During the first years of the new century, Latin America went through significant political changes in a period of economic growth. In education, we identify a regulatory governance turn characterized by the emergence of four policy instruments:
1-New performance-based teaching career regulations with teachers evaluations.
2-Curricular standards and increasing regulation via textbook provision.
3-Test-based accountability based on high-stakes assessments.
4-The formation of the school unit as an accountable decision-making body.
What a teacher can do to handle hot moments:
✓ Ask students, when there is a particularly heated exchange, to step back and see how they might make something positive of this exchange, what they can learn from it. This can move the discussion to a broader and more general level that helps everyone to see what issues have been at stake and what the clash itself might mean.
✓ Ask students to think about how their reactions mirror the subject at hand, and what they might learn about the subject from their own behavior. Often, groups act out or replicate in their own discussion the topic under discussion. Thus, a discussion of a case in which race is a factor which has been denied may mirror the case by avoiding the issue of race. Seeing this can enhance people's understanding of the issues.
✓ If a student makes a blatantly racist assertion or there is a particularly charged discussion and stop the class and give all the students an assignment for the next class meeting to research this statement and write a short essay about their findings. Alternatively, ask students to write about the issue for five minutes in class.
This enables students to think about and come to some kind of terms with the issue and can enable further discussion of it.
✓ Go around the room and ask each student who has spoken (and others if they wish) to state his or her view and explain the reasoning behind it. Every student is heard, and the class can be enriched by the range of perceptions.
✓ Use the passion as a vehicle to talk about differences in kinds and levels of discourse, who is comfortable with emotion and who is not, who favors personalizing material and who prefers to keep it abstract, whether there are cultural differences that underlie these differences.
✓ Use the passion and arguments to look at how group dynamics work -- who speaks and who does not who allies him or herself with whom, who plays what role, and to think about how the group wants to work.
In short, the teacher will have to decide whether to stop the emotional charge and go on, or whether to use it to explore the topic at hand. Often, when things get most hot, people are most capable of learning at a very deep level, if the exchange among students is properly handled. To make this possible, however, requires comfort with feelings and with conflict and enormous skill on the part of the teacher.
These policies created a new regime of accountability, control, and prescribed curriculum, which was fully developed in Chile, Mexico and substantially in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. Our research was based on the revision of over 500 articles and policy documents, a genealogy of the trajectories of education policies, and 134 interviews in seven countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay. We present the new policy landscape and analyze the paradoxes of the increasing regulation of classroom practices.
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