Purposes of Teaching: To Inform and to Train

As the purposes of teaching materialize within the classroom, they encompass complex decisions and diverse actions that teachers construct through the understanding of their students, the contexts of their daily lives, and expectations regarding their formation as citizens. With the metaphor “children first,” Alliaud and Vezub (2012) highlight the cornerstone that primary and secondary school teachers in Argentina attribute to the formative needs of their students in order to identify the purposes of educational labor. They underline their students’ knowledge and lived experiences as the most significant factors for improving teaching. This is a constant priority, although the teachers work in challenging conditions and feel their labor is insufficiently valued. This is also the case for the secondary school teachers from these three countries, many of whom worked under restrictive educational conditions, including holding multiple jobs and managing large groups of students as well as excessive extracurricular burdens.

Teachers’ expectations for their students’ education go beyond the transmission of knowledge, even when they are specialists. For teachers, the core of teaching is knowing how to foster the development of students as responsible and thoughtful citizens and critics with opinions of their own (Alliaud & Vezub, 2012; Borges, 2003; González, 2017; Monteiro, 2002). These SD are a fusion between transmission and training. Monteiro, employing the metaphor “teacher as author,” interprets SD as the construction which results from the didactic and axiological interactions as well as the disciplinary knowledge of teachers. She explains how Brazilian high school history teachers utilize SD through teaching strategies that bring together the transmission of historical knowledge, the promotion of justice as a value, and awareness of past and present social exploitation.

Teaching With Meaning

Understanding the students and the contexts of their daily lives is key for teachers, given their concern that curricular content makes sense, is understandable, and is learnable (Borges, 2003; González, 2017; Mercado, 2002; Monteiro, 2002; Terigi, 2008; Zibetti, 2005). Based on this understanding, they create specific strategies for intervention so that the students can connect their interests, lived experiences, and prior knowledge to curricular content.

These teaching practices materialize even in the most precarious conditions, such as the multigrade schools in rural, remote areas, and teachers see them as necessary from the beginning of their careers as teachers onward. For new teachers, due to their lack of experience, it is a challenge to connect their goals with the previous knowledge and diversity of their students, especially when their cultural reference point is different from that of the community in which they teach (Terigi, 2008). But even for the more experienced teachers, especially if they work in multigrade schools, there are no established, tried and true solutions, only continuously evolving challenges and concerns. Terigi (2008), for example, identified similar concerns between new and experienced teachers alike in multigrade schools in Argentina. The studies of these three countries agree that, for teachers, this kind of knowledge is a constructive, open, and variable process that depends on the experience (González, 2017; Monteiro, 2002; Terigi, 2008), the teaching conditions (Terigi, 2008; Mercado, 2002; Monteiro, 2002), and the grasp each teacher has of different pedagogical goals and the curriculum (Borges, 2003; González, 2017; Mercado, 2002; Monteiro, 2002; Terigi, 2008; Zibetti, 2005).

In the interest in “making course materials teachable, understandable, and attractive to students” (Borges, 2003, p. 8), teachers in all three countries relied on the various knowledges and literacies they possessed. They “fused” them in heterogeneous and agile ways in accordance with the unpredictable and constantly evolving needs of their students and each educational situation (Borges, 2003; González, 2017; Mercado, 2002; Monteiro, 2002; Zibetti, 2005). For this reason, the Brazilian teachers who specialized in specific subjects worked hard to master their discipline but also stressed that this in and of itself was insufficient (Borges, 2003, p. 8).

