There will be 22 teachers, with a minimum of five years of work experience, who will be interviewed in depth, within the framework of the Regular Fondecyt
By Lorenzo Palma Morales, Science in Chile.- How do rural teachers build school and educational trajectories? It is one of the main research questions that the research team from the Universidad Austral de Chile (UACh) and the Catholic University of Temuco (UCT) seek to answer by linking teaching experiences with historical and sociocultural contexts.
The work team is advancing in the first of three years of research, within the framework of the Fondecyt Regular project No. 1221524 “Teacher Trajectories rural. Contributions to better understand rural schools”, led by Dr. Marcelo Arancibia Herrera, from the Institute of Educational Sciences of the UACh and financed by the National Agency for Research and Development of Chile (ANID).
Getting to do research in rural areas and, especially, studying teachers comes from a very interesting trajectory, according to Dr. Marcelo Arancibia, since he in other research teams has studied the continuous training of teachers through training programs post titles; the use of technology in the classes, and later, how the interactions of teachers and students in the classrooms were expressed, in terms of educational relationships, with emphasis on how these change after teacher improvement, among other studies.
There will be 4 teachers from Aysén, 10 in Los Ríos, 8 in La Araucanía. “The three regions express different ruralities and manifest different types of rural education. They will be teachers who work in subsidized and municipal establishments”, explains Professor Arancibia, the idea is to cross the history of teachers’ trajectories with historical and political events of education in the country. Post-pandemic educational transformations will also be analyzed preferentially.
The three regions present different contexts. Los Ríos stands out for having the largest number of rural schools; La Araucanía has a large amount of rural enrollment and in Mapuche communities, while in Aysén, it is characterized by isolation and difficulty of communications from the schools to the regional capital.
Biographies tell stories, and Dr. Arancibia’s team hopes to learn, deepen and analyze them, focusing on rurality as a political option that questions the national tendency to merge and close schools located in sparsely populated territories. With this, it will be possible to characterize the school and educational trajectories, located in time and place in rural contexts and in times of socio-educational transformation, as happened with the Pandemic.
In this first stage, in addition to Dr. Arancibia, the team has been formed by three researchers, Bernardita Maillard, Dikssa Sáez, Paulina Larrosa, and researchers Alberto Galaz and Gerardo Muñoz, so far, there are four undergraduate students who will focus their theses within the framework of Fondecyt and two students of the Master’s in Education.
The 22 teachers who will participate in the study, at this stage, are preparing an autobiographical text, or the “report of the experience”, where they must answer the initial questions of who are they?, and how did they become the teacher they are? now?. This will be the starting point for the preparation of questions, of the in-depth interviews, of the next stage, in which there are also spaces for conversation and meeting, where teachers will share experiences and knowledge, to learn from their own experiences based on in a model of collaborative Teacher Professional Development of peer learning that also allows for the return of results from the project to the teachers and their rural schools.
This Fondecyt research also hopes to vindicate the current relevance of rural education by showing that rural teachers have particular traits that contribute to the development of the entire educational system. The experiences and knowledge gained during the second stage of the study will be reflected in the publication of a book and other dissemination documents.
