that addresses this concern, proposing that initial teacher formation could play a transformative role in society. Considering the Bourdieusian dialectical perspective of agency, as well as elements from critical approach literature, this article particularly focuses on showing some results obtained regarding about the capacity for ethical/political/epistemic pedagogical agency that novice teachers show in their first professional experiences as teachers, discussing how important the development of this capacity is in initial teacher formation programs to prepare teachers to be able to transform education.
Keywords
This study is part of the work developed in my doctoral research about the formation of teachers for social justice when it is understood as an act of empowerment through dialogical interactions (Honneth, 1995) and the elimination of institutional oppression (Young, 2011). The focus is on educators developing high levels of autonomy both individually and collectively in order to deal with the difficulties of the neoliberal scenario. Through the interviews and experiences offered by twelve novice secondary teachers of different subjects who graduated from Chilean universities, the research aimed to unveil how prepared they were to face the reproductive nature of the school system and transform it, exercising a dialogic pedagogical agency to educate their students. Particularly, this article shows results in relation to the development of dialectical pedagogical agency in initial teacher formation. First, the context from which the problem arises, and the concepts implied in the discussion are introduced. Then, the research problem, the methodological design and the methodological aspects are described. Finally, some findings obtained and their implications in initial teacher formation for transformation are explained.
A Problematic Context for Education: Neoliberalism and Its Logic of Instrumental Rationality
In order to understand problems in the education field, it is crucial to consider the wider scenario in which it takes place, which is the neoliberal context. The scope of study follows Giroux (2004), when he affirms that neoliberalism is not only an economic order but a cultural field that operates from a technical reason or technical rationality (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1997). This rationality orients our common sense as society, is inspired by our most basic instinct to survive the environment, is moved by an interest of control, and it is reflected in the way we research and know (Habermas, 1986). Technical rationality unfolded over modernity and instead of being liberating and progressive as expected, became dominating and controlling (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1997), making us perceive social reality in terms of means to ends, putting even human beings as means to others’ predefined ends and turning them into objects – hence, without capacity of action, as Arendt (2018) would say, looking more like a bureaucrat than a human being. Thus, dehumanization is the harm resulting from relating from this logic, and even more so of bringing it to the educational field. This research addresses this concern about instrumentalization in human relations and the subsequent domination that it implies as the key element to problematize when considering transformational education.
As this instrumental culture is transmitted in the school system through educational curriculum (Torres, 2017), usually arranged by objectives (Gimeno Sacristán, 2021), any transformation of our social culture from the educational system will need teachers to be able to recognize and deal with this technocratic perspective. This includes being able to go beyond purely instrumental criteria of learning, their subject knowledge, and the mere administration of predefined learning goals.
The complexity of this purpose is that the instrumental culture is highly naturalized: it seems to be easier to value things by applying criteria of efficiency, performance or throughput, than understanding the qualitative aspects of a process of learning. Unfortunately for those who believe in a different rationality – such as communicative, dialogical, or critical – the educational system itself works to transmit this instrumental logic (Torres, 2017), making it very difficult to change.
The Chilean educational system is a good example of this. The context of the work of teachers is regulated by post-dictatorial educational policies that have been strengthened through mechanisms associated with managerial logics (Oyarzún & Soto, 2021), such as standardized census-type evaluations, results-based management, and competition between schools (Assaél et al., 2021). As a result, this has defined a curriculum and assessment policy increasingly as standardized and prescriptive, which has impacted teachers’ work, as it has become an obstacle to the exercise of autonomous, flexible, contextualized, and active teaching in school daily life (Assaél et al., 2021). These conditions limit the pedagogical action field and predefine the type of teacher desired by the system.
This standardization or performativity, as Perryman and Calvert (2020) affirm, acts as a disciplinary technology that uses judgements and comparisons against what is seen as efficient as a means of control, as well as a culture of performativity that leads to performances that measure efficiency. This reality demands that teachers turn into a technical workforce to be managed and controlled rather than a profession to be respected (Perryman & Calvert, 2020).
