Mapping the debate on educational quality in Latin America as an intertextual field (2010-2016)

GOROSTIAGA, JORGE M.

Congreso; Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society; 2018

Comparative and International Education Society

The objective of this paper is to identify and characterize the main perspectives in the current discourse about educational quality in Latin America. Through the employment of the social cartography approach (Paulston, 1999), the study is based on the analysis of some 20 texts --published between 2010 and 2016-- which discuss the meaning and implications of educational quality in relation to the policies implemented for the basic education sector in the region.While high national and international attention continues to be given to educational quality (Adams, Acedo & Popa, 2012), the vagueness of the concept has been pointed out by different authors and organizations in the fields of comparative education and education planning (IDB, 2000; Casassus, 1999; Myers, 2006; Pedró & Puig, 1998). In Latin America, at the end of the 1980s a new rhetoric of education reform developed in the region based on three key or dominant concepts: quality, equity, and efficiency (Braslavsky, 1999; see also Casassus, 1999). Braslavsky (1999) argues that each of these concepts allowed for different interpretations, but together they established a common framework for reform in most of the countries in the region. At that time, the concern for the expansion of educational systems began to be replaced, at least in part, by the concerns about the performance of schools in terms of student learning and on how to achieve equality of opportunities. For countries in Latin America, the global Initiative of Education for All, launched in Jomtien in 1990, was also influential in the importance given to the issue of quality and its measurement, as one of the goals established in Jomtien was an emphasis on learning outcomes as fundamental indicators of quality. From the beginning of the 2000s, in a new regional political scenario that can be characterized as post-neoliberal (Pulido Chaves, 2010), governments have implemented different kinds of educational policies that seem to imply contrasting views of quality, while regional and international organizations have remained active in promoting education reform agendas aimed at the improvement of educational quality.Based on textual analysis and spatial patterning, social cartography aims at improving our understanding of the changing forms that knowledge fields and policy debates take. Given the increasing diversity of knowledge communities that compete among them developing arguments (and attempting to convince different audiences about their validity), this methodology results particularly suited "to provisionally order and interpret today's multiple views of education and society" (Paulston & Liebman, 1996, p. 23). One of the main elements of social cartography is a phenomenographic or "perspectivist" approach (Paulston, 1995) which involves identifying and comparing multiple ways of seeing, advancing understanding about the heuristic representation of a phenomenon. For a specific issue, social cartography allows to identify and characterize the arguments advanced by different perspectives or knowledge communities, and how these perspectives relate to one another through both textual and visual representation. The database of this study is comprised by some 20 texts published between 2010 and 2016 and that include both documents produced by international and regional organizations, and articles and chapters written by academics. Texts were identified through web searches in various sources (Google Scholar, ScieLO, RedALyC, EBSCO and CLACSO´s virtual library), as well as web sites of international organizations, and through snowballing. Procedures include a close reading of each text to identify its theoretical and methodological choices, as well as an intertextual analysis in order to identify relationships between the texts and to construct the main perspectives in the field.