“A salad of knowledge” is one of several metaphors that the specialist Brazilian teachers used to describe the heterogeneity of their SD, which is essential in making sure students learn course materials. They consider all SD to be “indivisible” and “important,” although “at class time” “they become hierarchical” (Borges, 2003, p. 8). Mercado did not study specialist teachers, but she noticed similar trends among Mexican primary school teachers who were in charge of all of the subjects within the curriculum. She used the metaphor of “a dialogue between different social voices,” referring to the ways that teachers engage with different knowledge and information, as well as the connections they make between them in order to respond to specific teaching situations or situations with their students.¹

Whether teachers are disciplinary specialists or not, or whether they work in primary or secondary schools, they must be able to appropriate SD that make course content familiar and accessible to students. In constructing these SD, teachers connect knowledge about their students with the importance and complexities of the course content so that students will be better able to understand. To make these kinds of linkages between student experiences and course content is essential when teaching to a curriculum, which often references information and processes that students perceive as removed from them, and they are not always interested in learning them.

Monteiro (2002), for example, identified that the Brazilian history teachers she studied considered problems with studying to be social/historical processes for students, making them seem abstract as a result of their spatial, temporal, and cultural lineage. With her metaphor “teacher as author,” she showed how the teachers took singular actions in order to familiarize and put students in contact with course materials. Monteiro refers to the use of alternative accounts with recent questions to foster productive dialogue with students or to involve them in the examination of examples, analogies, comparisons, and even role-playing activities, all in an effort to tie the processes being analyzed with the world they knew. Using these strategies, teachers not only manage to make studying history attractive to their students, but they also reach an understanding of historical processes using their similarities and differences as well as familiar current events as points of reference.

Classroom Workflows in Order multiplicity of cultural, familial, andto Serve Everyone

One of the most distinctive conditions of teaching is working in a group of people with constant interaction and in which one must negotiate daily between the intellectual perspectives and expectations of the participants. Even within the asymmetrical character of the teacher–student relationship, these are active subjects with respect to social processes and the learning each participates in. Thus, teaching demands that teachers create, rework, and deploy heterogeneous SD that respond to the different needs, actively expressed by their students, in this way advancing everyone’s learning.

With the goal of addressing the diverse needs of children with regard to schoolwork, teachers return to SD generally acquired through experience, as these specific cases are not usually addressed in educational training environments. Terigi (2008), for example, through the metaphor of “inventions of practice” (p. 138) details the SD that teachers employ in order to circumvent the conditions that limit the possibilities for learning for students in multigrade schools in Argentina. This metaphor recognizes the contributions of teaching practice to organize diverse groups of children, marshal content, and manage class time in order to motivate students who learn in conditions that demand that teachers pay simultaneous attention to students in multiple grades.

The author found that the teacher in a multigrade classroom divided her students up in two coexistent ways. One way was to group students according to their individual grades and another was in accordance with the rate that children progressed through course content, independent of their formal grade. In this sense, in a classroom of first-, second-, and third-graders, a little girl in second grade could move into the third grade depending on her progress (Terigi, 2008, p. 109). These decisions took time, observation, and deliberation on the part of the teachers and also resulted in the construction of SD through practice, although, as Terigi indicates, this is not SD that anyone taught them.

Similarly, for the single-grade Mexican teachers, Mercado (2002), through her concept of “dialogue of voices” explained that in their classes, teachers directed their explanations to the entire group while also clarifying certain points for some students. Therefore, teachers had to know and identify, in the moment, at what level students were understanding and where they needed to go in order to progress with their learning. Throughout these processes, the author identifies links between different SD, such as understanding the specific personalities of the students, their potential regarding each course subject, and the ability to adapt their teaching approach according to the individual as well as the collective dimension of the teaching (pp. 125–144).

In another complementary relationship, Mercado (2002) observed consistency among teachers who subdivided their classrooms to account for both challenges and student potential when approaching schoolwork. These adjustments, not necessarily explicit or permanent, helped teachers to diversify their teaching practice to account for these differences throughout the year. In this sense, Mercado also noted teachers’ SD to recognize student progress and lag and to adjust their teaching practice to each individual student (p. 44). The complementary relationships between the metaphors employed by Terigi (2008) and Mercado demonstrate SD that teachers use to organize and manage teaching in diverse ways and with the goal of fostering the heterogeneity of their students and their progress within the classroom and within specific school and social conditions.

