Ideas for a History of teachers in Latin America

Abstract

This article argues in favor of a history of teachers in a Latin-American scale. It presents the main difficulties of approaching a complex research object in a big scale. Some of those difficulties come from the heterogeneity of political experiences and educational national systems in Latin America. Some other difficulties come from the multiple dimensions of ´teachers` as a research object in the field of history of education. The article shows that it is necessary to establish interpretative lines that could provide explanations at a regional level, and that each dimension of that object requires, for its full comprehension, of its relationship with the other dimensions. In this frame, it is important to develop studies that approach the history of teachers in the regional space, analyzing the common and specific characteristics of the different national cases. To do so, teachers have been identified as the axis of the study, including teachers´ training, the ideas about their role, the mechanisms of their recruitment, the regulations about their work and their collective action organizations.