Ethnography and the Study of Teachers’ Work in Latin America
Ethnography and the Study of Teachers’ Work in Latin America
- Lucía PetrelliLucía PetrelliUniversidad de Buenos Aires (UBA)
Summary
This article examines the possibilities of a comparative approach for ethnographic investigations on teachers’ work. It draws on contributions from a study carried out from 2006 to 2010 in private schools in Buenos Aires. Due to the deep socioeconomic crisis in Argentina in the 1990s, those schools reorganized themselves into cooperative schools. From a holistic approach, the study develops a comparative analysis related to the presencias estatales (state presences) in schools and how teachers experienced this. As the investigation progressed, a series of correlations between theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches were unfolded, allowing teachers’ work, from their “lived experience” perspective, to be recontextualized. The article is organized in four sections. The introduction presents the aim, the methodology, and an overview of the international context for developing comparative ethnographic investigations. The next section provides an overview of studies on teachers’ work in Latin America and Argentina, as well as the possibilities of comparison in the particular thematic field. Moving forward, it describes: (a) the theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches in detail through comparative analysis about the presencia estatales in cooperative schools, and (b) the ways in which teachers experience this. The conclusion presents a synthesis of the comparative analysis and propose new inquiries for further investigations.
Subjects
- Research and Assessment Methods
Introduction
A version of this article in its original language.
Ethnography is not a fieldwork technique, neither is it a method, nor does it consist solely of constructing a good description. Indeed, it is a form of producing knowledge by articulating theory and method which carries its own epistemological demands (Achilli, 2005; Rockwell, 2009; Velasco & Díaz de Rada, Á, 2009; Wolcott, 2003). Taken as a focus or perspective, “ethnography has always been eclectic,” since it has drawn techniques and tools from many other areas of investigation, combining them in diverse ways according to the problem under analysis and the theoretical perspective of each researcher (Rockwell, 2009, p. 20).
Having in mind these different ways in which ethnography has been conceived, I document in this article a series of correlations between theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches at work, which I studied during the development of my doctoral research.1 To this end, the analysis of a comparative exercise about presencias estatales (state presences) within two institutions and how primary and secondary teachers experienced this are presented. The objective is to argue in favor of ethnography as a framework to study teachers’ work. I argue that, taken as an approach that intertwines theory and methodology, ethnography reinforces a reflection on the teachers’ work within the broad context of teachers’ “lived experience.”
The potential of this comparative analysis is to contribute to an international debate about the construction of a comparative perspective based on qualitative and ethnographic research (Anderson-Levitt & Rockwell, 2017). These efforts are reflected in events such as the XIII Inter-American Symposium of Ethnographic Educational Research, held in 2013 at UCLA, as well as in published volumes like Comparing Ethnographies: Local Studies of Education Across the Americas, edited by Kathryn Anderson-Levitt and Elsie Rockwell. This volume includes coauthored articles that compare ethnographies carried out in different countries and by different researchers, focused on a specific theme or field of research. Inspired by the concept of meta-ethnography developed by Noblit and Hare, Anderson-Levitt and Rockwell (2017) present the contrastive analysis as an exercise of interpreting the interpretations of the ethnographers whose studies are being compared. More specifically, what is actually being compared are the metaphors or key concepts employed in each study. In broad strokes, these comparisons indicate that their cornerstone is to wonder: (a) if the metaphors framing one study can be grafted onto another and vice versa (reciprocal translation); (b) if instead, the metaphors employed in the studies are opposites in terms of their worldviews (refutational synthesis); or (c) if the studies describe different but complementary parts of a whole (lines of argument synthesis).
The investigation used as a reference in this article was carried out from 2006 to 2010. During this period, I employed an ethnographic perspective to examine the work processes of primary and secondary teachers in two schools with an unusual configuration based on their legal status. The institutions were located in the central zone of the city of Buenos Aires and were both privately managed. From now on, they will be referred to in this article as the School and the Institute. They had been facing several periods of crisis throughout the end of the 1990s and, for this reason, the teachers and staff of both decided to form cooperatives as a strategy to keep the schools operating. At the same time, both establishments were functioning with considerable payment delay of salaries and benefits (healthcare, family care, and retirement) to teachers and staff, forcing many of them to look for other jobs. Meanwhile, student enrollment also decreased.
Taking those institutions as an empirical reference, I started by designing a fieldwork development strategy with a consistent organizing logic. This strategy aimed to record everything possible (Rockwell, 2009) about the functional processes within the School and the Institute. In this sense the methodology for this work took a holistic perspective, with the goal of recording, as thoroughly as possible, the practices and relationships developed by the concrete subjects in their specific institutional contexts. As Díaz de Rada argues, although anthropological holism presents different versions (2003) “it is not—and technically it cannot be—the pursuit of total knowledge about an entire society, but rather a broad, tireless attitude of inquiry into very different specific relationships between stakeholders, institutions, and social practices” (Díaz de Rada, 2013, p. 19).