The Incorporation of Knowledge Acquired Through Teacher Training Processes

Regarding high school history teachers in Argentina, González (2017) found, employing the metaphor “changes in long-standing practices” that, although Argentine history teachers continued to utilize traditional practices such as oral presentations and quizzes, they have also incorporated active student interventions, meaning that students are encouraged to contribute by expressing their opinions, thoughts, and deliberations about course content (p. 4). Throughout these processes, González noted changes in SD. They have combined prior knowledge with new teaching innovations tied to cognitive and constructivist trends in a reciprocal relationship. That is to say, established ways of teaching history are maintained, while teachers simultaneously rework their linear focus, mobilizing student participation to further their understanding and encouraging them to construct their own explanations about historical events. In this way, they produce a relationship between the previous SD and the new knowledge of the teachers coming from continuous training, providing better learning opportunities for students.

Examining a complementary relationship, using the metaphor “creation-appropriation” of SD, Zibetti (2005) details the teaching practice of one Brazilian primary school teacher who developed learning environments for a special needs child until his progress was evident to everyone around him (p. 215). To analyze the case, Zibetti concluded that the teacher developed these SD by putting literacy studies in conversation with her student’s performance. From another perspective, using the metaphor “dialogue between social voices” Mercado (2002) analyzes the actions taken by a Mexican second-grade teacher in a rural school, working to develop a free text work project with her students. The results motivated them to continue with their writing until the end of the course. Mercado understands this process as a dialogical production of SD, the result of the teacher using the Freinet model to think through the course, his analysis of his students’ literacy levels, as well as their potential to learn (pp. 43–45).

The insights of González (2017), Zibetti (2005), and Mercado (2002) complement one another in order to show that the proposals offered in professional training environments are not incorporated directly into teaching practice but rather are mediated through deliberative processes in which teachers analyze, rework, and calibrate the relevance of these practices to their students. In this way they convert the field of teaching into a field of SD reformulation and construction.

The Saberes Docentes in Early Literacy

Studies of SD when teaching specific academic content have garnered growing interest from their beginning in the first decade of this century (in 2005 there were 5 studies, 12 over the next five years, and 22 in 2015). These are broader studies due to interdisciplinary exchange between different academic disciplines (Monteiro & Penna, 2011). While they draw from the earliest studies about the nature of SD, they incorporate the theoretical perspectives and the pedagogical approaches of their different disciplines into their teaching. They are influenced by recent curricular reform; indeed, almost the half of the studies investigate teaching practice and SD for specific academic materials, taking new pedagogical approaches (NP) as a reference.

We present a synthesis of Brazilian and Mexican studies of SD teaching early literacy. In both countries, like in other Latin American countries, illiteracy is a sociohistorical problem. With the incorporation of social groups who had been previously excluded from educational systems, holding students back and dropout rates both rose in the first year of basic education, primarily because of the difficulty of teaching students the writing alphabetic system (SAE, in Spanish) (Ferreiro, 1993). In this context, from the 1980s onward, research interest in the development of NPs to teach literacy has grown.

The pioneering works of Ferreiro (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1979), aligned with the theories of Jean Piaget, spread widely throughout Latin America, inspiring experimentation with pedagogical approaches and their gradual incorporation into the school curriculum (Ferreiro, 1989). Their research documented the acquisition of writing as a cognitive process. They argue that children, through their participation in writing processes, produce and rework their ideas about SAE until they comprehend its alphabetic nature and conventions.

These studies harshly criticized the dominant teaching of early literacy, for their emphasis on direct teaching of graphs-phonetic relationships based on repetition and memorization. Traditional practices such as dictation, copying, and reading words and phrases, as well as texts used by teachers, were challenged for their focus on encoding and decoding in a way that is disconnected to the more communicative uses of language.