Thus, this social environment ends up reducing the autonomy of teachers. Assael et al. (2021) point out that this distance between assuming an autonomous and professional role of teaching and the standardizing demands of a business environment is generating growing frustration in teachers and a loss of meaning in their work. Other research about managerialist policies applied to schools concluded that the institutional context, mainly the various standardization and accountability mechanisms, restricts the possibilities of agency for teachers and generates tensions that arise from mismatches between the prescriptions of the institutional framework and contextual elements (Oyarzún & Soto, 2021).
Referential Framework and Concepts of Social Justice, Dialogic Pedagogy, Initial Teacher Formation, and Pedagogical Agency
This research was developed considering the tension between micro and macro levels. Formal education has been placed in a micro educational context of the classroom and faces tensions at the macro educational level of standardized and managerial educational policies that frame the teaching practice and tend to reproduce technical rationality. It is important to study the role that cultural transmitters play as they are the link between the social heritage and the possibility of transformation. Such a transformation creates a horizon of education that shows a more humanized, democratic, and reflective of a fairer society (Pérez Tapias, 1996).
The teleology of education that this research employs is that of social justice, which is understood, from a critical perspective, as the due recognition (Honneth, 1995) and absence of institutional oppression (Young, 2011). Recognition is fundamental since the human being is only constituted in relation to others in an intersubjective interaction (Honneth, 1995), so it is crucial to eliminate institutional oppression to promote an environment that strengthens people’s capacities to participate in discussions related to issues that influence their lives (Young, 2011). By considering this perspective, this research affirms that social justice is served when power is distributed in a fairer way in everyday interactions, contributing to a more democratic culture and social transformation.
In this sense, teachers can play a key role in the social transformation of education. To change an instrumental culture to a humanizing one requires teachers to work from the micro-level, where interactions take place, as they are embedded in power dynamics, as power is everywhere, grounded in everyday life (Gledhill, 2000, p. 126) and permeating social relations. As Scherer (2015) explains, micropolitics contributes to the formation of desire, belief, inclination, and judgement in political subjects; when interactions unfold, they influence and transform people, in a dynamic and spontaneous process, conforming an experience that affects them according to the way they are treated by others. It is at an imperceptible level that gestates who we are.
In the case of teacher formation, concerns for social transformation would lead them to be more careful with the kind of relations they develop with their students and the way they exercise authority. When education is understood as a humanization process and not mere training, teachers develop the means to exercise authority and promote dialogic interactions. Human encounters are more respectful of the learners as ‘subjects’ – the opposite of ‘objects’ – and foster reflective awareness that is facilitated by the teacher’s mediation between the students’ subjectivity and the world (Freire, 2000). As awareness, will and action can be developed in others, then power can be distributed in a fairer way.
Forming teachers able to deal with this technocratic perspective and able to offer a dialogic pedagogy requires putting human interaction at the centre of the pedagogical work, as pedagogical interaction is the channel of a hidden curriculum that configures subjectivities (Giroux & Penna, 1979). Interaction is a space that contains implicit meanings (Manghi, 2017), and teachers, aware or not, put into play the dynamics of participation and reflection that they promote in their classrooms (Cerda et al., 2004). It is through interactions that political, ethical, and epistemic issues are unconsciously absorbed by learners.
Interactions oriented to a fairer, ethically healthier and politically more democratic society need pedagogical awareness about how to promote dialogical forms of relation that go beyond monologic to be communicatively validated (Lee, 2019). These interactions treat people as subjects capable of acting and getting involved, causing transformative learning that links thoughts, actions, and emotions to see a new form of reality (Jarvis, 2005) and allows students to reinterpret the frames of reference that they have uncritically developed throughout their lives. This type of change builds new interpretive frameworks that guide their experiences in a more negotiated way (Alhadeff, 2014).
Forming teachers who are capable of interacting dialogically needs, in turn, people who have lived a similar experience in their learning, as dialogic rationality is not achieved with the mere absorption of critical texts or rhetorical discourses because the capacity to be dialogical and democratic requires a socialization experience (Sanjurjo, 2000). What is more, without the ability to put the discourse into practice, there is a risk of fostering dogmatism. On the contrary, learning about how to be dialogical and democratic requires that the educator offers these types of interactions in the classroom as lived experiences, provoking democratic socialization practices based on participation and reflection (Cerda et al., 2004).
