Teaching Work and Inequality in Argentina: Heterogeneity and Dynamism in Educational Research

3.1 The Question of the Meaning of Inequality in the Field of Educational Research in Argentina

In Argentina, educational research on the relationships between schooling and inequality had one of its important milestones in the pioneering work of Braslavsky (1985) around the discrimination processes at school institutions. This study was a valuable contribution in terms of deepening the break with the pedagogical optimism that structured some discussions in the field of sociology of education. It analyzed how the Argentine education system developed differentiated forms of school integration that perpetuated social inequalities through schooling circuits or segments for different social sectors. The research also highlighted the need to question what was going on within schools to address the issue of inequality, arguing that it had to do with the distribution of opportunities between different schools and teaching modalities, tracing a series of agendas and problematizations that following investigations approached.

Braslavsky’s research showed that socio-economic segregation was an extended characteristic of the Argentine education system and that it generated different educational circuits between schools of different quality in relation to students’ social origin. Discrimination involved not only practices of exclusion from impoverished sectors but also differences in the realization of the right to education in terms of the type of schooling accessed by popular sectors in respect of the one high and high-middle sectors attended. Thus, schools played an important role in reproducing social inequalities. There were differentiated circuits that expressed the ways in which education was unevenly distributed and articulated with students’ socioeconomic origin of the students, (Braslavsky, 1985).

Segmentation and disarticulation of educational systems constituted specific expressions and modalities of horizontal and vertical differentiation dynamics. Horizontal differentiation manifested itself in educational establishments that had a very different curriculum and offered very different conditions for learning. Vertical differentiation gave an account of the existence of various orientation and conduction bodies of each level of the educational system operating independently, being able to configure a disjointed system. As a result, segmentation and disarticulation were functional to the preservation of the monopoly on education in minority social groups (Braslavsky, 1985). Inequality, in this case, was based on differentiated access to socially and culturally relevant knowledge, skills, and certain levels of the education system. It was also expressed in the attendance to non-equivalent levels of knowledge and different possibilities of continuing within the formal education system.

This research and its results allowed us to move away from classical reproductive models, enabling the incorporation of perspectives, attitudes, and representations of social subjects, accounting for the discussions in the field of sociology of education in the mid-1980s. The study conducted by Braslavsky (1985) analyzed the impact of some features of teaching work – like labor stability and training– on educational processes and students’ performance. It also addressed how the pedagogical model of institutions prioritized knowledge transmission or socialization but did not include in the inquiry how teachers position themselves in relation to their tasks. Braslavsky’s work involved a valuable contribution in terms of dismantling the construction of the egalitarian appearance of the Argentinian school system, disarming the hegemonic pedagogical optimism in the educational field at that time:

“Instead of the single or common primary schools provided by the current law, equally equipped, with pedagogical practices that respond to the same model of pedagogical action, where levels and profiles of knowledge are taught equal to, in principle, allow equal access to successive levels within the formal education system, countless schools have been set up, in each of which the equipment is different, pedagogical practices are divergent, the acquired levels and knowledge profiles are not equivalent … The educational system is therefore clearly organized into different circuits that have crystallized as educational segments” (Braslavsky, 1985, p. 142)

The thesis of segmentation and unequal trends in terms of learning was based on an argument that identified both trends in reproduction and change, postulating that the State could assume this responsibility (Braslavsky, 1985). Democratization was understood in terms of improving learning and acquiring specific knowledge rather than socialization guidelines. These concerns led to research that diagnosed the hesitation of socially relevant knowledge of the education system and the obsolescence of programmatic content, advocating for the State to assume primary responsibility as content provider to the school system (Tiramonti, 2004). In an open discussion with Orthodox Marxist reproductivism, that perspective supposed a vision of the State as a space to be conquered to transform school education from there.

The breadth and extent of the research lines opened by Braslavsky’s work became visible in the following years in Argentina. The pedagogical and sociological studies of education put the focus on inequality as a social production and the way educational institutions developed processes that came into strain with promises of equality (Birgin, 1999; Dussel, 2004; Pineau, 1997). The research in the field of sociology of education incorporated the analysis of teacher/student interaction and the role of the subjectivity of social actors in the production and reproduction of inequality (Llomovatte & Kaplan, 2005; Morgade, 1992; Tiramonti, 1988).

