Professional practice in the age of neoliberalism: Teaching in public and private high schools in post-war El Salvador

This study examines the professional lives of a group of public high school teachers and a group of teachers working in a private, Pentecostal high school in order to comprehend exactly how neoliberal education reforms and the de-facto privatization of educational services in El Salvador are unfolding in the spaces of the local school. How, it asks, are high school teachers attempting to construct their professional lives just as the secondary education system is undergoing considerable transformation?; In addressing this question, the study compares teachers' daily life as it unfolds behind the classroom door, during staff meetings and in the teachers' lounge in two very different settings. Close examination of teachers' classroom practices recounts how teachers appropriate---according to their own personal histories---the new curricular forms and pedagogical ideals being introduced by education reform. The research explores the varied ideas that teachers bring from other social and historical contexts to their educative work and demonstrates how they actively engage particular aspects of national educational policy within the classroom. In this way, the study makes a case for seeing the classroom as a space wherein teachers still maintain a degree of occupational autonomy in the midst of changing and demanding working conditions. At the same time, the study demonstrates that teachers do not construct their professional lives exactly as they would have them. The conditions within which they work are shaped powerfully by the decisions of others and in ways that often contradict their own moral economies of work. The study describes how teachers draw on different class, religious and occupational histories and social relationships to engage the contradictions they confront at the local level. While this study demonstrates that education reform and the ongoing processes of privatization are circumscribing and problematizing teachers' contexts for deliberative social action, it offers an important reminder that teachers are not powerless in the face of change. The study calls for further critical exploration of how the commodification of educational activities worldwide are challenging teachers' efforts to improve their working conditions and to broaden their occupational autonomy beyond the four walls of the classroom.