The pedagogical maxim “you learn to read by reading and to write by writing” was gradually incorporated into the curricular reforms to teach students literacy at the beginning of their education. This trend was strengthened by the sociocultural studies and their conception of reading and writing as socially situated practices.

In contrast to Mexico, in Brazil the term letramento was coined to refer to learning the uses of written language in diverse social practices, and techers use literacy to refer to learning SAE (Soares, 2004). In this way, they allude to this sociocultural perspective as alfabetizar letrando.

In NPs, with some variation, it is expected that children, from the beginning of their education, will engage with situations where they read and write with the learning objective that they learn the uses and social functions of different texts. This, simultaneously, promotes a reflexive teaching style of the SAE that facilitates the discovery of its conventions. All together, NPs demand profound and radical transformations in teaching practice and traditional SD. On one hand, NPs replaced the traditional direct teaching of the SAE with reflective and indirect teaching. On the other hand, they approached teaching SAE through the process of reading and producing texts, in contrast to the sequential approach of this subject matter that teachers practice. Additionally, with NPs, in recognition of the different literacy levels children begin the learning process with, reprobation is prohibited during the first year and is extended to two years in Mexico and three years in Brazil, the period in which students learn SAE.

Both countries sponsor initiatives to help teachers learn NP best practices and change their current practices. In this sense it is understandable that the 15 localized studies of literacy practices and SD take NP and the teacher training as reference points. For this reason, teaching practice, SD, and their relationship to traditional and NPs is one of the central themes of inquiry of these studies and the focus around which we organize our synthesis.

In our synthesis, we consider eight Brazilian studies and two Mexican studies (see Table 3). These studies were carried out in public, primary schools within working-class neighborhoods with schools that functioned within materially precarious conditions. Only Almeida (2009) also included private school teachers in their study. The administrators and teachers, with important differences between schools, participated at the same time in different official programs that operated independently of one another.

The participating teachers had a similar profile. All were women, between 20 and 60 years old. The majority had a bachelor’s degree and some had attended graduate school—more Brazilians than Mexicans—and very few had only completed high school. All had at least two years of experience teaching early literacy. In Brazil, they had courses in teaching literacy available to them, although not all of the teachers took these courses. Some Mexican teachers participated in local professional development trainings on NPs and others took short courses on language, not specifically oriented toward literacy.

The studies survey a diversity of practices and of SD and their heterogeneous relationship to traditional practice and to NPs for teaching literacy. However, the metaphors constructed (Metaphors column, Table 3) propose divergent reading from these relationships and from the potential changes they propose with respect to traditional practices of literacy education. In this way, they constitute two contradictory metaphorical interpretations (right column, Table 3) (Noblit & Hare, 1988). While one supports the persistence of SD from traditional teaching (the metaphor of continuity), the other (the metaphor of hybridity) argues for the production of new SD. Despite this contradiction, however apparent, the studies appear to complement one another when one considers the heterogeneity of the practices being observed and they varied local contexts of their production.

First, we show how the Brazilian and Mexican studies complement one another in order to show a panorama of the complex relationships between teachers and NPs and traditional education approaches to producing knowledge for teaching literacy. Then we discuss the specific places where we believe the interpretations diverge.

Coexistence of NPs and Traditional Knowledge

Literacy practices within the different studies—beyond their diversity in the professional and academic trajectories of the teachers and their working conditions—mobilized a plethora of different SD. They coexist in different ways and with more or less influence from traditional knowledges—direct teaching of the SAE—and NPs—alfabetizar letrando.

One central and common interest of the Brazilian and Mexican teachers is that the students master SAE and be able to read and write by themselves during their first year of primary school. They dedicated the majority of their time and attention to this and it is the main goal of the knowledge they produce.

