Teachers’ politicity as a sociohistorical juncture: bringing a Freirean angle to education policy studies

ABSTRACT

This paper engages with the Freirean concept of politicity for critical policy studies in education. The first part lays the ground to expand the conceptualisation of teachers’ politicity. I argue this entails an examination of the limits and possibilities within a juncture. To develop the argument, the second part focuses on a teacher strike that took place in Chile and draws on corpus-driven discourse analysis to explore news from a national teacher organisation and from an influential newspaper. Through the angle of politicity, I identify and discuss ideational projects during the strike with an emphasis on counterhegemonic resources for change.

KEYWORDS:

• Politicity
• Freire
• teacher strike
• discourse analysis
• Chile

Introduction

‘Teaching is always a political practice’ Freire affirmed throughout his work. Politicity as the never neutral, always political, inherent feature of education and teaching, is widely acknowledged in the critical scholarly world. This idea has also been extensively used to back up moral and ethical calls pushing back both neoliberalisation and authoritarian regimes.

But what does it mean to recognise the political nature of teaching beyond the aforementioned? What other Freirean legacies can be brought to light by thinking critically about and with this concept? And how can politicity contribute to education policy studies? For Freire, reading the world and reading ourselves within this world is an essential part of an emancipatory praxis. In this regard, teachers’ politicity is grounded in a strong understanding of history framed by historical materialism. As historical beings, we intervene in a world that pre-exists us, and of which we are part. Contrarily, both voluntarism and mechanic objectivism carry the risk of cancelling the role of education (Freire 2016). The concept of politicity can be understood historically as laying a strong ground for Freire’s previous idea of conscientisation, while also revising some of his idealistic-oriented first writings.

This paper asks about the implications of recognising the inherent politicity of teaching for the field of critical policy studies in education. To do so, I make use of Freire’s idea of politicity as a heuristic device to carry out historical thinking on the relations between policy and educational practices. I argue that politicity for the field of policy studies in education calls for a closer examination of both the limits and possibilities of teaching as framed in a sociohistorical juncture. This entails careful attention to both structure and agency in the moments of practice, as for an examination of culture, ideology, and power in this interplay.

To develop the argument, in the second part of the paper I work with data from a larger research project aiming to explain change in teacher policies over time in Chile. I explore news from a national teacher organisation and from an influential newspaper, from a combined Corpus Linguistics (Baker et al. 2008) and Critical Discourse Analysis approach (Fairclough 2013). In particular, I reconstruct a moment of teacher strike and policy debate between April – August 2019 in Chile and unwrap and explore the ways in which social forces are manifested, together with the imaginaries that were at stake with an emphasis on potential counterhegemonic resources.

Finally, I conclude by arguing that Freire provides a language for both informed critique and hopeful possibility, and that thinking about teachers’ politicity in a historical thinking way provides a firmer ground from which to talk about teachers’ power in the context of policy studies and beyond.

Politicity and social transformation

The concept of politicity lays at the core of the Freirean tradition. Its meaning, which is framed in the condition of education and teaching as always political in nature, has set the ground to acknowledge the multiple implications of educational decisions. This condition follows from human existence and our consciousness of it (Freire 2016). As we all have the capacity of acting in the world and are permanently placed within specific circumstances, against or in favour of something or someone, education is always a political act. This is the political condition of humanity and social life (Freire et al. 2014), where the impossibility of neutrality stands as we are always in a certain place.

For educational studies, these assertions have contributed to the analysis of educational settings, curriculum, and teaching practices, from a critical standpoint. In other words, the Freirean approach has made it possible to look at the ways in which educational encounters dialogue with both structures of oppression and emancipatory projects beyond traditional educational settings (see Kirylo 2020). Yet the concept of politicity has not been completely developed in comparison to others, such as conscientisation or critical literacy, nor extensively expanded from Freirean scholars. The fact that politicity is partially addressed throughout most of his work makes it difficult to find a full robust definition, yet at the same time and for this reason it underlines its centrality for critical education. Then, unveiling politicity’s larger contribution requires immersing ourselves into a set of Freirean onto-epistemological understandings.