Therefore, the importance of considering Initial Teacher Formation (ITF) is much more than an academic process with a specific path in an institution, requiring students to carry out a set of subjects and experiences that lead to obtaining a final credential (Sánchez Ponce, 2013). Instead, this research understands ITF as a socialization process; this is, ITF is a process that tries to arouse in people certain moral, intellectual and affective dispositions through specific forms and contents transmitted to them (Bernstein, 1974, in Sánchez Ponce, 2013). To consider ITF as a socialization process makes visible pedagogical interactions a crucial element in teacher formation.
ITF programs can develop capable teachers who can resist the technical scenario they have to work in, which leads us to the concept of agency. Following Akram (2010), who proposes a novel and interesting dialectical view by incorporating Bourdieau’s notion of habitus, it can be said that agency is the capacity of influencing the circumstances of one’s own life, which requires overcoming the unconscious factors that limit the person from having greater control over the circumstances of the structure of which they are a part.
The habitus is referred to as the orientation or way of being in the world, the predisposed way of thinking, acting and moving in and through the social environment that encompasses posture, behaviour, perspective, expectations and tastes, which is socially acquired and culturally incorporated (Akram, 2010). The habitus reflects the social construction of reality in which even our unconscious cognitive structures are inscribed, so it is shown mainly through our actions. Thus, the acquisition of a certain habitus shapes our thoughts and actions.
It is important to remember, as Akram affirms, that to claim that agents act unconsciously and habitually in terms of everyday structural interaction is not the same as arguing that agents do not have conscious and reflective capacities, but rather that structural and agency interaction occurs in a mundane, habitual, and unconscious way (Akram, 2010, p. 105). In this research, we understand in-formation teachers with the potential for awareness and agency, but not as something given, since we live in an alienating neoliberal context that makes it difficult to develop critical awareness. This research proposes that ITF is the stage at which one can develop critical awareness.
From this perspective, an educational process that values the formation of agency capacity will emphasize developing reflective capacities. As Bourdieau and Wacquant (Akram, 2010, p. 119) explain, reflexivity is the ability to rethink the ‘unthought’ and consists of the systematic exploration of the unthought categories of thought that delimits the thinkable and predetermined thoughts. From this conceptualization, it is interesting to consider how much ITF can influence the habitus that pedagogy students bring with them and how much it can develop greater reflective capacities to expand that framework absorbed through previous socialization processes.
Another important element in developing the notion of pedagogical agency in this research is taken from Dalmiya (2016), who considers that agency is made up of three dimensions: epistemic, ethical, and political. This research brings these dimensions to the pedagogical field to develop a framework within which we can see and interpret teachers’ actions from a critical perspective.
The political dimension refers to the exercise of rights and responsibilities expressed in issues of power relations, resistance, domination, and oppression. In the pedagogical field, for example, this is reflected in confronting institutionalized oppression that resists curricular standardization, particularly when learning is put at the centre of the process of change (Bourn, 2016).
The ethical dimension refers to the weighting of criteria of justice, equity, and dignity to support the decisions that are made, paying attention to the relational and affective forces of the students that arise in the classroom (Zapata et al., 2019). Furthermore, it involves interacting with the students dialogically, developing a pedagogy as a communicative phenomenon with sentient beings, in which messages that cannot be monologically imposed, but communicatively validated (Lee, 2019). It also asks teachers to encourage students to become someone recognized, through a relationship that involves a welcoming encounter that generates moral qualities of responsibility and respect, becoming someone willing to bond affectively (Martínez et al., 2003).
The epistemic dimension has to do with the degree of awareness or reflection on what is known and how the action itself is justified (Jarvis, 2005). As Zanotto and Gaeta (2018) point out, personal epistemology refers to the cognition that an individual has regarding the nature of knowledge and the nature of knowing (Zanotto & Gaeta, 2018). It can be explored by reviewing the capacity for self-reflection of one’s own beliefs. Another expression of the epistemic is when teachers are able to create learning experiences capable of provoking transformative learning in their students, linking thoughts, actions, and emotions to see a new form of reality (Jarvis, 2005).