This focus is key in understanding the relationship between teachers and tradition and contemporary objectives, and for the knowledges that they recuperate, deconstruct, rework, or create in order to teach literacy. Thus, with the NPs teachers can share how important it is that children appropriate the different social uses of writing and reject the idea that the reading and writing is sufficient for students to master SAE. This way, they recover traditional knowledges and link them to the objectives of the NPs that they consider to be—through experimentation—useful and relevant as students progress and learn SAE.

The ability to read within different genres, even when the children cannot read by themselves, is one of the goals of the NPs that different Brazilian and Mexican teachers incorporated into their practices for teaching literacy. By sharing mostly literature from literary genres such as short stories or comics, they put their students in contact with different texts and their social uses, together with, or even in the place of, the typical academic texts for teaching the alphabet in sequence. From the SD produced, teachers use reading, in the literacy process, for pleasure or distraction (Arnoldi, 2014; Espinosa, 2014), or for research and understanding (Espinosa, 2015; Zibetti, 2005).

In contrast, the production of texts was less present in the SD of the teachers, most notably among the Brazilian teachers studied by Oliveira (2004, 2010) and Cruz (2012). The collective production of texts, mediated by the teacher, is one of the most challenging and disconcerting goals of NPs for teachers in their efforts to increase student literacy when the students do not yet know how to write. Generally, in both countries, they spent more time and attention on writing texts as the students mastered SAE. However, some developed SD that fused textual production and teaching SAE. These teachers participated in formative processes of collaboration and exchange of experiences (Espinosa, 2014; Zibetti, 2005), and reported positive results when they used NPs (Espinosa, 2015).

Indirect teaching of SAE is where the Brazilian and Mexican teachers diverged the most with regard to NPs and go back to traditional educational practices such as direct teaching. Some teachers radically distanced themselves and reestablished direct teaching of SAE using memorization exercises and traditional texts. These SD coexist with others closer to NPs, such as involving the children in reading different literary genres (Arnoldi, 2014; Cruz, 2012; Miranda, 2012; Morais, 2009) and even in textual production (Cruz, 2012; Espinosa, 2015).

Other teachers exhibited a more moderate distancing, also recuperating traditional direct teaching but fusing it with the reflexive orientation of NPs. For example, they used reading materials as sources for keywords to teach specific letters, at the same time encouraging questions about and reflections on the conventions of SAE. They stopped this practice when the students had learned the alphabet but returned to it when specific difficulties writing complex syllables arose. They even employed this more direct strategy with children who were falling behind (Arnoldi, 2014; Espinosa, 2014; Zibetti, 2005).

According to our assessment, this synthesis demonstrate how the Brazilian and Mexican studies complement one another. It accounts for the complexity of SD for literacy, generated from contact with NPS and academic research on language. As the synthesis suggests, SD are heterogeneous combinations of different resources derived in different proportions from traditional practice and NPs. However, this diversity, and what it represents, is problematic in that interpretation. The metaphors of continuity and hybridity disagree on the meaning of the synthesis presented. In what follows we explore two hypothesis that work to clarify these interpretive divergences.

Continuity, Rupture, or Hybridity

Although all the studies testified to the co-presence of tradition and NPs, they diverge when interpreting the meaning of practices and knowledge with respect to traditions in literacy. On one hand, they locate interpretations that situate these practices as a form of continuity, which they express through the use of metaphors such as traditional methods (Morais, 2009), or a tendency toward the traditional (Miranda, 2012). On the other hand, they situate the interpretation of practices and SD as hybrid productions that interweave tradition and NPs. They use metaphors such as mixed methods (Almeida, 2009), hybrid pedagogical habitus (Arnoldi, 2014), manufactured tactics (Oliveira, 2004, 2010), construction of practices (Cruz, 2012), the creation of knowledge (Zibetti, 2005), and connections between perspectives (Espinosa, 2014, 2015).

