Over the last decade in the context of collapsing trust in major public and private institutions, Chilean society has engaged in massive social mobilizations culminating in 2019 with widespread rioting in rebellion against the neoliberal model. This socio-political crisis raises the general question which this article addresses: How does such a…

The present study uses a story constellation to explore the experiences of a group of students participating in their high school in an urban city in Central Chile. Because these experiences were motivated by the students' participation in the student movement outside of their high school, they were not considered in any school or policy…

This paper is a call for "counter-pedagogies of cruelty" and memory as counteractions to colonial technologies of violence, erasure, loss, and linear spatio-temporalities and notions of "progress." In this paper, the authors move across geographic locations in Abya Yala to expose and unpack overlapping and often unnamed…

The key to sustained and equitable development in Latin America is high quality education for all. However, coalitions favoring quality reforms in education are usually weak because parents are dispersed, business is not interested, and much of the middle class has exited public education. In "Routes to Reform," Ben Ross Schneider…

This article presents the results of a descriptive case study of the Union School of the Chilean nongovernmental organization (NGO) Alejandro Lipschutz Institute of Science (ICAL-Spanish acronym). The study contributes to the field of adult education by providing a contemporary example of what Gramscian pedagogy can look like. Theoretically, this…

On October 18th, 2019, Chile experienced the beginning of its most powerful social uprising since the return of democracy in 1990. People took to the streets of cities all over the country, protesting against social inequality in terms of healthcare, education, household living conditions, and wages, among other issues. Students, who have been…

Neoliberal discourse has undergone substantial changes over the last years, taking a status as if it were a natural given. In this article we analyse the naturalisation of neoliberal discourse in higher education in post-dictatorship Chile. Based on discourse analysis of two Chilean higher education policy reports, we examine the reconfiguration…

Chile is recognized in the educational policy field as one of the first laboratories of neoliberal initiatives. These policies, initiated under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, did not change with the new democratic governments after 1990. This characteristic led international organizations to promote the Chilean policies in different…

Disrupted schooling can heavily impact the amount of education pupils receive. Starting in early June of 2011 a huge social outburst of pupil protests, walk-outs, riots and school occupations called the Chilean Winter caused more than 8 million of lost school days. Within a matter of days, riots reached the national level with hundreds of…

Latin American teachers' unions have stepped into the policymaking sphere and shaped education policies unrelated to regular workplace priorities like salaries and class sizes at notable moments. The literature on teachers' unions in Latin America has not addressed this, tending to focus instead on those unions' history and role in social…

The 2011 Chilean student protests were a powerful social movement aimed at transforming education and, with it, the social spaces and formations of daily life. This social movement was pedagogical because students transformed the city into a classroom to gain control over the production of space. In this vein, the student movement provided a…

This paper analyses the 2011 Chilean student movement, the most relevant social mobilisation in Chile since the restoration of democracy in 1990. Based on available material and secondary sources, it describes the main features of this student movement, analyses the key components of the students' discourse and its relationship with the Chilean…

Through a qualitative approach this study documents life experiences that youth with a history of sustained social and political participation judge as significant in the development of their civic commitment. Data is drawn from in-depth interviews to 6 Chilean youth (3 ages 16-19; 3 ages 20-24 years) of diverse socioeconomic condition, with a…

Paulo Freire's pedagogy was developed in reaction to the state of "periphery" of illiterate farmers in Brazil and Chile. However, his thinking, which illuminated capitalism's oppressive nature in the classrooms, was enthusiastically accepted in the "centre" and he became a global point of reference for social action. In this…

Chile is facing a major intellectual revolution: organised college students are arguing for the most significant educational reform since the period of dictatorship (1973-1990). Thousands of high-school and university students have refused to go to lessons since early June 2011, calling for better and more affordable education and an end to a…