The introduction of politicity to Freire’s work added a deeper layer to the notion of conscientiousness, hence strengthening his views and adjusting his idealistic-oriented first writings (Pérez 1997). According to Freire, conscientisation first rendered little justice to the real world; specifically, to the intertwined link between comprehending the world and acting on it, which had been first left to the process of knowing alone. But politicity suggests that no action can be undertaken without entailing the political quality of the subject since conscientiousness is not separated from the world. This is reflected in Freire’s distinction between being in the world and being with the world (Au 2017). While the former suggests a separation between object and subject, the latter highlights our dependent relation between knowing and the concrete objective reality that we know of. This means that our ideas are born ‘from the relations between people and from relations between people and their material world’ (Altmant in Au 2017, 175).

The indivisible link between humankind and the world is constitutive of human beings. Therefore, reading the world and reading ourselves within this world is essential as we are unfinished and uncompleted beings. Our dependent attachment to the world arises from this condition vis-à-vis our constant process of becoming. In Freire et al.’s (2014) words:

At this point we are grasping something that we may call the nature of human beings. The nature, not understood as something that simply exists, and not something that exists independently of history, a priori of history but on the contrary, as a creation within history (15–16).

The place of ideas in the making of history is far from floating above the concrete reality. As part of a human production, ideas are constitutive of our humankind while at the same time, these are shaped by human agency. Consequently, Freire insisted on the need for knowing the world from ways that go beyond hegemonic forms of knowledge production, to transform our realities. In the contrary, there is a risk of replicating ideas of our current present in a static way and without an imagination that challenges current structures of oppression. In this vein, the relation between the world we inhabit and the world that may come to be is also indivisible. Bonded by utopia, this relation allows for new ways of being and living (Freire 2016). Similarly, the unfinished nature of humans is founded in change. As long as we continue existing, processes of change are inevitable, these are a condition of our existence and a condition of the social world.

Possibilities for change are enrooted in the here and now of our immediate reality, in the conflicts and confrontations of our present, as well as in the material conditions, constituting a viable dream instead of a naïve vision. Consequently, the recognition of humankind’s historicity is as much an epistemological matter as a political one. By driving us to reflect on what the future would look like, utopia brings politicity back into question. In other words, the imaginative exercise of envisioning new realities is, at the same time, an echo of our own positionality.

Education, particularly the kind that encourages epistemological curiosity assumes a pivotal role (Rossatto 2004). As Gadotti (2008, 154) indicated, ‘ … to educate is always to indicate paths, to point toward a possible future. Thus, there is no education without utopia’ it is a way for becoming as it expresses a human product and action towards their future. The educational practice envisions and embodies these possibilities, and teachers are the main manufacturers of educational practices. Therefore, by referring to teachers’ politicity, I am deliberately emphasising the particular position of teachers in shaping educational change. Its position defies social reproduction as it is creative of new realities into existence (Connell 1995). To some extent, their labour embodies a window space for forging new temporalities.

The inherent politicity of teaching may offer many more contributions than backing ethical claims for a humanising education or recognising structures of oppression. Acknowledging the conditions under which change takes place from a transformative optimism (Rossatto 2004) can help to delve into the analysis of teacher power as well as refining an examination of policy processes. This can be a strategic contribution to the field of critical policy studies in education. Politicity can work as both a heuristic device and analytical guide to explore the relations between policy and educational practices while also strengthening the interconnections between Freirean legacies and critical social theory.

This article sits with the idea that change is a space of possibility and indeterminacy (Streck 2008), foregrounded in politicity and one which represents a commitment to the examination of ideas and ideologies of our time. This examination is of key relevance since even though change is part of humankind and the world, and of the constitutive link between both, the direction or form that change assumes is neither necessarily aligned with our aims, nor it is completely visible to us. In addition, the limits and possibilities in which change circumscribes are not given nor made instantaneously but constantly remade. This is the historically made side of history. Conversely, fatalism, a contemporary problem of our world that abounds in neoliberal projects, denies the role of history and humans in history by negating change towards new paths (Freire 2016). Similarly, voluntarism, on the one hand, and mechanic objectivism, on the other, carry a conception of history that cancel the role of education. Social and political practices are a necessary condition for the human process of becoming in a never-ending dynamic of creation and recreation where each generation ‘has to forge in its own practice and fight, equal and different, overcoming the anterior generations’ (Pérez 1997, 11).

Implications for education policy studies

The multidisciplinary field of critical policy studies in education is concerned with the larger social processes encompassing educational reforms. Founded with an orientation to critique and transform aided by a clear recognition of power, this field emphasises the historical character of education policy and its analysis as a response to the persistence of tecno-rational approaches to policy analysis in education which has been pointed out by several critical scholars (Webb and Gulson 2015).