By presenting holism as a methodological approach, I do not intend to suggest that theory is not taken into account. Indeed, my intention throughout this article is quite the opposite: to emphasize the articulation of the theoretical and methodological aspects during the development of ethnography. “Holism can be conceptualized as an operation of knowledge practiced by an anthropologist [. . .]. This implies that everything, the totality and the holism are categories that should be defined at the level of theory and method, not at the level of the object, understood as a pre-theoretical reality” (Díaz de Rada, 2003, p. 238).
This process of exhaustively documenting practices, interactions, and the contextual aspects in which they play out allowed me to conceptually establish a series of variables that, from my point of view, intervene in the configuration and development of teachers’ work. Among them, I found that the institutional projects and contexts of schools constituted a dimension that molded teachers’ activities and educated them (Petrelli, 2010a, 2010b). A second dimension was rooted in the ways the families participate in the school community and their influence on the configuration of teachers’ work, which allowed it to be understood from a deeply relational perspective (Petrelli, 2008b, 2010b). Likewise, the ways in which the state was present in these institutions constituted another key dimension of the teachers’ work (Petrelli, 2012).
The work in the institutions with this particular configuration (both privately and cooperatively organized) inspired me to identify the protagonists of each process, the positions they occupied in the educational hierarchies, how they were situated within the structure of the cooperative societies, and the relationships between these issues and the development of teachers’ daily work at each school. Additionally, as my research progressed and as I became a permanent presence in the field, I began to pay special attention to the different ways in which the structuring dimensions of the teachers’ work were expressed in each social space where the fieldwork was being developed. How did the variables identified within the School articulate themselves in the processes of the Institute? What other (new) dimensions would allow me to construct a second scenario?
Hence I adopted a second methodological attitude: a comparative approach, understood as “a necessary condition for the ethnographic description (. . .) in search of analytically constructing the dimensions of variability of the phenomena being studied” (Rosato & Boivín, 2017, p. 92). On the nature, validity and scope of the comparison, Gaztañaga and Koberwein (2017, p. 114) point out that:
When approaching a comparative analysis, one of the essential considerations is whether or not the processes chosen as “case studies” are, indeed, comparable. This might seem obvious, but perhaps it is not, as the analytical dimensions that determine the nature and scope of the comparison indicate. (. . .) According to Barth, in order to overcome this problem we should consider that we are “comparing descriptions” not empirical realities evident themselves. The context, then, ceases to be an ethnographic context in the strictest sense, but the categories produced within this framework incorporate the value of previous ethnographic work. Thus, they serve as a potential tool that opens up the possibility for one more analytical step.
As we will see, I argue that the modalities in which the state makes itself present within institutions constitutes one of the key dimensions that shape the processes of teachers’ work. Thus, this will be the axis of the comparison to be presented in the next section. Although it has been taken out of its ethnographic context in the strictest sense, it incorporates the value of previous ethnographic work (Gaztañaga & Koberwein, 2017). In short, this article offers a synthesis of the many manifestations of the state in these schools under study (Petrelli, 2012), framed by theoretical and methodological reflections that describe the correlations among theoretical/conceptual perspectives, methodological approaches, and the relationships between these aspects and the uniqueness of the empirical point of reference.2
Research on Teachers’ Work in Latin America and Argentina: Possibilities of Comparison
Research on teachers’ work makes up a rich and heterogeneous field with origins in different fields of investigation such as anthropology, sociology, history, and pedagogy, among others. At the institutional level, it is possible to highlight the role that the Latin American Network of Research on Educational Labor (Red Estrado) has played in the Latin American context. Red Estrado was formed in 1999 as an initiative by the Study Group “Education, Work and Social Exclusion” of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), and it has stimulated the production of knowledge about teachers’ work in the region and expanded our understanding on the issue by: (a) the fluid exchange of researchers and other involved social actors (civil servants or union organizations); and (b) the development of public policies for the sector. Currently, Red Estrado is spread throughout different countries in the Southern Cone, where it hosts exchanges with researchers from other regions and countries such as the United States, Canada, France, England, Spain, and Portugal.3
Regarding the anthropological approach to teachers’ work in the region, distinguished and pioneering studies were produced in the 1980s by researchers Elsie Rockwell and Ruth Mercado Maldonado at the Department of Educational Research of CINVESTAV (Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute) in Mexico City. Being in the area, both continue to contribute research to the field, focusing on aspects such as the transformation and intensification of teachers’ work, its complexity, and the challenges involved in developing effective assessment strategies; reform processes and teachers’ opinions of these; and the relationships between families and schools and their impact on teachers’ work (Espinosa Tavera & Mercado Maldonado, 2009; Mercado Maldonado & Montaño Sánchez, 2015; Rockwell, 2013a, 2013b). In line with these developments, researchers associated with the Department of Philosophy and Literature at the University of Buenos Aires, the National University of Rosario, and the National University of Cordoba, among other academic institutions, continue to research education in the Argentinian national context. Their focuses vary, emphasizing issues such as the material conditions of teachers’ work, the impact mandatory school attendance has on it, and the potential for ethnography to contribute to teacher education processes and to analyze the implementations of educational reform (Batallán, 2007; Cerletti, 2013; Cerletti & Rúa, 2016; Neufeld & Petrelli, 2017; Petrelli, 2014; Petrelli & Neufeld, 2017; Sinisi & Petrelli, 2013).