Research Problem Definition, Questions, and Methodological Decisions
The Chilean educational context described earlier reinforces the reproduction of the dehumanizing instrumental logic of education. This research examines these concerns about the role of ITF in preparing teachers to deal with this technocratic rationality and determines whether, once working in the educational system, a transformative education empowers students politically, ethically, and epistemically.
This research focuses on the capacity of pedagogical agency of secondary teachers who recently graduated from ITF programs and the demands they face in their first teaching experiences. Pedagogical agency is examined as a key capacity to carry out practices of recognition and empowerment. Specifically, this research asks about the contribution of ITF in the development of a dialogical pedagogical agency capacity of recent graduates of pedagogy programs for secondary education and aims to make it visible through the analysis of their experience when they have started to work as teachers. Thus, the general question guiding this research is: What is the capacity for ethical/political/epistemic agency that novice teachers develop in their initial teacher formation? Furthermore, the main objective of this research is to analyze the capacity of pedagogical agency that teachers have developed throughout ITF, to propose guidelines that redirect efforts to recover an integral human dimension of the formation of secondary education teachers to contribute to social justice.
Methodologically, the approach of this study is, as previously described, situated in critical theory, as the focus of the problem and the development of pedagogical agency relies on issues of power related to institutional processes. Cohen et al. (2018, p. 53) point out that much of behaviour is the result of repressive or dominant factors, so to explore the capacity of pedagogical agency of novice teachers can shed light on if this is something developed by ITF. This approach places this research in the field of analysis of power dynamics, making explicit the need to form teachers responsible for the use of power as a minimum to advance in the development of more dialogic and democratic communities. As Cohen et al. (2018) point out that this spirit of transformation in research occurs because critical theory is explicitly prescriptive and normative, and its purpose is not merely to understand situations and phenomena but to change them.
In terms of methodological decisions, this research was developed from a critical qualitative perspective. As there is not a critical methodology by itself (Ashgar, 2013), it was necessary to design a methodology according to the purposes of the research. This design was a methodological bricolage, a construction of an emancipatory research (Kincheloe et al., 2018) that goes beyond the blinders of disciplines and looks through a conceptual window into a new world of research and knowledge production (Kincheloe et al., 2018). This design is an eclectic process of research that required epistemological vigilance to maintain theoretical coherence (Kincheloe et al., 2018).
The instruments to collect the data used in this study were the semi-structured interviews and critical incident, as they privilege the appearance of novice teachers’ voices. The critical incidents collected information to answer the first specific question, while the semi-structured interviews collected information for the other specific questions.
The sample of this study, as expected in qualitative research, was not probabilistic, but significant. It was defined at the beginning as a purposive sample and, later, self-defined by availability, as teachers agreed to participate in the study. The criteria for the purposive sample was to be a teacher who graduated from a secondary education ITF program no more than two years ago; to have studied in institutions that publicly declare social commitment; and to have chosen to study pedagogy for their desire to contribute to social change.
A formal invitation to participate in the study was sent to secondary ITF programs of four universities in Santiago, Chile that fulfilled the requirement of declaring social commitment; that is to say, universities which promote publicly a profile, through publicity or official motto, connected to or concerned with social issues, social justice, social change, or social transformation. The ITF programs that accepted provided lists of recently graduated teachers, to whom a formal invitation was sent via email, inviting them to participate in the study. Twelve teachers agreed to participate, and they received the instructions to develop the critical incidents. The sample was defined by an availability criterion, as from the twenty participants who agreed to participate in the study, some did not send any critical incidents. Twelve participants completed the process and participated until the end of the study. Thus, the sample of the research is constituted of twelve novice teachers, studied in eight different ITF programs of two universities that declare concern about social issues, situated in the capital of Chile, Santiago.
Data Collection and Analysis
This section focuses on the data collected to answer the specific question: What is the capacity for ethical/political/epistemic pedagogical agency that novice teachers show in their first professional experiences as teachers?
