Evaluación de segmentación

For both initial and later in- service training, the institutions the gov- ernment set up were largely concerned with producing so- called con- veyors of the national ethic. The emphasis was not on subjects and learning. The institutions themselves, generically referred to as Escuelas

Normales, existed under a variety of names: Escuelas Normales Rurales,

Escuelas Rurales Regionales or Centrales Agrícolas, Escuelas Regionales Campesinas, Escuela Normal de Profesores de Instrucción Primaria, Escuela Normal Superior de Mexico, Escuela Nacional de Maestros, Escuela Nacional de Educadores, Centros Normales Regionales and Benemérita Escuela Nacional de Maestros. They were all tightly regu- lated by the central government with a strong input from the SNTE. Universities until recent times did not participate in the training of teach- ers largely because they were considered to be unreliable, despite the fact that they could offer a higher quality education than that provided by the centrally controlled institutions. Even the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional (UPN) was strictly regulated.

The result was a poor quality education for aspiring teachers and this translated into a poor education for children. Only in more recent

times when the link between economic and social development and education was recognized were the bonds relatively and reluctantly loosened. On paper, the current teacher- training curriculum appears to measure up to the best practices at the international level, and to be based on the view long held by international organizations and agencies that teachers need to have both the support and the freedom to be crea- tive and to adapt their knowledge to the needs and possibilities of their students. The teacher- training curriculum in the Mexican teacher-train- ing colleges now incorporates pedagogical subject- based knowledge and training in decision making. These aspects therefore explicitly mark it off from the older prescriptive approach, in which social control rather than the acquisition and application of knowledge, skills and dispositions was the guiding principle. In theory, by the end of the four- year course the student teacher should have acquired the specific capacities to teach, a solid grounding in their subject, the ability to impart that knowledge, a set of professional ethics, and an ability to understand the students’ cir- cumstances and characteristics and be able to respond to them creatively. The work set up to develop this profile is divided into five blocks: peda- gogical skills and historical and social contexts, subject knowledge, a spe- cialist option, ICT and a second language, and teaching practice.

It has been far from easy putting the new curriculum into prac- tice. Two recurrent tensions in teacher training over the years since the Mexican Revolution have influenced its evolution or more accurately, led to its stagnation. The first of these is the tension between the teacher as street bureaucrat or foot soldier for nationalism and the autonomous professional. If the latter is in the ascendancy, there are still siren voices that insist on control, tradition and conformity, with decision- makers and teachers themselves clinging to the old view as loyal subjects and conveyers of national values.

In addition, the new curriculum is replete with internal inconsist- encies. Both the 1997 and 2012 initial teacher- training programmes made great play of contextualizing the curriculum in relation to what they called a diversity of cultures, an emphasis on social background and how it affected individual performance and the enormous dispar- ity between facilities offered in schools. Nevertheless, as Fortoul (2014) points out, the 2012 reform package sidelined these issues by choosing to foreground the psycho- pedagogical or universal human aspects of learn- ing over and against the different ways that students learn as a result of their different socio- economic- cultural backgrounds. This shift, that was never explained, made it difficult for teachers to make sense of what they had learnt when it came to teaching basic and universal concepts in the

classroom. For example, notions of counting and measuring are differ- ent in different parts of the country due to different cultural interpreta- tions of these concepts. With regards to language matters, the teachers encountered even more difficulties.

Ruth Mercado (2010) has argued persuasively that teacher training should serve the school rather than the school serving and conforming to the teacher- training regime. This cogent and telling criticism might well be extended to most aspects of how educational policy is fashioned and delivered in Mexico. In addition to the inconsistency resulting from the imposition of generalized pedagogical principles in very different learning conditions, current teacher training has been mired in a long tradition of prescription and reliance on inappropriate mechanisms to achieve those ends. The 1997 reforms and its 2012 successor have made bold attempts to depart from the idea that teachers are merely convey- ers of officially sanctioned knowledge in its gestures towards inculcating what they call generative abilities or competences for teachers and young learners. Commentators have lamented the continued reluctance or, per- haps, inability of teachers’ colleges to generate reflection and collective and dialogical learning, in spite of paying lip service to these notions.

Recent studies point out that trainee teachers say they benefit from the increased contact with schools in the last two semesters as well as the introduction of practical exercises with their peers (for example, Instituto Nacional para la Evaluación de la Educación, 2016). From the evidence, it is clear that the link personnel in the college and the host school play a key role in the success of this exercise. This lynchpin of teaching practice varies between the institutions and states. Especially in more remote and poorer areas of large cities and in rural and/ or predominately indigen- ous areas, the services of local support teachers and their linkages with the teachers’ colleges may be weak or non- existent. As it is often the case with programmes needing administrative coordination, there is little support or monitoring of teaching practice.

Remedi (1999, 135) also alerts us to the way learning in teacher- training colleges is reduced to simple predigested prescriptions. He sug- gests that teacher- trainers:

dismiss the teachers’ enquiries and replace them with pre- set mod- els and recipes, masquerading as authoritative representations of the world around them, based on generalities, rules and laws that give a sense or order to the chaos they imagine exists. These teach- ing experts roll on from one conjuncture to the next one, with the certainty of possessing the truth; in this facade, they seduce the

teachers with a series of norms set in models of what should be, and recipes that slip pass the official gaze and stops the teachers from basing them on a solid academic foundation.

The full implications of this only become evident when the student teachers make contact with the pupils in the schools.

At the outset of their careers, novice teachers encounter a number of difficulties in fulfilling their pedagogical duties. The most obvious of these is time constraints. For many decades now, studies have shown that it is difficult if not impossible to cover adequately the basic education curricula (for example, Martin, 2004). Even a cursory glance at the pro- grammes for the primary and secondary levels shows that the contents and the didactics that the current competences- based approach demands require the equivalent of a full school day, that is the norm in other coun- tries, but not in Mexico.