Another focus of Argentinian researchers mainly, albeit not exclusively, in the fields of sociology or pedagogy, is directly tied to who is currently choosing a teaching career and how researchers can learn about this social group. In Argentina, teachers have traditionally been characterized as middle class or petit bourgeois and in the 1990s a debate emerged related to the possible impoverishment of this group (Davini & Alliaud, 1995; Llomovate, 1995; Narodowski, 1990; Tenti Fanfani, 2005, 2010) even though they continued to be characterized as “middle class” (Donaire, 2012, 2013). This debate emerged as far back as the late 1990s, and new questions have arisen: How different are pre-service teacher students from past groups of aspiring educators? Can we speak of a first generation of tertiary students? What previous education do preservice teacher students possess? (Bottinelli, 2014; Donaire, 2012, 2013; Tenti, 2010). These future primary teachers are studying in institutions that have been increasing their enrollment at least since the end of the 1990s, although not on a regular basis (Bottinelli, 2014). The available literature indicates that this increase coincided with a growing heterogeneity in the social background and experiences of the enrolled students. However, it is important to note that the literature has not reached a consensus on whether or not the new students come from more impoverished backgrounds than those who have historically pursued a career in education (Birgin, Pelegrinelli, & Poliak, 2011; Bottinelli, 2014; Donaire, 2012, 2013; Tenti, 2005, 2010).4
Along this line, Noel (2010) has also produced significant findings which reconstruct the social and demographic profiles, expectations, and representations of students at teacher training institutes (IFD, in Spanish) by analyzing the results of self-administered surveys taken by 3,000 subjects throughout the whole country, as part of a research project coordinated by Emilio Tenti Fanfani (2010). This literature also identified “factors” or “motives” that influence people to choose a career in education: the economic context, the longevity of the career, the geographic expansion of the IFDs, the salaries in each region, and the perception of teaching by young people and their families as a more or less prestigious profession (Bottinelli, 2014). Tenti Fanfani (2010) proposes two main reasons: one more tied to education’s “vocational” aspect and another to more “practical” considerations. His research also indicates that a career in education often emerges as a “second option” at which many students arrive, after having completed university or having had other work experiences.
The goal of this literature review is not to present an exhaustive survey, but rather a general overview of the research on teachers’ work within Latin America and Argentina. This functions as a foundation in order to situate another group of studies that presents a historical debate which is still relevant: As a social class, should (or can) educators be considered workers, professionals, or semi-professionals (this last term employed by Batallán, 2007)? These studies have: (a) addressed how teachers’ work has intensified, how it can be considered as an occupation, its characterization as a craft, the issue of the proletarianization/de-proletarianization of teachers; and (b) discussed the frequent interpellations that have promoted the professionalization of the sector through state policies, among other aspects (Alliaud, 2017; Alliaud & Antelo, 2011; Batallán, 2007; Donaire, 2012, 2013; Oliveira, 2004; Petrelli, 2010c; Rockwell, 2013a).
Returning to the beginning of this section, it is interesting to reflect on the diversity of the dimensions linked with teachers’ work as analyzed by different Latin American and Argentine researchers from diverse theoretical and field perspectives. In relation to one another, these antecedents make valuable contributions to our understanding of one of the most complex and least understood jobs (Rockwell, 2013b). But how can we establish a dialogue among these studies? How can we further develop their contributions? Hence, I would like to return to the possibilities of comparison not only for ethnography in general, but also as an (ethnographic) approach to teachers’ work in particular.
At this point, it is necessary to refer to the comparative analysis developed by Anderson-Levitt and Bueno (2017) in “Teachers’ Work: Comparing Ethnographies from Latin America and the United States,” included in the book edited by Anderson-Levitt and Rockwell (2017). Based on meta-ethnography (Noblit & Hare, 1988), the authors present three exercises of comparative ethnography, drawing from different sites and referring to different variables related to teachers’ work. In all examples, they compare and identify the key concepts or metaphors employed in each of the studies in order to finally reflect on the reciprocal character, opposite or complementary, in each of the situations. First, they compare Ruth Mercado’s research on educator knowledge in Mexico with Kathryn Anderson-Levitt’s research on cultural knowledge for teaching in France. They argue that the concepts employed are similar and reciprocal, although each retains a certain specificity. Next, they examine the issue of state intervention in schools and its relationship to teachers’ work by comparing two studies: one carried out by Cynthia Coburn in California, and my own research carried out in Buenos Aires, Argentina. From these studies they extracted the metaphors (external) environment (Coburn) and state presence (Petrelli) for comparison, determining that they are opposite concepts that actually refute each other in that they give contradictory answers to the question where is the state? The third exercise compares studies carried out within the United States (Sally Galman) and Brazil (Belmira Bueno), both focused on the processes of teacher education. The metaphors identified in Galman’s study were “easy” course of study and inevitability, while in Bueno’s study they were less demanding and inevitable. The analysis revealed these metaphors were complementary and documented different aspects of the complex process under investigation.