Policy constrains and enables educational possibilities. In line with a Freirean standpoint, I am particularly interested in policy change that offers more possibilities for humanisation and emancipation. While policy agendas are functional to specific interests, these are also always open to crises and contradictions. Policies represent a relatively volatile arrangement within a particular time and space (Jessop 2010). These can offer solutions and continuities to state structures and represent ‘temporary settlements’ attempting to resolve conflicts in a particular moment. Correspondingly, policy arrangements entail a relatively stable set of practices and discourses, every education policy text constitutes an unstable product that codifies rationales, disputes and deliberations deployed by the wide range of actors interacting (Fairclough 2013) as well as an encoded representation of the world (Ball 1993). The often-competing projects being mobilised come to rise as part of the confrontations of our time. Notably, today’s globalisation did not emerge as a self-generative entity but as ‘a specific point in time in the process of the capitalist economic development’ (Rossatto 2004, 17).

Consequently, the field main task goes further beyond the analysis of policy documents, or their mere implementation and it can encompass other layers and spaces where education policy circulates. Noticeably, in Latin America, social movements have had a primary role in shaping educational systems (Tarlau 2022). In particular, the strike as a collective action has shown potential and a horizon for transforming policies and bringing better realities into existence. At the same time, it also expresses a moment of intense conflict in the realm of policy and politics.

Teachers’ strikes are a moment of policy and politics where not only agential elements of the social life play a part, but also structural aspects. Verónica Gago’s (2020) remarks about the feminist strike are of relevance here. For the author, these result from an accumulation of forces that places the future in the here and now. In other words, striking can be seen as an embodied intersection of the present existence with the existence of a future that is not entirely imagined yet, but that is being crafted during and through the strike. In this process, new agential possibilities can be constituted.

The immediate resources of the struggle, as Williams (1989) called it, are essential for the defiance of the social order. I argue that this directly concerns to the politicity domain. The ideational resources of the teachers’ movement are a manifestation of their politicity as these are both embedded in material relations and shapers of new social relations, and their power is grounded in this dialectical intersection. In this sense, the actions taking place during the strike and the ones preceding it, push for collective problematisation of teachers’ positionality and experiences.

Framed in a sociohistorical juncture, the relations between policy change and a moment of potential cultural and structural elaboration (Archer 1995), such as the strike, involve limits and possibilities that can be looked through the lens of politicity. At this stage, a clarification about the nature of policy needs to be made beforehand: policies are not entirely structurally based, part of institutionalised orders and products of agential forces that also involve agency. Besides, as text, policies can also sediment new styles and genres.

Now this paper’s argument can be further expanded. Politicity refers to the limits and possibilities as well as to a determined way of looking at these and to how deep certain ideas permeate in our structures of thinking. Similarly, from a Freirean view, the protest is also the reaffirmation of the possible change (Freire 2014).

This intimate relation with education policy has methodological implications. The opportunities for challenging policy paths are circumscribed in a dynamic process. In this study, this is conducted through a focus on language. Before moving into a methodological proposal that uses the grammar of politicity, the following section unpacks the 2019 teachers’ strike in Chile to uncover the limits and possibilities within a certain juncture.

Context of action and the circumstances of the 2019 teacher strike

The military dictatorship that took place between 1973 and 1990 in the country, restructured the public educational system from a marketisation and privatisation process (Falabella 2015) and affected the teaching profession enormously through systematic persecution, control, and precarisation of their work (Zurita 2020). The repercussions in teachers’ organisations lasted several years, reaching the period after the return to democracy. During these years, teachers witnessed the continuation and expansion of a period of neoliberal policy experimentation without a strong opposition. Compared to Argentina, where teachers’ strongest resistance against neoliberalism took place back in the 1990s (Tello 2013), answers from Chilean teachers took longer and they even were described as absent subjects in the well-known educational movements of 2006 and 2011 (Cornejo and Insunza 2013). However, the diminished political power that had characterised their political organisation hit a tipping point in 2014–2015 with the Teacher Spring (Acuña 2022) or the Grassroots Rebellion (Sisto et al. 2022), when a spontaneous teacher movement emerged in response to a set of measures announced by the government. This movement served as a platform for the debate over the New Teacher Career; a policy that reorganised the teacher profession into five stages of career progression tied to performance outcomes. The project of the New Teacher Career refined the country’s standardisation architecture (Sisto et al. 2022) within market and accountability policies.