The peculiar aim of this question is that the capacity of pedagogical agency is not something that can be asked for, as it is not necessarily situated at a conscious level that can be literally verbalized. As Alvesson & Sköldberg (2009) say, we can hardly go around asking people about their ‘psychic prisons’ or ‘false consciousness’, or about ‘communicative distortions’ (p. 162). To have access to the messages absorbed throughout the formation, it is necessary to dig below the surface of the discourse, to understand the influences and effects of ITF in the development of pedagogical agency. We required, then, an instrument that collects evidence of concrete actions in real situations, which can be subsequently analyzed. That is why the instrument for collecting information to answer this specific question was the critical incident.
Guidance to Orient Analysis of Critical Incidents. Process of Extracting Meaning From the Critical Incidents. Source: Own Elaboration From Theoretical Framework Revision.
Following the description of the application of critical incident as a data collection instrument, once the participants agreed to be part of the research, they were asked to write the critical incidents. To motivate and orient the writing, a set of instructions was sent via email, which is detailed as follows: This exercise requires you to have about 30 minutes alone and as calmly as possible. Any distractor could affect the depth of the narrative. At this first stage, I will ask you to focus on your work as a teacher on a day-to-day basis: on everyday matters in different areas of the school: the teachers' room, the classroom, the playground, the entrance to the school, the room where meetings are held with the management team, the library, a laboratory, or special room, among others. Try to review the emotions/sensations that invade you when you remember these different spaces, times, and relationships. Try to stop in those situations that come back to your memories, related to any actor of the school: a director, a teacher, a student… in short, anyone with whom you have had to relate from your role as a teacher. Please try to identify a specific moment in which, interacting with any of these actors, you have felt that have been able or not to carry out something that you wanted to do as a professional. Some tension that you have perceived and that you have had to face. Try to focus on the emotions that you have felt, that allow you to identify that moment... It does not matter if that tension was resolved in favour of your will or that of others, the important thing is the situation per se. Now, I would like to ask you to write that situation, as descriptively as possible. That is, imagine that it is a scene from a film, in which you have to say when, where, and what happens, who is acting in that scene and what is the plot of that scene (what the actors present in the scene do and say). Start by writing the first thing that comes to mind. The most significant for you. What happened, who was present, what you did, what others did, how you felt about it – which is not necessarily the same as what you feel now). Write, read it again, and then re-include the details that allow you to complement your story and allow those who were not there to recreate it as faithfully as possible to what happened.
As previously noted from the twenty participants agreeing to participate, twelve sent critical incidents. Some wrote one incident; others, two; and others three. In practical terms, once the critical incidents were collected, a first reading was carried out to have an initial look at what facts the writer posited as relevant. This first reading was complemented with an unstructured interview immediately after the incident was submitted, to delve into possible information that would allow a better understanding of the incident and clarify any aspect of it. This step is recommended so that the narrator of the incident can decipher the basic assumptions of any context that might be taken-for-granted (Angelides, 2001). The interview did not have a predefined structure; it was led by the questions that arose by reading the incident together – the researcher and novice teacher – to clarify the narrative and facilitate the later analysis.
Once the incident’s reading and interview were completed, a second reading was made, interpreting from a critical perspective the facts and decisions described in the incident to evaluate in critical terms the agency capacity of the teacher. This process of analysis was first deductive, oriented by a frame of reference developed to guide the analysis (See Table 1), elaborated from the theoretical framework, considering criteria from political, ethical, and epistemic dimensions of pedagogical agency to guide the analysis of teachers’ actions. The analysis followed inductively, developing interpretations of the data that derive from themes, concepts, explanations, and understandings that explain the data (Cohen et al., 2018, p. 645).
As Alvesson and Skoldberg (2009) say, in critical theory, the theoretical frame of reference possesses a special importance because it can help to make good interpretations to go beyond surface meanings. This is important to declare in this kind of research, as critical theory works interpretively, focussing on relating the action level to the broader social, historical, and economic context. Considering this, it is necessary to review those beliefs and values that lead people’s conscious lives and those unquestioned beliefs and values upon which the taken-for-granted structure rests (Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2009).