The three comparative exercises presented by Anderson-Levitt and Bueno (2017) were carried out by observing local studies (meta-ethnography), while the exercise developed in this article goes in a different direction: to offer a comparative analysis within a single ethnography. Although this is its central tone,, there is a suggestive relationship between my project design and the third example of meta-ethnography, in that the concepts employed and being compared in both cases complement each other, and allow us a more complex understanding of a process or issue. In my case, what I documented in each of my fieldwork sites (and the analysis each of them entailed) expanded my overall understanding of the complexity of the impact of state presences (intentionally in its plural form) on cooperative schools and on experiences of teachers.
State Presences, Holism, and Comparison: Between Theoretical Uses and Methodological Approaches
As a starting point, I would like to clarify the theoretical framework used to carry out my analysis. In line with the developments of the Departamento de Investigaciones Eductivas (DIE) as summarized in an earlier section, I prefer to distance my research from the concept of a singular and abstract educator. Rather, I am interested in the specific and contextualized work that primary and secondary teachers carry out every day. This work involves different variables and dimensions, and demands that teachers put into play different kinds of knowledge they have been constructing throughout their professional lives (Petrelli, 2010a, 2010b, 2013; Rockwell & Mercado, 1990). Educators always operate within specific institutional contexts and material conditions that not only refer to physical resources, but also to working conditions, school organization in terms of space and time, “and the work priorities that result from the daily negotiation between authorities, teachers, students, and parents” (Rockwell & Mercado, 1990, p. 66; Rockwell, 2013b).
This theoretical approach to teaching works in relation to a specific, theoretical understanding of the institutions, their dynamics, and the link between those dynamics and the subjects that live them: I refer to the Gramscian process which describes the mutual constitution of subjects and institutions. From this perspective, specific individual subjects are the ones who determine the particularities of the institutions they work in or, in other words, make the institution. At the same time they are constituted—in the broadest sense—by the institutions in which they work (Petrelli, 2010a, 2010b; Rockwell, 1987; Rockwell & Mercado, 1990).5
To these conceptual uses of educational work and institution, I would like to clarify how I conceptualize school and the perspective from which I describe the presence and impact of the state on institutions as concrete environments where teachers carry out their work. Levinson and Holland (1996, p. 2) define school as an “An organized and regulated state institution of formal instruction,” whereas Neufeld (2010) argues that schools are one of the most concrete indicators of state presence in the organization of societies. As I have indicated in a previous work (Petrelli, 2012), the ways in which the state is present in schools must be historicized, since it is a broad issue which can be analyzed from different angles. Synthesizing these perspectives, I conceive the state as a combination of practices, processes, and their effects, lacking institutional permanence: “Its materiality resides in the flow between processes and power relations” (Trouillot, 2001, p. 4) that plays out daily at multiple sites, often unseen or underestimated by social researchers. Barragán and Wanderley (2009) argue that “it is in daily life that the materiality and representations of the State reproduce themselves, and it is also through representations and discourse that the construction of the State materializes itself. These perspectives suggest we cease to consider the State as a single and coherent entity” (cited in Petrelli, 2012, p. 935).
From this point and assuming that: (a) teachers encounter and engage with the state on a daily basis; and (b) it is imperative we consider it “in its disaggregation, in its concrete contexts, in its different incarnations, and in its officials” (Barragán & Wanderley, 2009, p. 22), I will document some of the ways in which the state is present within schools. I suggest that the state’s lack of institutional regularity allows us to see traces of such encounters in situations (discussions, debates, demands) or environments never imagined a priori.
In order to understand the varied ways in which the state expresses itself within these institutions, it is necessary to briefly review some of the characteristics of cooperatives. First, a cooperative is “an autonomous association of subjects that come together voluntarily to satisfy their economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically managed enterprise” (Chiappetta et al., 2009, p. 29).
The regulations establish that the workers associated with the cooperative charge for their work through “withdrawals” as opposed to a “salary,” since they are not in a dependent relationship. However, during the course of my fieldwork, I noticed an inconsistency in how each of the institutions incorporated new workers. At the Institute, those who entered after the formation of the cooperative did so as associates, receiving remuneration for their work as “withdrawals,” whereas, in the School, new workers were contracted by the School and received a salary. This distinction will be central to understanding the analysis that follows.