The proliferation of market and accountability driven reforms has had a severe impact on teachers working conditions and practices across the globe. These create new expectations about the profession, which taken together reshaped what count and can be known about teaching profession (Holloway and Brass 2018). Research about teachers’ strikes have highlighted teachers’ answers to neoliberal reforms that affect education and their work, which have been marked by an intricated relationship with the state that can move between cooperation and cooptation (Tarlau 2022). Teachers’ resistance to these policies has allowed them to develop a better understanding of their situation by connecting the complex links between their everyday experience of burnout and precarisation with oppressive structures (Sánchez Cerón & Del Sagitario Corte Cruz 2015). This resonates with Acuña’s work, which suggests that the 2014–2015 strike was articulated ‘beyond the traditional labour and economic demands and describing their actual subjective experience as teacher’ (2022, 7).

The 2019 teacher strike is particularly interesting since it follows a period of teachers’ political re-emergence, which took place during 2014–2015 in the debate for the teacher career. During this preceding moment, a dissident faction within the Colegio de Profesores (hereafter CdP), the country’s teacher organisation that acts as a teacher union, came to power and won over its presidency. Yet, less examined than the 2015, the 2019 strike took place amid the initial outcomes of educational policies that aimed to counteract the education neoliberal model. These reforms, effected in 2017, modified some of the most contentious elements of the educational system, such as private profiting, municipalisation, school selection and parental free choice (Rosenzvaig-Hernandez 2022). The main demand was against the double teacher evaluation, that had resulted from the New Teacher Career. On 18th April the Facebook account of the CP declared:

Teachers in Chilean public education are subject to two parallel evaluation systems, the Teacher Evaluation of Law 19.961 and the ‘Teaching Career’ (Law 20.903). The duplicity of these evaluation systems results in work overload and distraction of time, energy, and resources of teachers in the preparation of evaluation instruments instead of the development of their classrooms (Colegio de Profesores, 18th April, 2019).

On the 3rd of June 2019, the teacher union went into an indefinite national strike. According to the Colegio de Profesores, the action was backed up by 80% of the teacher force. Nine days later, the negotiations with the government started taking place. The proposal of the Ministry was discussed among the CdP’s regional committees, who voted to continue into strike. After that, several negotiations with the Minister and Deputy Secretary of Education took place, and on the 18th of July, the senate issued a legislative project on teachers’ contractual hours, one of the main points on demand. The national strike extended for 55 days, during which the CdP organised marches, picket lines, and other public demonstrations such as artistic performances and media statements.

Methodological notes

The main goal of the research methodology has been to break down the implications of politicity as a heuristic device to look at change and possibilities for teachers. Processes of change and all social practices involve language. With this affirmation, I do not pretend to reduce the social world to language but to highlight that as a social structure, it can articulate social practices and relations and that change in these practices and relations can reflect on it (Cornejo and Insunza 2013). As a structure of thinking, language also enables an intelligibility of the world (Freire 2014). Correspondingly, an examination of the ideas, ideologies, and imaginaries at stake during the period of interest serves the purposes of this study. I draw on James and Steger (2014). for whom there are different levels of stabilisation of meaning formation going from ideas which are the immediate ‘elements of thoughts and beliefs’ (423), ideologies ‘patterned clusters of normatively imbued ideas and beliefs’ (op. cit) and as such are useful for navigating the always complex political grounds. ‘Imaginaries are patterned convocations of the social whole. They are ways of imagining how ‘we’ are related to each other in concrete communities or entities of belonging’ (op. cit). Finally, ontologies are ‘the most generalised level of meaning formation’ (op cit.) that constitute ways of being.

Methodologically, the paper uses tools from Corpus Linguistics (CL) combined with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to explore the use of language in the text form of data. This combination provides a general view of a relatively large set of documents, together with a closer examination that allows for zooming in on the meaning of data. Besides, critical approaches to discourse have proved to be suited for exploring ideology (Cohen 2021).

Data consisted of texts from the news section of the CdP website between April and August 2019. From this, a first corpus of 28,710 tokens was put together. In addition, a second corpus comprehending news during the same period was generated. This corresponded to news from ‘El Mercurio’, a powerful national newspaper, considered a major defendant of neoliberal and conservative ideas (Cabalin 2014). From this, a total of 99,090 tokens was created. This second corpus helped as a reference corpus which allowed for comparisons between words, ideas, and ideological themes and hence serving this article’s purpose of exploring counter-hegemonic resources. Only news mentioning education, teachers or their organisation were included and based on this criterion, the whole corpus consisted of 211 documents. The corpora were uploaded into AntConc 4.0, a free software widely used for CL.

