El docente en la legislación educacional chilena

Abstract

The figure of the teacher as an actor within the educational system gets built and modified as a function of diverse processes, based on which different ways emerge to understand and define their work. The research described here deems the legislation on education as the constructor of social reality, inasmuch as it proposes certain conceptualizations of the teaching profession which influence pedagogical practices and social relations. Alongside, the revision of the most relevant research about being a teacher in Chile reveal the existence of a variety of constructions of identities as a function of the evolution of social-historical processes. Taking this into account, the goal of this article is to analyze the explicit and implicit conceptualizations of being a teacher, which are part of the legislation enacted between 1920 and 2011.To that end, our approach uses a qualitative methodology by means of documentary research and content analyses. Results reveal the existence of coherent patterns in conceptualizations of being a teacher in some of the legislation, while in other laws a diversity of conceptualizations coexist, with some degree of tension even within a given legal body.