But first, it is necessary to review in greater detail aspects of the institutional processes of the schools that compose my empirical reference point: their missions and the social contexts that have impacted their histories. As I mentioned in Petrelli (2012, p. 928), these institutional processes
must be analyzed in articulation with the profound socio-economic crisis that, during these years, affected Argentina. This crisis produced massive closures among enterprises of all kinds, and motivated many workers to defend their source of work, taking charge of their places of work: a phenomenon that is usually referred to as enterprise recovery by their employees. The figure of the cooperative was the means par excellence that workers adopted in order to sustain the enterprises in which they had been working.
During the years (from 2002 to 2003) in which these schools organized themselves as cooperatives, the phenomenon of enterprise recovery was becoming a well-known practice. This issue was reflected in two large movements that distinguished the workers who formed part of these experiences. In the course of the fieldwork, we noticed that, at specific moments, educators were in contact with workers from other enterprises, including those connected to labor movements. In fact, according to some of the primary and secondary teachers, these ties were strongly associated with efforts to obtain state subsidies in order to address building and equipment issues. In spite of this, “the majority of teachers quickly realized that the specificity of being a school distanced them from these kinds of experiences because the ties that were established at the beginning progressively lost strength” (Petrelli, 2012, p. 928).
The State in the Institute
I carried out several months of fieldwork in the Institute. I knew a significant number of teachers at high school, all the primary and secondary pedagogical management teams, and the Counselling Board of Directors (at the corporate/cooperative level).6 I have spent long hours in conversation with them about the institutional crisis at the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 21st century, about the initial difficulties once they had formed the cooperative, about ongoing issues, and about the successes and obstacles they still faced. I have also listened to them speak passionately about politics, their families and social ties, their anxieties, and personal projects for the future. From the beginning, I noticed that in their stories these last issues were interwoven with the evolving story of the Institute itself. In the same way, I noticed that the state was almost always present in my conversations with the Institute associates. Without understanding then how these references would contribute to an understanding of teachers’ work, but in accordance with my holistic approach, I documented everything I could about this widely addressed theme: the state.
My documentation of the state presences in the Institute was truly heterogeneous (see Petrelli, 2012). Here, I will focus on a controversy that I was able to document over the eventual “subsidizing” of teachers’ “salaries/withdrawals” by the government of Buenos Aires, through the Dirección General de Educación de Gestión Privada (DGEGP).
It is worth noting that the teachers who work at the Institute are all associates within the cooperative who are compensated through monthly withdrawals. As I analyzed at the time, it is important to point out that what they perceived as payment for their work was changing along with the institutional processes. At the beginning, they had barely made a fraction of what their union had established as the monetary value of an hour of teaching, but later, the reorganization of the Institute as a cooperative allowed them to recover 100% of their rightful earnings.7 Nevertheless, at the time I was completing my fieldwork, all teachers still depended on an extra cash flow (beyond that of the regular fees paid by parents), which allowed them to maintain the facilities and buy materials without impacting the funds for associate “withdrawals.” Intentionally approaching the situation from a holistic perspective, I documented a diversity of subject positions regarding ways of coming up with the extra income which all agreed was necessary in order to make the cooperative process possible. While most favored the idea of DGEGP subsidies, others believed that the extra income should come from credits through the Instituto Nacional de Asociativismo y Economía Social (National Institute of Cooperativism and Social Economy) or through other types of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). There were also those who believed that this money should come from the expropriation of the building (until then the cooperative community had allocated a percentage of their income to paying rent to the owner of the building).
But how did those who advocated for “going for subsidies” construct their argument? I identified two major issues. In the first place, this position was tied to a reflection about their own work situation within the Institute. In this sense, the references pointed to: (a) what they should earn and the fact that that salary would not always be possible; (b) employer contributions that, at least within the initial blueprints for the cooperative, were absent; and (c) expectations about their professional futures: if they changed jobs, for example, or whether their years working as primary and secondary teachers within a cooperative would be recognized, and so on. Second, and related to the first point, their support of state subsidies was also a response to a specific issue: the range of teaching positions.8 They warned that there was a strong likelihood that other teachers would not consider joining the Institute and would, instead, transition to other educational work environments where they would be guaranteed bonuses, vacations, retirement plans, and so on.
What elements were in play in the arguments of those who were opposed to subsidies? In these cases, those opposed articulated a relationship between subsidies (money coming from the DGEGP) and a loss of “autonomy.” Some stated that by seeking a subsidy, “their self-management would dissolve.” At this point it is important to note that governmental support covered a percentage of the contract value of teachers’ salaries within the specificities of the regulation for that school, but always taking into account the minimum number of students per class. This meant that, by accepting the subsidy, the teachers would have to adjust to these new regulations, losing the possibility of contracting external personnel or opening classes that did not comply with the number of students prescribed by state recommendations. The connection between subsidies and loss of autonomy did not end here, but rather established a kind of periodization that can be clearly delineated into different stages: if initially (when they earned less for their work than what was stipulated by the blueprint) the cooperative did not require this type of intervention (“we’ve made it this far on our own”), it would be less permissible to ask for the back pay later, when the most serious aspects of the institutional crisis had been resolved. This improvement was visible through the gradual recovery of enrollment, the growing percentage of withdrawals taken by the associates, and, over time, the incorporation of new personnel who took on tasks that had initially fallen on the teachers: cleaning, building maintenance, and so on.