Traditional CL search tools served as an entry point to the documents. First, a fixed list of words was queried, answering directly to the politicity domain. This included a semantic cluster of reasons and motives (e.g., ‘goal’, ‘purpose’ or words following ‘for’, ‘to’) and indicative words (e.g., ‘should’, ‘has to’, ‘must’). In addition, a measure of keyness was integrated to assess whether keywords are more present in the target corpus in relation to the reference corpus. Following this first round of analysis, specific keywords that could potentially hold ideological significance were selected to run collocation and concordance analyses. The underlying reasoning for this is that ideas can be identified through words in context. For this purpose, a list consisting of a set of lines was displayed, which includes the words of interest and the words on their left and/or right.

Therefore, concordance was used to see the common usage of words within the texts while collocations were useful in examining relational differences in each corpus as it was expected that words such as ‘teachers’ would be equally present but used differently. At this stage, a CDA approach was added to the analysis from which the interpretation of texts entails not just what is meant but, more importantly, an attempt to provide explanatory accounts of social agents’ discourses dialectical relation with non-discursive aspects of the social world (Jessop 2010). In specific, attention to style texturing, interpretation of ideological contested words, and grammatical features (Fairclough 2013).

The analytical strategy consisted of searching for ideational projects being stabilised and the specific analysis looked at how the different levels of meaning challenged the ideas, ideology and imaginary represented by El Mercurio, as a corpus representing hegemonic discourses, to later draw implications for teachers’ politicity in the aforementioned period. I explored both corpora independently and swapped them as target and reference corpus. This allowed identifying unusually frequent and with unusually low frequency keywords in relation to the reference corpus, also known as positive and negative keywords, respectively. For each theme resulting from the combination of the different analytical strategies undertaken, I use the angle of politicity to discuss possible implications.

Noteworthy, news as a form of discourse does not represent all the communication forms in which political actors express their views; media interviews, social media posts, and protest signs, among others, do so as well. However, it does provide availability and relatedness between discourses. Nonetheless, other texts might have pointed out different findings, which constitutes one of the limitations of the study.

Non hegemonic and hegemonic projects

I first describe the CdP corpus representation of ideational projects. There are four main themes represented in the CdP corpus. The first is the scope of the strike where an image of massiveness is expressed through the words: ‘everyone’, ‘country’, and ‘national’. Although at first glance, the word ‘country’ might suggest a more patriotic-oriented discourse, its use is linked to the large adherence to the strike which reaches a country level. Also, the description of features of the mobilisation process, which is stated as historical, wide, and massive, constitutes another part of this theme. There is value in the very act of striking that manifests in positive attributes such as support from civil society, social organisations, and political parties, among others. Hence, adherence and society's attention to the CdP strike is a common distinctiveness of the corpus.

A second theme is pondering the negotiations. This theme groups the words and collocations: ‘has, have been’, ‘no’, ‘is’, ‘is that’, ‘government’, ‘this’, ‘these’, ‘action(s)’, ‘answer’, ‘carry out’ and includes references to meetings, communication exchange, media statements and the demands. Through this theme, not only a follow-up of the actions in the context of the strike is presented but also an assessment of their effectiveness. The ideas circumscribed in this theme position the CdP against the government due to its ineffectiveness and passiveness in meeting and responding to teachers’ demands. They also express alternative actions that are being developed to reach solutions.

This is a complementary action to the demands and to our strike, which goes through the administrative channels of the public prosecutor given that the Government is completely closed-minded. We believe that regardless of how this conversation continues in the context of the strike, it is feasible to carry out other actions simultaneously (CdP, 5th July 2019).

A third theme I identified is unionism. It articulates a common collectivity and identity while referring to the organisation’s internal building capacity and general strategy. This theme groups the words: us, we, ours, if, from, teaching body, workers, regional, district based and unity. The uses of plural pronouns refer exclusively to the teaching body. Function words in the form of keywords can be indicative of style (Cohen 2021), in this case, they frame issues from a collegiate and unionism perspective. The invoked ideas of who the ‘us’ refers to, point to the members of the teacher organisation in the first place, and to teachers from the public sector in the second place. In this regard, unity is mainly directed to the union members and less occasionally to unity with other social forces.