Once the incidents were recovered, the deductive analysis focused on situations to identify if any action described fit with any criteria defined in Table 1, elaborating a summary to facilitate the later analysis, considering: • Relevance of the incident in terms of interaction between teacher and environment; that is, if the incident illustrates the teacher’s interaction with different actors of the school to test the way he/she faces situations that demand different wills at stake. • Presence of every dimension (political/ethical/epistemic) according to how the teacher acts. This is to signal the presence of elements related to pedagogical agency (political, ethical, or epistemic) implied in the way in which the teacher faces the situation. • Strength of pedagogical agency resulting from dimensions. This is a very complex definition, as it is an effort to describe in brief the pedagogical agency of the novice teacher – as a result of the three dimensions implied – per incident. • Elements of every dimension according to how the teacher acts. These elements, the political, the ethical and the epistemic, refer to a description of the elements found in every incident, according to the detail of Table 1. • Comments/Aspects that highlight – Possible explanation. Any distinctive feature? Comments about peculiarities of the teacher, the situations narrated, the context or any other aspect that could help to the later analysis.
In the next sections, two incidents have been selected randomly – out of twenty-nine collected – as an example to offer an analysis of each. In Section 7, there is a more general discussion resulting from the general findings of the research process.
Findings
Incident 1
Participant: Female, Musical Arts teacher, first year teaching, graduated from a 5-year ITF program. The context and the incident that followed were written by Lorena, a pseudonym.
Context
I worked as a music teacher in a small private school. The groups were for made for a maximum of 25 children, and from the beginning they told me that inclusion was an important task for the institution, so they accepted children who came from other countries and who had suffered bullying in other schools. Basically, they had left out important information on that subject, such as the existence of many children with severe untreated Special Educational Needs that the school did not take care of, so I was forced to have to deal with them on my own because there was no support for teachers.
Incident: Group Chaos
At the end of recess, I tried to start my class in kindergarten. I tried, but I couldn't because there was a lot of noise, and the environment was complex. As soon as I walked in, they were already starting to fight. This small group of children hit each other between cries of authentic war, while a chair and a table flew with violence while another child climbed up the furniture on the wall and the co-educator went out of her way to try to get him down. I panicked, unsuccessfully, while another kid threw all my stuff on the floor in a sudden fit of rage. I remember desperately looking at that scene, not knowing where to start to stop the chaos. Again. It wasn't the first time the class had turned into a jungle. The school inspector had to come to put order, taking away the children who caused the most problems. So, I was able to continue with about two-thirds of the course. I was able to do the class but with a bitter taste for not having been able to take charge of the situation. According to the post interview, the first element that can be lifted from the data is that Lorena seeks to respond to institutional demands, seeking to be responsible with her work. However, when alluding to the immediacy of the problematic situation she is facing, she seems not to visualize the structural conditions that give rise to these situations and, therefore, the unnecessary wear and tear that trying to control everything to do in her class means. Her way of wanting to bond with the children is through control, and since this doesn't work out, she enters a spiral from which she only manages to get frustrated.
From a political perspective, some elements present in the narrative are: powerlessness over resistance, naturalization over resistance, programming over spontaneity, and (lack of) capacity to influence the context. It is hard for Lorena to visualize issues of power and interests that exist in schools. Her response is adaptive to the context, at the same time that she demands the adaptation of her students instead of trying to dialogue with this context, trying to understand why it is like this, or even trying to have a more active role in it.
It is striking that in reflective terms, her story lacks elements that allow some degree of depth. Although in the interview she expresses her frustration at the lack of meaning of the context, she does not seem to be able to ground this frustration in reflections to understand what role she could play as a teacher in front of it. In this sense, Lorena seems more like a frustrated official in a context in which people do not fulfil the role they should fulfil – in the case of the students, respecting the class so that she as a teacher can dictate her lesson. Lorena seems unable to find other ways to relate to the environment than through control. Neither in the situation narrated in the incident nor in the subsequent interview does she reflect on the complexity of the context to see that the students are not part of the problem. Faced with this, it seems that she does not have the pedagogical resources to face the situation creatively.