At this point, I want to consider the temporal aspect of the naturalized construction of the Institute, in order to reveal the correlation between theoretical uses and methodological approaches at work in the production of knowledge about these teachers’ work.
Methodologically, I paid special attention to “history,” in terms of “the temporality of people who carried it out or located its process, articulating it with the past, present, and future. And this temporality grounded their behaviors” (Rosato & Boivín, 2017, p. 92). In the Institute, the position of some of my interviewees indicated that if they had not required help or support in the past (“we’ve made it this far on our own”), there was no reason to ask for it in a present situation when the future outlook was even more hopeful. Aligned with the methodologies I have described, I employed the insights proposed by Nugent (2007), which I found to be theoretically coherent. He observes that “the relationship between the local population and the State (. . .) has clear spatial and temporal dimensions which vary over time” (p. 141).
In what follows, I will synthesize my documentation of the School in relation to the issue of the state and the ways in which it expressed itself within this specific environment. First, however, I will explain a writing decision I made which is, in fact, an analytical one. I am referring to the fact that I began my analysis with my documentation of the Institute, which was the second of the two institutional environments in which I carried out my fieldwork. This decision is related to the way in which I am developing my comparative strategy. Rosato and Boivín (2017) argue that when the comparative method encounters time, it establishes a particular kind of relationship between the synthetic and analytical components of the research. In this schema, “the diachrony does not necessarily refer to the dates of the documented events but rather to the research process itself. Descriptions of facts, sequences, and events are ordered diachronically, in a temporal sequence as well as in an analytical time” (p. 91). It will soon be clear why I have chosen to reverse the order and, by doing so, create a new chronology in analytical terms.
The State in the School
As I mentioned, my fieldwork began in the School and not in the Institute. My first interviewees were teachers who had worked in the School for a long time, who had gone through different phases and challenges there, and who spoke movingly about the work of founding the School. Those teachers became emotional, confidently expressing different issues when talking about the institutional crisis that played out for the last years of the 1990s; a crisis that followed the creation of the cooperative and many years later, slowly started disappearing. A group of phrases caught my attention from the beginning. The primary and secondary teachers articulated that “with the cooperative we stopped being teachers,” and “the hardest thing was when we ceased to be teachers.” In other studies (Petrelli, 2008a), I have analyzed how these phrases fundamentally refer to changes in working conditions and particularly, according to what my interviewees stated, in their transition away from being regulated by governmental teaching statutes.9 The creation of the cooperative appeared in their stories as the beginning of a new institutional phase that changed the pre-existing relationship between teachers and the institution, that formally ceased to provide protection—via their status—but that did offer the possibility to participate in the brand-new cooperative/school as associates. The recurrence of these phrases, combined with the stories they told, led me to the conclusion that they were not just experiencing changes in the formal ties between subjects and a changing institution, they were also coming face to face with changes in the relationships among teachers themselves. On one hand, there were teachers who decided to leave the job even before the cooperative was formed, either because they could not endure a situation in which they were not earning enough, or because they considered it inappropriate to stay under those conditions. Fundamentally though, a very productive question in analytical terms emerged: the fact that when it was necessary to fill the teaching positions that had been left vacant (once student enrollment began to increase), those who joined did so as “hired employees” and not as “associates” or “coop members.” The latter who had, with regret, expressed their sadness at losing their “status as teachers,” had to protect the most recent new employees: as associates, they would hire the new members as full teachers.
For some time, I remained entangled in their discourse, in the multiplicity of meanings they articulated in relation to “being associates” or “being employees” and the benefits or pitfalls each label carried. I extended my empirical reference points and aligned myself with representatives of the cooperative movement in order to better understand what had happened, or, in other words, to comprehend what those frequently recurring phrases so charged with anxiety meant. To my surprise, my new interviewees openly questioned the policy adopted by the teacher/associates (that of employing the new teachers), suggesting that this meant they were not “truly a cooperative.”
How was I to advance with my interpretations of the School institutional evolution? Where was the state? How did the state manifest its presence? The key that unlocked this situation for me was methodological in nature and had to do with the comparative process.