A mobilization that has been inspiring for the entire social movement, which has observed that with organization, unity, and conviction it is possible to resist and roll back neoliberal policies. A mobilization that closed one stage and left the next open, with the task of achieving the points not reached during the 8-week strike. A strike that woke up teachers. (CdP, July 2019).

Finally, a fourth theme is critical working conditions. This shows the pressing issues affecting teachers and teachers’ analysis of the educational system. It is expected that a theme from a union strike points to problems in their working conditions. Nonetheless, the specificities of this theme provide a rich vision of their particular struggle. In that sense, as I expand in the following subsections, how the union articulates its diagnoses matters because it also expresses its accumulated experienced and reflexivity, together with the policy arrangements being contested. This theme comprehends the words: ‘hours’, ‘work’, ‘project’, ‘heating’, ‘evaluation’, ‘years’, ‘SLE’, ‘debt’ and ‘fight’. The positive keyword, ‘heating’, which might seem strange in this semantic cluster, expresses the lack of necessary infrastructure to carry out classes in southern schools as a consequence of the government's indifference to public education.

Public Education is in real abandonment. There are schools that have plagues of mice in the rooms. There are schools where there is no heating and temperatures are close to zero degrees in their classrooms, and that is how our children in the south study (CdP, July 2019).

The word SLE is also interesting. SLE stands for Local Educational Services (in Spanish ‘Servicios Locales de Educación’), which comprehended a reorganisation of the public (municipal) administrative architecture resulting from an education policy enacted in 2017 (Law 21.040). The teacher organisation accused the government in power of perpetuating the detriment of the public sector and pointed to how this affects their classrooms. The problems associated with their working conditions impede them from focusing on their specific aspects and more relevant tasks of their work.

Challenging hegemonic imaginaries

Whereas the two highest ranked positive keywords: teacher and teaching staff are not linked to a specific theme or pattern but serve multiple purposes; zooming into some of the keywords from the identified themes provides a better sight of the structural and agential elements in the moment of practice of the strike.

A market guided ideology has been at the core of the policy transformations in the country’s education arena. This is consistent with the longevity of the teacher demands from the critical working conditions’ theme. For instance, ‘debt’ refers to a historic debt that goes back to the 1970s when teachers from the public sector were transferred to the new municipal system with non-payment of their salary benefits. The municipalisation of schools created a decentralised system that compromised teachers’ stability by ceasing their public servant status.

The denouncement from the teachers’ larger organisation of their working conditions suggests that the reforms put in place over the last decades have not only maintained but also added new complexities to their situation. Besides their contractual situations, there are the poor infrastructure of public schools and the pressures from their evaluation system. The exploration of concordance lines uncovered new elements in this regard. Table 1 displays ten concordance lines from the word ‘hours’ (from a total of 55 hits) that expresses the centrality of rightful contracts recognising their actual work.

Table 1. Concordance extract: hours.

CdP Corpus
end the precariousness imply by	hours	of extension and spend that part of the day
Now to fight for the	hours	of extension and to insist with the parliament
demands such as the tenure of the extension	hours	the payment of educators’ major
among teachers’ demands, tenure of extension	hours	and end to the double Teacher Evaluation
such as ‘extension hours’, which are legally	hours	of work under the ‘contract’ regime, which
some teachers are holders of, for example, 30	hours	of work and their day is completed with 14
they are assured of a part of their working	hours	while the rest is left to their discretion
teachers who, besides their regular	hours	carry out part of their working day with
teachers outside their working hours, adding	hours	to their working day
teaching working day, which regulates	hours	of teaching and non-teaching

In addition, other demands indicate the most recent rearrangements of neoliberalism such as the double evaluation caused by parallel laws of accountability systems (Acuña 2022). Different performance-based incentives have been created since 2001 but there are two predominant ones since they are attached to direct consequences such as being fired or put on probation measures.

The overall instability of the teaching profession has transcended governments in power and educational reforms implemented. However, the government in power is positioned as the single interlocutor of the demands (84 hits), instead of other administrations or larger arrangements such as the state (only 20 hits). On the contrary, the main collocation and cluster pattern of ‘government’ in the hegemonic corpus alludes to the ‘previous’ government, which corresponds to a centre-left coalition under which the educational reforms attempting to soften the neoliberal model were implemented.

The negative keywords: ‘students’, ‘classes’, ‘kids’, ‘learning’, ‘hours’ and ‘school’ are linked to a critical learning loss. This means that the hegemonic corpus narration about the teachers’ strike stresses harmful effects of the class interruption, and that this narration is significantly absent from the CdP corpus. The following table exemplifies the learning loss cluster (Table 2):

Table 2. Concordance extract: classes.