To our knowledge—first hypothesis—both positions reflect, in part, the great diversity of literacy practices and knowledge produced by teachers. They differ because the social and institutional realities in which the studied teachers teach within the two different countries are themselves that different, not to mention their personal and professional histories, as well as their access to NPs.

In the face of challenging reforms such as literacy NPs, the necessary governmental training policies, for example, have not always been successful (Espinosa, 2015), or have been absent (Oliveira, 2004, 2010). The metaphors of continuity coincide with regions of professors with marginal access to professional development training programs, or that participate in training programs where theory is taught independent from knowledges built up through teaching practice (Arnoldi, 2014; Sarti & Bueno, 2007). Thus, it is understandable that these teachers see them as distant from everyday practice, unhelpful when confronting the challenges of teaching and, consequently, resort predominantly to experiential knowledge, even when they are acquainted with the goals of NPs (Almeida, 2009; Arnoldi, 2014; Espinosa, 2015; Miranda, 2012).

In contrast, the teachers who most connected their experiential knowledge to NPs associated their successes with training experiences that they considered to be valuable. They participated in programs that involved them in collaborative processes of planning for, evaluation of, and reflection on their experiences. With the support of their coordinator, they discussed doubts, problems, and alternative action plans (Espinosa, 2014; Zibetti, 2005). In other words, while they learned pedagogical theory and NPs, they simultaneously participated in the co-production of the understandings and knowledge necessary to effectively employ them in accordance with the needs of the class and the working conditions of their individual institution (Espinosa, 2014; Espinosa & Mercado, 2009; Zibetti, 2005). The collaboration was, additionally, an emotional support to confront the fears and anxieties of working with NPs whose results are unknown, a situation that is particularly difficult for literacy teachers because parents and teachers are so attentive to student progress (Espinosa, 2014; Talavera, 1992). Involving teaching staff in diagnosing and adopting agreements on teaching strategies was also a process that some teachers appreciated and found helpful in order to understand how to integrate NPs into the classroom (Cruz, 2012; Espinosa, 2015).

Other aspects, such as the distance between the resources required to operate NPs and the precarious situation of existing resources within schools (Espinosa, 2015; Zibetti, 2005), the kinds of work demanded by NPs and the respective local institutional arrangements, or curricula and their role in marshaling learning (Arnoldi, 2014; Oliveira, 2010), all show the different realities that teachers confront in each individual school. And, in this sense, it also indicates the different conditions in which they produced their practices and SD more or less close to NPs and traditional literacy education shown in the different studies.

Even so, the documented experiences, even in the case of the teachers more aligned with traditional teaching practices, enacted an active position in relation to NPs. The metaphors of continuity highlighted the rejection of the indirect teaching of SAE, the scarcity of reading, and the absence of actually producing texts; however, few considered the incorporation of a reflexive approach or the diverse social uses of texts that several teachers employed. What do these incorporations represent in terms of the practices and knowledges employed by teachers? Is it possible to sustain continuity in the presence of conflicting and still emerging resources of the practices which have been supposedly replicated?

Our second hypothesis is that the difference in interpretations is also based on researchers’ different conceptions of the relationship between theory and the development of teaching practices and SD. Smolka (2000) distinguishes two visions addressing the appropriation of social discourses. In one, which we refer to as receptive, the appropriation expresses a direct correlation between the prescriptions and expectations of social discourse with actions taken. In the other position, which we call productive, the appropriation constitutes an active response, which can disagree with and oppose what is established and desired within social discourses.

We posit that the metaphors of continuity-rupture are constituted from a reception oriented appropriation. The NPs define what is appropriate for teaching literacy before other approaches, such as the traditional methods. In contrast, the metaphors of hybridization are produced from a productive perspective: practices and SD are active responses in the face of diverse teaching approaches, including traditional approaches and NPs.