The approach these methodological movements shared was aimed at the interior of the school’s “black box,” discussing the objectivist models in the field of sociology of education (Tenti Fanfani, 2007). These new orientations incorporated theoretical currents of Anglo-Saxon origin such as symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, and social phenomenology. The shift toward processes, practices, and experiences of social subjects also took place with the deployment of social anthropology in these perspectives. This involved other approaches that confronted the hegemonic “quantitative” sociology at that time (Batallán, 2007), enabling ethnographic approaches to the analysis of links between subjects within the classrooms. These movements deepened the shift away from reproductive models and strengthened the growing interest, in the field of socio-educational research, in developing more processual approaches that accounted for the role of social subjects.

Thus, problems such as school repetition or exclusion, which until the early 1980s were diagnosed by extracurricular causes began to be analyzed from the subjects’ behavior, especially teachers. Ethnography, as a perspective articulating theory, methods, and techniques, was directed to document the undocumented to account for processes whose complexity exceeded the strictly didactic and in which forms of coercion, negotiation, and resistance. Research on education and inequality aimed at reconstructing the perspectives of subjects on their daily lives to describe the various situations of school life.

This emphasis on subject prospects had various expressions in the field of educational research. Studies began to investigate how teacher expectations influenced students, producing exclusionary dynamics (Kaplan, 1997). Low prospects seemed to concentrate on children of popular or subaltern sectors in terms of ethnicity or gender (Morgade, 2022). Contributions to studying inequality as a social production focused on the naturalization of the differences and categories with which the world is learned by students (Kaplan, 2018; Tenti Fanfani, 2007).

Emphatically aside from deterministic perspectives on school success and failure during the 50s and 60s, socio-educational research in the last decades became a key contribution to the show that teachers’ representations (Llomovatte & Kaplan, 2005) operated as verdicts on student boundaries in relation to school success or failure, structuring a target effect. These discussions were based on the idea that inequalities in capitalist societies lied in the unequal distribution of material and symbolic conditions. Thus, subjective representations of teachers must be understood as a frame of present and past social configurations, and as productive acts and interventions on students’ educational trajectories.

These research lines boosted discussions on the fact that students’ educability did not depend on their natural interiority or external social conditions, but on schooling-built relations between subjects that affected learning. As several studies showed (Morgade, 1992, 2011, 2022), attributes of gender, age, ethnicity, and class were automatically linked to other properties that were presented as natural and non-arbitrary. The naturalization of intelligence in magisterial discourse occupied a central place in teachers’ judgment.

Furthermore, in the last decades, research educational research in Argentina approached the ways schools built production and reproduction of inequality from the view of subjects and institutions. These studies were based on the obsolescence of the conceptual instrument of social scientists to analyze the problems of society, in the context of the restructuration of social relations and regulatory frameworks of subject actions. This need to revise conceptual scaffolding was added to the fact that the distances between the different social strata had reached unthinkable levels by the beginning of the 2000 decade, producing new inequality scenarios in Argentina. The school expressions of these situations could no longer be explained only in socio-economic terms, although they conditioned schools and educational subjects (Tiramonti, 2004).

From these coordinates, between 2000 and 2010, educational research in Argentina revised the conceptualizations around educational segmentation to account for how the processes of inequality were involved with the existence of a fragmented educational field in which actors moved within a relatively enclosed space that marked the limits of their options. The conceptual production around educational fragmentation as a lens through which to observe the issue of inequality was supported by the analysis of the role played by expectations institutional resources, the cultural capital of families, and the strategies social sectors developed (Tiramonti, 2004). It also showed the inadequacy of the concept of class to explain those dynamics.

The fragment as a concept accounted for a self-built space inside which schools had little articulation with other institutions. In the framework of this research line, some studies analyzed the heterogeneity of the teachers’ training institutions, the construction of their profiles and the strategies they developed in relation to students, and the teaching representations about the public sphere (Arroyo & Litichever, 2019; Arroyo, 2004). In this way, the revision of the category of segmentation implied the abandonment of structuralist views that established continuities between social positions and educational inequalities. The research showed that teachers presented ideas of acceptance of the context and the absence of references to the responsibility of society for all its members. Thus, in the context of the fading of the public dimension in the conception of their work, teachers became mirrors of the fragments of the way of dealing with educational problems, disassociating them from a broad social gaze. Inequality not only reached students and their material conditions but also their teachers.