El Mercurio Corpus
teachers should return to	classes	and continue negotiating with the Government
Without teachers, there are six weeks of lost	classes	and learning
they want their children in	classes	and they want solutions
the focus is on the recovery of	classes	and the Ministry will monitor with special
The key will be in how the	classes	are recovered and whether friction emerges
prolonging the interruption of	classes	in hundreds of schools, thus seriously affecting
migrant students in public education are without	classes	due to the strike
in the last seven years, 120 days of	classes	have been lost due to teacher strikes
we want all classes to be recovered, and the	classes	that are recovered are the ones that are paid
The strike affects learning seriously; thus, missed	classes	must necessarily be made up

The discourse about learning loss is especially aimed at ‘vulnerable’ students such as migrants and those in public schools. However, the decay of the public system was a project orchestrated by neoliberal forces. Ideas expressing the downfall of the public have converged in a loop imaginary and ontology caused among other things, by the voucher funding system that allocates schools funding to students’ enrolment (Falabella 2015). In addition to the problematic situation regarding the loss of classes, the actions to be undertaken following the strike are strongly directed to the learning loss recovery plan, which entailed additional teaching hours in schools. This learning loss can be traced to the global move from teaching to learning focused educational approaches, that at the same time resulted from the knowledge based economy to solve the neoliberal crisis (Moreno-Salto and Robertson 2021). In this context, the support of parents and families during the strike is in dispute. If they agree with the hegemonic narrative about learning loss and turn against the CdP, the scope of their strike can get threatened. Moreover, the neoliberal premise that parents are the rightful consumers of education that have been accentuated over decades is at this interplay (Falabella 2015).

A counterhegemonic resource to these hegemonic ideational projects stands in the intersection between unionism and critical working conditions. Even though this is not statistically significant, it points to a direction of potential defiance because it redirects the class hours – learning collocation, to long-term educational purposes and connects it to the meaning of teachers’ work. This is expressed in the following quote from the news posted as an open letter to the civil society a few days after the end of the strike:

We do not work for those who have imposed a marketized educational model, (…). We work so that girls and boys can build a life project that allows them to fully develop their abilities; we work so that the daughters and sons of our country have effective possibilities to overcome the deep inequalities of society and fully integrate into it; We work for a more just, supportive, and free country (CdP, 29^th July 2019)

The dialogue with the civil society seems to be at the front of their strategy for making the most of the strike. Mobilisation in this context is the set of actions that sets in motion ideas, actors, and collaborations as part of a larger project and strategy. I interpret the use of ‘mobilization’, which constitutes a positive keyword, in this regard. Whereas the hegemonic corpus uses ‘paralización’, which etymologically emphasises the act of stopping from work or other duties, part of the CdP corpus's distinctiveness lies in reinforcing the movement as a generative force.

In the realm of politicity

In this subsection, I draw on the hegemonic and non-hegemonic aspects of the corpora that were previously described to delve into the limits of what is being challenged as well as the extent of the agential capacities in emergence.

Teachers’ influence ability during the period of the 2019 strike resemblances their status before the dictatorship. Their organised strategy to dispute education policy settlements evidence their agential capacities being transformed during ‘a strike that woke up teachers’ (CdP, July 2019), which also differentiates from the grassroots rebellion (Sisto et al. 2022), whose main feature was its spontaneousness. The positive narration of the mobilisation process of the scope of the strike indicates a revitalisation process of teacher organisation in terms of maintaining participation, massiveness, and adherence. In this regard, the news section of the CdP website also seems to work as a mean for retaining active involvement of their members by maintaining an open channel following up on their disputes.

In terms of the development of the CdP, an internal organisation is presented in the teacher corpus in relation to the theme of unionism. The ideas expressed there, relate to social movement unionism as an ideology informing their practices. Social movement unionism emphasises the connection between economic and political demands towards a transformational horizon via intersectoral alliances to fightback the neoliberal order (Stevenson 2015). But building an intersectoral alliance without affecting what has been achieved in internal revitalisation might present some difficulties. This can be exemplified through the following extract, referring to a national strike called by a platform of social movements and collectives:

In the union, there is awareness that teachers recently participated in a national strike that lasted more than a month, so in this case, the call for the 5th September will appeal to teachers to participate in different ways in order to express teachers’ discomfort with the social, economic and political situation that is being experienced these days, and with it, generate a day of citizen mobilization that breaks with normality throughout the country during that day (CdP, 29th August, 2019).

