Teacher Education and its Reforms in Two Countries of the South America: the Cases of Chile and Uruguay

Resumen

One of the last decades’ central public policy in educational subjects in South America is the one that has teacher education as its object. This paper aims to analyze from a comparative perspective the reforms of initial teacher education policies in two particular South America’s countries: Chile and Uruguay, and the transformations that occurred in curricular subjects between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s. of XXI century. To understand the regional and its local singularities in the global framework, a brief characterization of educational systems will be presented, a historicization of initial teacher education policies and their salient aspects, such as curricular, to finally establish some conclusions in relation to the circulation and transfer of global policies in tension with local recontextualization. This work is part of a research project that studies the that have occurred in teacher training in South America during the period 1990-2015 and, as mentioned, assumes an international comparative perspective. Data collection was done through various strategies. A survey of national and sub-national levels normative documents (resolutions, regulations, study plans) was carried out; official documents related to teacher training and / or the considered dimensions, such as circulars, publications, propositional documents; and international level documents: World Bank, OECD, UNESCO; research and academic productions related to teacher training both in Chile and Uruguay as well as in South America.