Adopting a comparative strategy forced me to ask myself about the ways in which the teachers at the School coordinated their chronology during the process of creating the cooperative, and how references to the state appeared (or were absent) within that process. Just as I demonstrated in the case of the Institute, my analysis accounted for “the temporality of people,” for “the temporality of the processes, linking it to the past, present, and future,” and how “this temporality [may have] served to ground behaviors” (Rosato & Boivín, 2017, p. 92). In the case of the Institute, if the zero point in terms of conceptualizing the institutional periodization and its relationship to the state applies to the formal confirmation of the cooperative (“we got here all by ourselves” signaled the birth of the cooperative), in the case of the School the chronology included the period of crisis before the formation of the cooperative, during which time several teachers left. Although this situation was also documented within the Institute, if taken as raw data, I hypothesize that the different constructed periodizations between the two say something about the relationship between the subjects and their institutional histories. In this sense, the teacher/coop members at the School had 25 years of history within the institution, a history that was, in fact, reflected in the process of forming the cooperative. In this case, it was the members of the old administration who, by announcing that they would leave, raised the possibility of teachers adopting this type of organization, therein lending continuity to the institutional project. In contrast, the primary and secondary teachers of the Institute who dealt with the cooperative worked from the beginning to separate themselves from the previous management, in fact blaming it for having destroyed the school. In concrete, administrative terms, in the case of the Institute, one institution closed and another one opened. Moreover, the pioneering teachers in this case had only been within the institution for five years.
This comparison between the state presence in two distinct institutional environments allowed me to “see with different eyes” what I had documented first at the School, under the lights (and shadows) of what I documented in the Institute, regarding the eventual state subsidies for the teachers in the cooperative. There, the state appeared clearly, even within the controversy of whether or not it should interfere. This investigation demonstrates that when one speaks of the state, one is also speaking about the regulation of teachers’ work and, fundamentally, about the social relationships that play out between subjects and their specific institutional contexts. In this sense, one speaks about real people, their self-expression in creative and specific ways, and their quality of life (Petrelli, 2013). From these ideas, I began to think that the “we ceased to be teachers” phrase could be interpreted as an appeal to the state, in terms of a specific regulation that would protect the rights of these workers. It also appeared to reflect a certain tension between fear of losing rights that had been acquired over many years, and relative independence/autonomy from a boss, and for some, from the state. All these are aspects that informed institutional decisions to form a cooperative in order to save jobs.
Through an ethnography with a holistic and comparative approach, I have documented variables that refer to two orders of questions. On one side are the many different forms the state takes within different institutions. On the other, I suggest that these forms also indicate multiple modalities through which teachers experience state forces within different social spaces. These theoretical and methodological approaches came together with a conceptual precision already noted at the beginning of this section. At this time, I turn to the need to conceptualize teachers as subjects, beyond their role as primary or secondary teachers.
Final Words: Ethnography for the Study of Teachers’ Work
In this article, I started my analysis from the concept that ethnography is neither a method nor an autonomous technique regarding a theoretical framework. Indeed, ethnography constitutes part of a process of knowledge production that articulates theory and method from which unique epistemological demands emerge (Achilli, 2005; Rockwell, 2009; Velasco & Díaz de Rada, Á, 2009; Wolcott, 2003).
From this starting point, I returned to the data and analyses I carried out during my doctoral research, with the goal of clarifying certain theoretical uses and methodological approaches that, when combined, facilitated a greater understanding of how the processes involved in teachers’ work were constituted within the institutions I used as my empirical reference. These were privately managed institutions within the city of Buenos Aires that went through periods of crisis during the last years of the 1990s and whose teachers and staff decided to reconfigure their institutions as cooperatives so that the schools could continue to function.
As I have noted, I approached my research with a holistic intentionality, best understood as “the methodological approach of a researcher (. . .) a broad, tireless inquiry into very different specific relationships between stakeholders, institutions, and social practices” (Dumont, 1987, cited in Díaz de Rada, 2013, pp. 18–19). This approach allowed me to document a multiplicity of events and interactions in the specific institutional environments in which they took place, and to continue to interpret them as different contextual levels emerged in these situations (the general challenges facing education, their connections with organizations having similar experiences, the political moment, the social and economic climates of Argentina at the time, etc.). Along these lines, I was conceptually identifying and establishing a series of variables that, from my point of view, impacted the contours and the development of teachers’ work. Institutional projects and contexts, the families, participation at the school level, and the modes of the state presence were among the most relevant variables. This theoretical/conceptual development ran parallel to my fieldwork, which forced me to question how the structuring variables of teachers’ work I was defining expressed themselves in different ways within the environments under study. For this reason, I adopted a second methodological approach: a comparative attitude.
