BETWEEN SECOND MOTHERS AND "ADJUSTED" WORKERS

Changes, ambivalences and juxtapositions in the social representations of teachers in Argentina

Abstract

This article analyzes the process of feminization of the teaching profession in Argentina. Firstly this article describes the three historical institutional models of teachers´ training in Argentina: the "Normal School", the "Professorship", and one that for lack of a better definition can be call "the normalized teacher education program." Secondly, this article presents the social representations about teaching that these three models conveyed. This article concludes, discussing some of the multiple relationships developed among different conditions (such as low salaries, lower social status for women) that have contributed to professional patterns of feminization among teachers in Argentina. Among the most important of those relations are the notion of teachers as second mothers, and teachers as caring and vocationally oriented to the emotional and intellectual guidance of children. All of the above have created the conditions for the primacy of two semantic equivalencies that reinforce the gender regimes of teacher education programs: teachers-womendedication and men-teachers-discipline.