Thus, common occurrences, such as reading diverse social texts, produce divergent readings. From a receptive perspective, they are interpreted as a continuity for their distancing from the work laid out by the NPs. Morais (2009), for example, observed activities that provide “different experiences with writing such as working with rounds, rhymes, fables, and other textual genres” (p. 90). However, she questions two aspects that in her opinion contrast with NPs. On one hand, the connection between those texts and the syllabic method to teach SAE, “after the analysis of the text,” says, the teachers “direct their activities towards the study of words, focusing the formation of new words, by putting together syllables, reinforcing the study of syllabic families” (p. 93). On the other hand, she questions the relevance of the use assigned to texts so that children learn their use in social practices. Thus, she considers the use of a children’s song set forth by a teacher to be “equivocal” because it does not explore “the aspects of the song’s musicality, rather, the text serves as a pretext for the study of the animal theme” (p. 126).

By deviating from what is expected within the NPs, the metaphors constructed from a receptive perspective end up identifying practices and SD within the use of text as a continuation of tradition. In this sense, Morais (2009) concludes that, “the practice of teaching literacy is marked by the employment of traditional methods, . . . through an emphasis on teaching and learning the written alphabet and not on the uses and social functions of writing” (p. 98).

Regarding the metaphors of hybridization, similar events are interpreted as active and generative responses and reworking of practices and previous knowledge. Espinosa (2014), for example, describes the simultaneous and complementary uses that one teacher made of reading diverse text, a strategy derived from NPs, and syllabic teaching of SAE, a strategy derived from traditional educational practices. According to the teacher, children learned SAE through the syllabic approach, but their learning was “very mechanical.” In contrast, as they read texts they learned to “analyze, question, and describe” (p. 332). After considering other similar cases, Espinosa concludes that between teachers, “experience intervenes like a voice that formulates and contextualizes ideas and resources coming from past and present teaching approaches, while combining them with solutions for unique situations” (p. 327).

In our estimation, the adoption of receptive or productive approaches is related to the theoretical frameworks employed, particularly with the status granted to the theories that sustain NPs. Although all of the studies accounted for the theoretical and pedagogical ideas of NPS—for example, Ferreiro, Soares—it was the theoretical centerpiece of the studies that focused on continuity, while in the studies of hybridization, theories about the production of cultural practices played a more central role—for example, Chartier, De Certau, Wenger, Leave, Bajtin, Bordieu—as well as knowledge about teaching—for example, Rockwell, Mercado, Pimenta, Schön, Tardif, Gauthier, Perrenoud.

A More Complete Panorama of SDs

Latin American research on SD has progressively diversified the field as well as the theoretical and methodological perspectives employed in its inquiry, thereby making different aspects of the complex process of its construction more visible.

The overlap found in these studies is understandable, in large part thanks to the important transnational similarities of its production: for example, the predominance of a severely unequal economic model, the contexts of poverty—extreme in many cases—and the precarious situation of schools with few resources where teachers work, as well as the rich sociocultural diversity that contrasts with the standardized, neoliberal educational policies.

The panorama these studies suggest can be summarized. Teaching is a situated, social construction, a process that demands production and creativity. Successfully motivating students to focus on their work and to learn the content laid out within the curriculum is a teaching requirement and a central concern of teachers that is never resolved once and for all. What to do and how to accomplish it are specific knowledges that teachers produce by teaching in diverse institutions and cultural contexts.

Teachers produce knowledge through the vicissitudes of practice, but in its construction they inevitably incorporate diverse sources: their small personal sphere, the curriculum, colleagues, their experience as a student and as a teacher, their professional training, and their individual students. The combination of these sources and the knowledges produced therein are as heterogeneous, mobile, and plural as the intersections between the histories of each teacher, school, and social sphere.

The advent of globalization, new technologies, and the “knowledge society” renewed a tendency to blame teachers for the meager results of the educational system. From certain sociological perspectives, teachers appeared to be prisoners of their own adverse circumstances, paralyzed in the face of changes under way, but the panorama that the studies of this synthesis paint is different.

