Education for Citizenship: The Meanings Chilean Teachers Convey in the Neoliberal Context

Abstract

This article presents the results from research into education for citizenship in which Chilean teachers participated. Ninety-nine interviews and two focal groups that included questions on knowledge, beliefs, values and practices related to education for citizenship were carried out. NVivo 12 software was used for the analysis of the discourses, following the direction similar to the grounded theory that considers elaborating free nodes, structuring categories and configuring categorical trees, according to the school’s administrative dependency. The results yield six macro-categories: School, Authoritarianism, Neoliberalism, Curriculum, Teacher Role and Citizenship. The present article analyses the Neoliberalism macro-category formed, in turn, by the following subcategories: (1) subject and resistance, (2) competitiveness and individualism in a subject that is instrumental, consumer and reproducer of the establishment, (3) commodified schools, where the economic value regards students and families as clients, (4) a culture of bureaucratization and accountability, and (5) lack of a sense of communality as a collective, supportive body. In all of them, teachers show themselves eloquently critical of the neoliberal system and of the obstacles it poses to rights, justice and democracy in the current capitalist citizenship and school.