From an ethical perspective, Lorena does not mention relational, interactional, or dialogical aspects to somehow make visible the way in which she approached the relationship with her class group or how she could approach it in the future, because she does not seem to have the tools to imagine other ways to develop her class to challenge the order of things. She does not seem to be able to read the children’s reaction as a form of unconscious resistance to the system; on the contrary, her complaint is that they are not normalized, even when it comes to kindergarten children. Why is being adapted to the traditional class system expected a priori as normal? Where does that belief come from, and why is it held to be expected? Although the narration deals with a difficult situation, in her later reflection in the interview, there is no mention of different ways of imagining school and teaching, as if the only problem were misbehaving children. Although she seems to be aware of the meaninglessness of being in school, at the same time, paradoxically, she expects the children to behave like normal students. Lorena is focused on a technical rationality, moved by an interest to control the environment; that is, she is focused on how to solve the immediate problem and with an absence of dialogue with the students – not as a literal chatting, but of having a common harmony that allows understanding beyond explicit verbal messages. Although dealing with young children, dialogue is possible if one understands it as the ability to interact in a more playful way, for example, to create conditions to develop a welcoming encounter, a shared climate for learning together. In this dimension, dialogicity as a means for overcoming the instrumental orientation is lacking.
Lastly, from an epistemic perspective, Lorena does not show awareness or reflection on what she knows, neither in the incident nor in the later interview. She does not go into her own beliefs to explore where the problem might be or how to find possible ways to deal with the situation. She accepts reality as something given, not having a deep comprehension of the context.
Incident 2
Participant: Male, Mathematics teacher, first year of work experience, graduated from a 5-year ITF program. The context and the incident that followed were written by him. His pseudonym is Cristian.
Context
The following incident takes place in a professional scientific and technical high school in a peripheral commune of Santiago, known for its high level of vulnerability.
Incident: Concerns
I had to learn important places in the school (inspection, infirmary), the names of my classmates and those in charge of each area, certain routines that the school required: taking fingerprints for attendance, requesting the room key from the assistant, a language of the school (used in each email) with acronyms to refer to the director, the area director, the deputy director, the director of school coexistence, among others; I quickly learned to use SYSCOL, a digital class book, which I did not know before, in which I had to record attendance, grades, interviews, etc. All these previous actions, at least during the first two weeks of classes, made me feel stressed, to such a level that I couldn't sleep at night. This was because I dreamed of all the tasks and activities that I had to do the next day without trying to make mistakes. Fortunately, I had the support of my classmates who accompanied me in this process of difficult adaptation to a school where everything was urgently required. Now I feel grateful to the work team that helped me with tips and tools to get ahead in this initial stage.
From a political perspective, his position in relation to the situation is merely descriptive, very flat, without elements or reflections with some degree of depth, almost without relevance. Although he began the story by saying how nervous he was about quickly learning how things worked, he quickly closed that tension by saying that his colleagues helped him, without stopping to reflect on what it means, for example, how the institution works. What is most striking is the absence of the pedagogical. He is recounting how nervous he felt about starting to work as a teacher, but he never mentions that the nerves had to do with taking on the role itself, issues related to teaching, or future students. It is only about learning the operation of the place: acronyms, systems, processes, and procedures. In this sense, the concern of an official or a bureaucrat is more noticeable than that of an educator or a teaching professional. The element of political dimension that is highlighted in this incident is naturalization over criticism.
From an ethical perspective, there is no mention of relational, interaction or dialogic aspects that concern Cristian, nor are reflective features observed in this sense of what he recounts in his incident. There is nothing related, epistemically, that appears in his way of understanding things at school and how the experience of gradually inserting himself generates new understandings regarding the role he plays there. The writing of the incident and the interview occurs in an apparent naturalization of what he describes, without explicitly giving an account of their beliefs, without asking or reflecting on it.
Discussion
From the critical spirit that guides this research, the most significant absence in these incidents is the way in which these novice teachers refer to pedagogical issues. The math teacher, Cristian, does not mention them, and the music teacher, Lorena, refers to them from a perspective of control. In both cases, the way of interacting with the environment and the students is not moved by a spirit of dialogue, which is crucial to overcome monollogicity and being validated communicatively (Lee, 2019). There is no mention of any element that can evidence the importance these teachers give to relate to their students as subjects able to get involved in building a new form of reality (Jarvis, 2005) or to reinterpret the frames of reference that they have developed throughout their lives, in order to build new interpretive frameworks (Ardoino, 2011).