The low level of significance, together with the thinness of a social movement unionism discourse, might indicate that this is not yet sufficiently stabilized in the ideational project of the CdP. Similarly, arguing that the revitalisation process is fully accomplished would be too premature as it will overlook more nuanced dimensions of power. From a radical vision (Lukes 2004), the power of unions and teacher movements does not rest exclusively on their negotiating capacity but on the power to dispute and shape actors’ desires, aspirations, and projects.

The ideational projects that dispute the nature of teaching in the CdP corpus, such as the meaning of their work (CdP, 29th July 2019), have the potential to change the expectations about the profession and what counts as being a teacher, which are longstanding meanings of the current order (Holloway and Brass 2018) of ontological sediment (James and Steger 2014). Shaping ideas is precisely a potential outcome of the strike agency as a human and collective action.

Although teachers’ diagnoses of the relation of their labour with the educational system are vast, their imaginaries about the future and its connection to the concrete demands of the movement are rather unknown based on the corpus analysis. Words associated with reasons and motives refer predominantly to short term issues of a specific character, oriented to actions such as legislative projects, and a list of demands. Although among the larger word frequency and range there is ‘public education’, which is used as a noun without major reference to what it is and what it serves. Similarly, ‘comprehensive education’, a low ranked keyword of the corpus, follows this same use.

Over the last decade, the absent linkage between teachers’ working conditions and a larger pedagogical project has been recurrently pointed out as a critical node in the Chilean teacher movement from political and academic analyses (Acuña 2022; Cornejo and Insunza 2013). The analysis carried out here indicates this has not yet been entirely overcome. Moreover, the comparison between the CdP and El Mercurio corpus, may indicate other risks of this absence. For example, by linking the consequences of the strike to the decay of public schools and students’ learning, the hegemonic discourse obscures the real configuration and functioning of the educational system hence restricting other imaginaries and convocations of the social world.

Conclusions

In this paper, I asked about the contributions of Freire’s concept of politicity to education policy studies. Specifically, I focused on teachers’ politicity, which I argued is grounded in the transformative nature of their labour. Delving into the ideas, ideologies, and imaginaries through language, provided better access to it and therefore allowed for a deeper understanding of the concrete possibilities for change in the 2019 strike sociohistorical juncture.

Acknowledging the nature of the spaces where policy circulates, is pivotal for critical policy studies in education. Here, the strike’s lens as an experienced (Gago 2020) and as a conflictive moment where contestation over meaning is more prone to be unveiled (Jessop 2010) was useful for theorising the possible ways in which hegemonic and potential counterhegemonic resources would manifest. Because structure and agency play an equally relevant role in social life (Archer 1995), my purpose was to attend to both aspects while looking at the news of the strike. The conceptualisation of politicity guided and organised a way for looking at this, which started with an identification of meanings through themes, it continued focusing on the ways in which those meanings challenged the hegemonic imaginary, and it finished with an exploration of the limits for what is being challenged and agents’ capacities.

As a concept heavily anchored in context specificities, politicity relies upon a profound knowledge from the researcher about the matter at stake. As Freire (2014, 273) pointed out, ‘at the end of the day, it is necessary to discover the historical, social, political conditioning, etc., where possibilities exist or do not exist’. Therefore, Freire’s politicity also speaks to the role of research and researchers because it calls to prioritise questions about possible directions of and for change.

Evidencing the links of politicity with our dependent relation to the social world and vice versa, offers a language and an angle for informed critique and hopeful possibility that allows a clearer form for seeing teachers’ power. Based on the analysis I carried out, teacher politicity in the 2019 juncture resides both in their accumulated experience with the neoliberal order and in the collectivisation of a deeper understanding of it. This order is expressed mainly in marketisation, privatisation, free choice, performance-based accountability, and learning centred teaching approaches. In the same vein, even though teachers’ accumulated experience makes possible a stronger ability to dispute educational policies, the potential of their power can get compromised without a vision of a pedagogical and educational future that can contest the direction of ontologized contemporary discourses. The current limits are set by the intelligibility with which teachers’ organisations imagine, analyse, and express the link between their working conditions, the educational possibilities of their students, and major social problems. Therefore, expanding the limits of the possible change might then require a robust connection among the dimensions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo under Grant N° 72200421 / Becas Chile.