International learning evaluations and teaching positions: dislocation and new senses. A critical analysis

Abstract

The article aims to analyze the new configurations of sense that international and standardized assessments of learning – as the Pisa test driven by the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development – produce in the pedagogical field. In particular, the interest is in identifying, in the field of discursivity, the significants associated with the process of symbolic overdetermination and semantic resends which affect the pedagogical field. Also, in the pedagogical field itself the displacement of the significant evaluation and the new condensation of senses that is operated from the international tests of learning, as well as the elements that are articulated to generate a teaching position are studied. Research work is conceptually based on some of the central categories of the Political Discourse Analysis of the school of Essex (Laclau y Mouffe, 1987). Work is done, basically, with documentary sources. From the study it is observed how the introduction of the discourse of the international agencies on the assessment uncouples the latter from the curriculum and teaching by altering the pedagogical sense and the position of the teachers in the educational process. At the same time, the significant evaluation tends «to dominate the field of pedagogical discursivity» becoming a nodal point that attempts in an unstable way, to suture the sense of teaching.