3.2 Links between Schooling and Teaching Work in Contexts of Social Inequality: Queries from Educational Research

Recent research on schooling in poverty contexts in Argentina contributed to the construction of a perspective that argued it was not possible to sustain the idea of unity of the educational system and the senses associated with it, and that it was conceptually unfeasible to assume a homogeneity of subject positions. These studies shifted a perspective on inequality in more mobile and flexible terms than the old divisions of social class or positions of power (Dussel, 2021; Redondo, 2004, 2016; Southwell & Vassiliades, 2014). Equality was not a static or defined state, but a set of strong relationships that were established between subjects and that encompassed different areas: wealth, income, job opportunities, gender, ethnicity, and geographical regions, among others. The relational nature of inequality led to questions about society, as it is a political problem that is at the heart of institutions and subjectivity. In this context, some authors emphasized the need to look inward from the school system when thinking about the relationship between it and inequality, focusing on the organizational conditions of institutions (Redondo & Thisted, 1999; Southwell, 2008).

In this sense, educational research in Argentina argued the concept of exclusion did not allow us to see the inclusions that coexist and how both processes can be part of the same face of the coin (Dussel, 2004). This category often meant acceptance of the exclusionary order and made invisible the struggle for inclusion:

“The shift from the concept of ‘inequality’ to ‘exclusion’ naturalizes the current processes of social disaffiliation and places them, in a discursive operation of legitimacy, in new relationships of power that have their direct expression in the construction of social policies, including education” (Redondo, 2004, p. 68)

The field of educational research in Argentina sought to account for impoverishment scenarios by showing how they reached teaching workers, whose socio-demographic, socio-economic, and socio-economic characteristics varied. Some studies highlighted how job precarization crossed teaching subjects (Filmus, 2006; Tenti Fanfani, 2005). They showed Argentine teachers perceived that they were worse than previous generations and that they felt they were in a process of downward social mobility process that impacted on their daily work (Dussel, 2006).

These processes were parallel to a series of substantive changes in the conditions of teaching work in Argentina, in the framework of policies that aimed at changing its organizational contexts, trying to reconfigure the professional profile of teachers (Birgin, 2014, 2023; Gluz & Feldfeber, 2021; Tenti Fanfani, 2006). These subjects were the core of Latin American educational reforms, being in the place of responding to demands that went beyond their training, particularly when they developed their task in poverty contexts. The new educational regulations caused a significant intensification of teaching work and that had an impact on their status (Tenti Fanfani, 2005).

Also, these perspectives enabled a view of the relationship between teaching work and inequality in contexts where teachers worked with students who belonged to families excluded from employment. These approaches argued that teaching in poverty conditions and social care practices toward students should not be taught in a dichotomic way (Redondo, 2016). They emphasized that the quality of educational experience that certain schools propose did not have to do with their students’ social origin (Duschatzky, 2017; Dussel, 2021; Redondo & Thisted, 1999; Redondo, 2016; Vassiliades, 2012). These contributions showed how schools in Argentina were capable of opening democratic horizons for students who live in poverty conditions. They highlighted that teaching work was traversed by unease, frustration, and anger, but also by stubbornness, daily and militant struggle, and pedagogical will. Thus, the field of educational research showed the heterogeneity of situations and positions in the processes of schooling sectors living in poverty:

“The educational reality of these schools is far from homogeneous or uniform. On the contrary, the group of educational institutions that serve the child and adolescent population in poverty represent a highly heterogeneous set. This is due to (…) the prominence and positioning of the subjects inserted in these educational realities, which produce diverse institutional and pedagogical practices, heterogeneous and even contrasting” (Redondo, 2004, p. 78)

Within the framework of this heterogeneity, studies that reported situations of educational fragmentation showed the existence of a mandate of “containment” that acquired a strong reproductive content at the average level of teaching, and that did not have a single meaning for the subjects (Tiramonti, 2004). These institutions involved a pastoral component that aimed to develop guardian protection of their students with a marked pretension to provide material and pedagogical assistance. Schools were conceived as the only expression of the State on the periphery forming the last frontier of the public (Redondo & Thisted, 1999; Redondo, 2016). Following the relational conception of inclusion–exclusion, the idea of “borders of exclusion” was raised to consider the differences between those who are included and those who are excluded, without assuming that this relationship is given in dichotomous or exclusive terms. The concept of border accounted for the edges, boundaries, passages, crosses, and margins that enable more complex glances of pauperization processes and their expression in the daily lives of families and school institutions (Puiggrós & Dussel, 1999). The borders of exclusion schools produce various re-articulations of the links between education and poverty, opening a field of positions that include strengthening inclusion processes and deepening situations of exclusion.

