Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Situated in the reconceptualize movement for understanding curriculum, I offer the use of performativity theory as lens for the study of the notion of quality within global and national discourses in teacher education curriculum in Latin America, regarding the excessive focus on standardization and accountability that distrust teachers’ professionalism. I discuss the notion of quality within global and national documents and policies in the Latin America context. In this regard, I argue that this notion of quality, presented as the solution, constitutes also the problem itself that policymakers pretend to identify. By linking the curriculum to such kind of performance, politicians take control of what is to be taught: the curriculum. In this sense, this idea of ‘quality’, derived of a neoliberal and neoconservative agenda, reproduces an understanding of curriculum that fails in representing the subject itself. In addition, the neoliberal agenda about ‘quality’ is expressed in the prescriptive curricula and its vocationalism. Prescriptive, because is trying to prescribe the work of teachers in schools, and vocationalism, since curriculum should have profit-making potential through the standardization. All of this distrust professionalism in general, and of teachers in particular.