It can be observed that novice teachers do not problematize what happens in the school, and this is an indicator that realities are naturalized. That is, they are not being seen and discussed, and with this, the possibility of updating their sense and relevance is lost (Gimeno Sacristán, 2005). Nothing is mentioned in relation to these naturalized realities – the length of lesson periods, the organization of the classroom, the (lack of) spaces to make decisions, the relation between teachers/students, the sense of community promoted by the institution, just to mention some.
All these elements speak about a weak capacity of pedagogical agency, which coincides with the lack of critical spirit and lack of problematization from which these two novice teachers tell their stories. They do not go beyond a descriptive level of analysis and do not look at or question the assumptions from which they position themselves as teachers, so they do not seem able to recognize them. They neither seem to examine their actions nor the motivation that moves them. Neither in the incidents nor in the subsequent interview did they recognize the assumptions from which they developed their pedagogical work.
These incidents also show that these teachers’ actions lack creativity and spontaneity, which makes easy to relate to the environment as more of that of a bureaucrat or official than a pedagogue. That is to say, the teaching work ends up being relegated, in Arendt´s terms, to work instead of action (Arendt, 2018); it’s not a way to disclose to others in a personal and collective pedagogical project to give sense to action, it is just a task to do. The absence of creativity and spontaneity limits the capacity to dialogue with the context to develop a curriculum as a praxis instead of a product (Grundy, 1987), which affects learning. A complex and vibrant knowledge cannot be engaged with by fixed, pre-determined or standardized means (McArthur, 2014, p. 77). The capacity to develop a curriculum as a praxis is crucial to put authentic learning at the heart of the process of change (Bourn, 2016). Otherwise, it is just a matter of time ending up doing things because they have to be done; if this is the case, the initiative of action atrophies and is replaced by the automatism of behaviours (Goyenechea, 2012).
From the Bourdieusian perspective of agency considered in this research, which has a dialectical character strongly defined by the reflective capacity that allows us to see the frameworks within which doing so is sustained, it is interesting to observe that, when telling their incidents, both teachers’ reflective capacity is consistently weak. As reflexivity is the ability to rethink the ‘unthought’ and to explore the unthought categories of thought that delimit the thinkable (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, as cited in Akram, 2010), the absence of this ability is an important indicator of the agency capacity developed by these novice teachers so far. We wonder how much ITF can influence the habitus that the pedagogy students bring with them and how much it can develop greater reflective capacities to break and expand that framework absorbed through previous socialization processes to be able to develop pedagogical agency.
Final Comments
Educational processes oriented to transformation towards a fairer and more democratic society cannot be solved on the basis of inspiring speeches. Change is not about rhetoric or talking about change but about relating in empowering ways that allow us to achieve a greater capacity for agency to act in the world. Education is fundamental in this and demands that teachers know how to do it.
Agency capacity is in the field of practice, so it is not a speech to learn but a habitus to develop through socialization processes. It is a result of a complex network of interactions that is offered daily by any teacher of future teachers to pedagogy students, as a meta-pedagogy that affects the cycles of cultural reproduction of society, in which issues of power and human formation are involved.
Research about the development of pedagogical agency is scarce. Considering its importance, it is even more urgent to develop more research in this sense. This research takes place out of these concerns and expects to be a starting point for further research.
Further implications of this research are related to investigating the future ITF internal processes. The lack of studies that penetrate what can be called the black box of teacher training to study the characteristics of teacher training processes (Ávalos, 2011) are an urgent call to observe the processes of formation of teachers in the programs. Particularly, it is important to observe those processes related to the pedagogical practices of teachers of future teachers, to understand the habitus that is modelled in everyday interactions and through the hidden curriculum. In technocratic times, our students in the educational system need teachers who are better prepared to offer a transformative education, and this must include a greater capacity of pedagogical agency.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (72200252).