Following these coordinates, some research studies (Redondo, 2016; Southwell, 2008; Vassiliades, 2012) reported heterogeneous positions among teaching subjects working with students living in poverty: those who sought to compensate for the shortcomings of their students through affection and inculcation of good habits, those who looked with indifference what happened to them, and those who recognized the situation of inequality and approached it from the conviction of producing reparation through teaching, based on the recognition of dignity and rights. In some cases, the configuration of the teaching identity was based on the link with students named as “lacking” and on covering what they did not have.

Within the field of social anthropology, a research analyzed a teaching initiative that discussed the organization by grades in primary school in Argentina, pointing out that it referred not only to technical-didactic issues but also to an expression of a debate on the political principles that structured the system of instruction in relation to social inequality (Padawer, 2008). It considered the origins of school in relation to the graduation device and the experiences recognized as background by professors. This research showed many teachers thought poverty produced a “backward” cultural environment in children’s homes and that this situation irreversibly led to school failure. It also gave account of non-homogeneous positions among teachers, including the idea that these conditions were a non-definitive, and of various criteria of grouping students as a mode of addressing their schooling. In addition, the research found:

“Underlying ideas about the relationship between school, poverty and failure, where inequality is understood as difference or diversity, in a naive relativism that hides deterministic positions on students’ poverty conditions” (Padawer, 2008, p. 277)

Like other studies, this research highlighted the configuration of heterogeneous, contradictory, and paradoxical senses for the schooling of subjects in poverty (Redondo & Thisted, 1999; Redondo, 2016; Southwell, 2008; Vassiliades, 2012). In the case of institutions that worked with students living in poverty, teachers pointed out that parents had “little interest” in their children and gave an account of difficulties in getting parents to come up to the institution (Achilli, 2010). According to these authors, teachers and principals conceived a certain “disciplinary weakness” of families, which became ineffective socialization for the incorporation of their children into socially accepted patterns of conduct. The work of containment carried out by the school is linked to an intention of social control and to supplementing a supposed “lack of affection” by the social and family environment of the students (Redondo, 2016). Some research noticed that affection seemed to have a contradictory circulation in schools, as a component of the increasing “affectivization” of pedagogical relations (Abramowski, 2010, 2024).

In this context, relationships between schools and families were characterized as oscillating and paradoxical, accounting for positions that could be contradictory in the same subjects (Southwell, 2008). In some cases, the institution was perceived as part of the community, but that in that movement it set educational action to the limits of what was next, without linking with other cultural horizons. In addition, some research focused on the issue of educational inequality since school choice practices in Argentina. A series of works accounted for the relationship between choice strategies and social class, considering how families developed these practices by reflecting on what to demand from the education system (Cerletti, 2010). These authors argued that the question of educational choice showed a growing market presence both in the material dimension of educational offerings and in the dimension of discourses that legitimize their logics. This presence set up on-demand schooling processes in Argentina that displaced previous dynamics based on the supply of education within the framework of broader social transformations (Pineau, 2014).

These studies showed that families living in poverty in Argentina gave a central place to education of their children as a possibility of social ascent. The deployment of a diversity of assessments and choices gave account of an active school search by families, who developed comparisons with their own educational trajectories and built arguments regarding the quality of public or private education (Cerletti, 2010). In this way, these practices of school valuation – and avoidance of certain institutions– were not an exclusive heritage of rich social sectors, but also reached impoverished families. In addition, other research studies highlighted that for popular sectors school remained as an opportunity and continued to be loaded with expectations (Achilli, 2010; Redondo, 2016).