Teachers and the knowledges that they produce, for example, are not indifferent to the cultural conditions and poverty of their students. Rather, they invent practices and knowledges to teach in circumstances not addressed by research, pedagogy, and teacher training, such as in multigrade schools. They are not entirely resistant to NPs generated within recent educational research, but neither do they assume them passively. They incorporate them in connection with their previous knowledge and their formative goals. They create practices of teaching, fusing—in heterogeneous, variable, and mobile ways—traditional educational practices and NPs, while also assessing and calibrating their results.

The panorama the studies of these three countries construct deepens our understanding of the processes of continuity and change within teaching practice and SD, and how these relate to the possibilities and limitations that arise from precarious social and institutional conditions for teaching, standardized reforms for a multicultural reality, and strategies for teacher training.

In light of the already limited conditions of teaching, we should investigate the repercussions that the demands placed on teachers by neoliberal policies—such as standardized teacher evaluations—have on teaching practice and SD. Such contributions are fundamental, as school systems and certain research focuses tend to assume that the school, despite everything, can and should improve teaching and student achievement, neglecting to consider the conditions of production of the teaching itself. Additionally, it would be useful to study commonalities across borders in processes that are currently studied within each individual country. What new understandings about SD might result, for example, from a consideration of reforms within different disciplines?

Shared and Diverse Social and Academic Contexts

We posit a similarity in economic, social, and cultural contexts between Latin American countries to explain the shared interest in studying teaching and the knowledges that teachers produce. However, the growth and diversification of these studies is heterogeneous between countries. More than 70% of local research comes from Brazil, and in smaller proportions from Argentina and Mexico. We hypothesize that these differences are a result of the particularities in the development of academic research communities and their influence within each country. Brazil, for example, during the past decades significantly promoted educational research and the training of new researchers through postgraduate opportunities. The majority of the research developed on SD in this country could also be attributed to the early influence, since the 1990s, of internationally renowned authors such as Tardif and his contributions to continuing national debates over teacher training.

However, interest in SD in Latin America is broader than the considerations of the studies addressed here. A considerable output from Argentina and other countries, for example, starting in the 1980s and more prolifically in this century, focuses on teachers’ narrative documentation of their experiences and knowledge.

The adoption of these narratives as tools for the professional training of teachers and the circulation of knowledge within the guild suggest new ways of connecting research to teacher training and the general improvement of teaching practice. This approach generates new and important research questions about its potential to effectively foster these articulations between research and training, and above all, about its effects on SD and teaching practice.

Explanatory and Normative Theoretical Frameworks

The debate over the rationalist-normative approach to teaching practice and SD that the study positioned as constructions of the teachers themselves is still in process. We noted both positions in the studies, at times paradoxically coexisting in the same investigation.

We understand the interest that studies grounded in normative frameworks have in identifying the aspects of teaching practice and knowledge in terms of how both can benefit the learning of their students. However, we observe the comparison with explicit or implicit pedagogical models, as if they would be replicable outside the diverse social and institutional conditions of teaching. Additionally, we note a scarce questioning of those models from the practices and SD produced by teachers. When confronted with abstract models, the everyday practices and knowledges of teachers are often interpreted as deficient, prisoners of traditionalism. This is worrying in the face of the wave of standardized evaluations with professional consequences for teachers in Latin America.

In contrast, from a normative perspective, it is usual to question research grounded in explanatory frameworks. The argument is that these frameworks are based on good teachers—some are—and that they only highlight the positive aspects of the teachers studied. However, in the development of the field, there are several emerging research projects which point to the convergence of both perspectives. In order to study the day-to-day work of education, these perspectives put the normative expectations that prevent researchers from documenting the diversity of the educational processes that take place every day, including SD, to the test. Without wishing to exhaust the debate, it is worth asking about the potentials for research shared by researchers from both perspectives: How could both camps benefit from a mutual investment in joint studies? Is such a thing possible?