In order to carry out this comparison, I focused on how the state manifested its presence within the institutions, and assumed that these manifestations had impacted teachers’ work. As I pointed out, what was being compared were not empirical realities but rather descriptions: “it involves (. . .) a process that usually takes holistic ethnographic descriptions as a point of departure, decontextualizing certain relationships in order to abstract them from their descriptive context and then later recontextualize them through analysis and comparison” (Balbi, Gaztañaga, & Ferrero, 2017, p. 24). While my documentation of the Institute foregrounds the tension between the state presence in the school environment and the “autonomy” of the cooperative process, my documentation of the School allows us to think of a state to which the teachers appeal for protection, in terms of regulation, working conditions, and rights defense. The comparison, more than establishing similarities or differences, allowed me to denaturalize my documentation from each of the environments under study and to formulate new questions (Gaztañaga & Koberwein, 2017; Rosato & Quirós, 2017). Noblit and Hare (1988) and Anderson-Levitt and Rockwell (2017) suggest something similar. This comparative analysis, carried out within my own ethnographic research, led me to identify different manifestations of state presences and their impact on the experiences of teachers, thus establishing a broad perspective that grows in complexity with each new revision.
My methodological approach led me to refine my initial frameworks, ultimately rendering them more flexible (Achilli, 2005). Regarding teachers’ work, I established from the beginning that I understood it as contextually dependent, carried out within concrete, institutional contexts. Adopting a Gramscian perspective, I addressed how the primary and secondary teachers (subjects with heterogeneous backgrounds and experiences) influenced the composition of the institutions they worked in, while simultaneously being shaped by the institutions as well. Progressively, my fieldwork within diverse and constantly evolving settings led me to see how the state is perceived and experienced by teachers in multiple ways. Additionally, as I hope I have demonstrated, these manifestations of the state are not fixed, but rather have temporal and material dimensions that intersect with the more general strategies subjects employ within the institutional processes they confront on a daily basis.10 Of course, these schemas are also being transformed. Regarding the questions generated through the comparative analysis, I want to make one final reflection. As I indicated, the stories of my interviewees unfolded into complex descriptions of institutional dynamics that intersect with heterogeneous manifestations of the state, interwoven with interviewees’ own “lived experiences,” their family lives, hopes for the future, and so on. How do the “lived experiences” of these subjects relate to institutional processes? How do these experiences evolve as they build on the teachers’ work they develop? I believe that in the future it will be necessary to analyze these intersections carefully, aiming at reflecting on teachers’ work within the entire life context of those subjects who undertake it daily. As a form of knowledge construction that articulates theory and method, ethnography has much to contribute.
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Notes
1. My doctoral thesis was completed during my time in the Anthropology and Education Program at the University of Buenos Aires, under the supervision of Professor María Rosa Neufeld, with the title Maestros y profesores haciendo institución: Sujetos, instituciones y experiencia (Primary and secondary teachers making institution: Subjects, institutions and experience).
2. It is imperative to emphasize their specificity. As private institutions they are regulated by the state through its substantial pedagogical activity. Due to their status as cooperatives, they possess an equally unique organization and management style, which makes them somewhat “atypical” as they simultaneously function as schools.
3. See http://redeestrado.org.
4. For the time period for which systematic information is available (Bottinelli analyzed the period from 1998 to 2012), the proportion of students coming from working-class sectors did not increase, although some students did come from working-class areas, perhaps in a greater proportion than in the past and similar to what has happened in universities. It is important not to overemphasize this increase so as not to obscure the fact that the majority of these students still come from different segments of the so-called middle class, which, in turn, also differs from the past conception of the middle class (Bottinelli, 2014).
5. This theoretical perspective is the polar opposite of another one which conceptualizes normative ideals as the structuring axis of educational institutions (see Rockwell, 1987).
6. The Board of Directors is one of the main organizing principles of the cooperative, with specific authority and functions. Chiappetta and collaborators note: “the board constitutes the primary expression of democracy within the cooperative. All associates participate equally: with their voice and with their vote. In this environment, the associates analyze existing problems, express their diverse opinions, and come up with projects. They make key decisions about the cooperative together. All associates are responsible for carrying out the tasks of governance: it is the right and a responsibility of each of them. The board of directors is in charge of implementing the strategic decisions made by the assembly in the everyday operations of the organization [which] requires an intense every-day level of involvement that can’t be carried out by all associates together (. . .). It is the primary decision-making body of the cooperative when the assembly cannot meet” (Chiappetta et al., 2009, pp. 36–38).
7. Beyond this concrete improvement, I documented an interesting local discussion on the criteria necessary for associates to make withdrawals. Some wondered why they went by figures determined by the union rather than “what the cooperative can pay” at a given moment in the institution’s evolution.
8. In analytical terms, this issue highlights a social situation we can use productively to unfold meaning and apparent contradictions. I will return to this point later.
9. Only later (Petrelli, 2012) did I indicate that these statutes amplify (from a normative perspective) the tension between autonomy from and dependence on the state.
10. Returning to Nugent’s argument that “the relationship between the local population and the State (. . .) has clear spatial and temporal dimensions which vary over time” (Nugent, 2007, p. 141), I want to emphasize the idea of social (and temporal) spaces that are configured within material conditions and not within a vacuum. At the same time, those same spaces—understood in the sense described—express the material conditions alluded to (see Petrelli & Neufeld, 2017).
