The teacher’s voice: citizenship and neoliberalism: The case of Chile

This research aims to understand the meanings of citizenship education for Chilean teachers. Based on this framework, the concepts of citizenship and education are discussed concisely in relation to their equivalence with the political sphere and the commons. The analysis of 81 individual interviews and 2 focus groups of teachers from the Valparaiso region, Chile, raised various matrix categories. However, this article focuses only on the Neoliberalism matrix, which includes discursive lines linked to a subject who sometimes feels defeated, nullified, subdued, self-marginalised, and isolated in a climate of individualistic competitiveness. Another subcategory that emerges from the matrix of neoliberalism relates to discourses that refer to school having become a commodity, in which economic resources are the supreme value and a guiding principle that determines practices and policies, configuring students and families as clients, as exemplified by the logic of vouchers. Finally, teachers complain about the growing culture of bureaucratization in which they are trapped in accountability processes within a framework of pedagogical pragmatism, linked to observable behaviours through standardised measurement by means of standardised tests.ⁱ.