3.3 School and Context in Educational Research in Argentina: Joints and Tensions

In Argentina, many studies argued on the suitability and relevance of the idea that children should receive “local schooling” in Argentina, with an emphasis on topics related to their cultural contexts. These adequations were highlighted by some research that maintained a pessimistic judgment about students and their interest in learning, founding these assumptions in problems of discipline and motivation, in the context of a supposed antagonism between what is popular and school (Tenti Fanfani, 2006). They highlighted teachers held an idea of giving more to the ones who had less in terms of subsistence, family containment, and behavior (Alliaud, 2017). Based on these diagnoses, initiatives such as preparing teaching for the context, adapting the curriculum to the needs of students, and relying on the support of specialists were often developed in Argentina. In a different direction, educational policy analysts continued to deepen a line of work from international agencies by proposing “contextualized” training to work with poverty, as if specific preparation to work with this sector were needed:

“Schools where students from popular sectors attend should have teachers trained to work in these contexts, including the different family and youth cultures, who can enrich the fundamental contents of the curriculum to adapt them to the knowledge and contexts of the students, and that they know how to work with diversity” (Veleda, Rivas, & Mezzadra, 2011, p. 120)

For other studies, the issue of working with students in poverty conditions in Argentina became formalized training strategies that aimed to prepare teachers to educate poor children, turning poverty into a differential feature of the other that reorganized the pedagogical relationship (Serra & Canciano, 2002; Serra, 2003). The assumption on which these proposals were supported was that specific training was needed to work with poverty, as teacher training revealed insufficient. Those initiatives were based on the idea of the existence of a deficit, relative to the social environment of children and their families. Poverty was essentialized, establishing what the poor were and were not, what they could and could not, giving the context a decisive role. Teachers were reduced to mere technicians who needed to be trained to work with poverty. These operations reversed the way in which the relationship between education and poverty had historically been built in Argentina, in which school bet on teaching to ensure the consolidation of the social order. This also enabled upward mobility for the popular and middle sectors, by carrying out an intervention in relation to inequality. This scenario was revoked when policies declined the aspiration to institute the common. Thus, the fragmentation dynamics of the education system were deepened:

“To admit the question of how we educate the poor, from where and where to, means supporting a reconfiguration of the field of pedagogy. The current question about the culture of the other, their attention or respect, reconfigures the pedagogical operation, and in the name of respect and attention to differences, we blur the illusion of equality” (Serra, 2003, p. 107)

Several research studies strongly discussed the proposal for a “located” training for work with specific populations. These studies attempted to address the relationships between education and poverty as a link that delimits a problematic field, showing that if the context was assumed as a limiting factor for educating it prevented the school from becoming a place of construction of democratic horizons (Birgin, 2006; Frigerio & Diker, 2013; Redondo & Thisted, 1999; Redondo, 2016; Vassiliades, 2012). This way of conceptualizing context as the cause of school failure structured a logic of exclusion: the outside was frozen as something associated with evil (Dussel, 2004; Southwell, 2021). In this sense, a set of research studies argued about the need to produce knowledge that recognized the place of subjects and their potentiality, highlighting that the experience of context as a limit for educational possibilities did not invade schools in Argentina (Achilli, 2010; Birgin & Serra, 2012). They placed a central focus on methodologically approaching the ways subjects and educational practices are signified. In this context, ethical and political training of educators became central.

Establishing a difference between education and transmission, some studies noted that the latter offers an inheritance and the enablement to transform and re-signify it, while education did not imply that a student transformed what is taught to him. Transmission could not set a directionality since its effects depended on the enablement of the new generations (Diker, 2004; Southwell, 2009). Unlike education, which pursued objectives, transmission provided a starting point and allowed a subject to build the difference. In this context, the question of the common, the collective, and the production of equality became essential:

“The world and the country in which we live, where knowledge circulates and communication creates new bonds, our lives are driven by inequality and injustice; there, some long-standing debts are still present and new ones show the limit of some past dreams. In that territory, we ask ourselves again about the political – transformative – role of the institutions that have as their object the common, the collective and among which we place the school (…) Education and teaching have a political dimension that houses rights, which produces subjects, that promotes or hinders the participation, democratization and transformation of institutions and society” (Southwell, 2009, p. 180)

In that frame, educational research in Argentina showed the need to make visible the possibilities, commitments and utopias set to be developed in pedagogical scenes (Birgin, 2014; Redondo, 2016; Southwell, 2008; Vassiliades, 2012). This implied conceiving the other as capable of inhabiting that possibility, of being a subject of possibility, a position marked by an ethical perspective. That methodological position led to the production of studies where the focus was on the potential that each situation showed, approaching the way schools produced the plural within the common. These are aspects that integrated the discussions on teaching work as the construction of a position in specific scenarios, as a way of dealing with different policies (Southwell, 2009). These discussions enabled a perspective that addressed how teachers were producers of pedagogical knowledge and focused on the recognition of what they daily did in schools.