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In 2021, one of this paper's authors conducted research to obtain a master's degree, while the other two worked as supervisors. The thesis aimed to explore the visions of pre-service biology teachers and teacher educators regarding sex education and gender diversities, recognising the relationship between those subjects and their possible tensions. In the thesis production cycle, there was an attempt to decolonise sex education in pre-service teacher education, a process of decolonising the context of academic supervision happened too. This paper illustrates the research process' particularities, especially how queering ["enfletando"] the supervision process incorporated decolonial cracks through "fleta" reflexivity.

This paper undertakes an intersectional analysis of the ways in which socio-economically elite higher education students in Chile reproduce privilege through everyday practices of whiteness and beauty. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews and observations with 20 privileged students at an elite Chilean university, the paper identifies and discusses the students' ambiguous racial identifications and the racialized, classed and gendered ways in which privilege was enacted through practices of 'beauty' as a 'natural' embodied distinction. We discuss how ideals and practices of beauty were a 'double edged sword' for elite female students, conferring advantage while also denying academic authenticity. We argue that Chilean elite performances of whiteness offer an added layer of complexity to existing literature, problematising and decentring performances of whiteness from white bodies. We conclude by suggesting that an intersectional lens offers a useful way to understand and address the re/production of inequalities in Chilean elite universities.

This paper examines how pupils' aspirations towards higher education (HE) are shaped and reinforced in Chile. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical framework and building on relevant scholarship focussed on HE decision-making and choices, it introduces two dual-headed conceptual tools which allow a grasp of relevant differences between social classes: firstly, "channelling micro-practices" and "pushing micro-practices"; and secondly, "horizons of reference" and "horizons of potentialities." Through analysing forty-six semi-structured qualitative interviews with pupils from thirteen different secondary schools, this study shows that HE aspirations in the dominant class are experienced as the natural pathway towards university; in the intermediate class, the possibility of HE is taken as a demand of society; while for those in dominated positions, aspirations are rather influenced by uncertainties regarding the future.

This paper illustrates the influence of a new national assignment system (NSAS) on Chilean middle-class advantage. This system was designed to increase educational equity by changing the previous school admission "rules" that were prejudicial against low-income students. We use Bourdieu's conceptual tools, drawing on concepts of capitals and field, to analyse the influence of the new rules of the game on the value of middle-class capitals. To understand how the new rules shape middle-class families' advantages, we link qualitative and quantitative analyses that empirically explore how families subjectively interpret the policy change and how objectively it shapes their access to desired schools. The qualitative phase shows that middle-class parents experience the NSAS as a risky new scenario. However, quantitative analysis shows the NSAS is associated with only a modest decrease in middle class-advantages. We illustrate the difficulty of transforming marketized educational systems, where previously privileged families react against equity-driven changes.

While much has been written about student movements against the neoliberal privatisation of education in Chile, less attention has been given to teacher activism around similar educational matters. In this article, we contribute to the field of teacher activism as a social movement to resist the global education reforms of neoliberal education policies/practices. Data for the study were generated through yarning, photo-yarning and testimonios, methods often deployed in Indigenous and mestiza feminist research. Basil Bernstein's theoretical work on pedagogic rights and democratic formations, initially developed in Chile, was used to analyse the data. Teacher activists argued that their collective struggles over what constitutes the public of public education, has interrupted the neoliberal agenda. However, battles over public education, its purposes, who should it serve, remain ongoing. New ways of privatising education are being enacted in Chile that are harder to resist, challenge and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In highly marketised higher education systems, massification has afforded greater access, particularly for first-in-generation students. Generally, this expansion has been fuelled by neoliberal ideologies that valorise the notion of choice and promise of social mobility. In this study, using interviews with 25 first-generation students, the issue of choice is critically examined in one of the earliest arenas of neoliberal experimentation: the Chilean higher education system. The study found that these first-in-generation students encountered complex and multi-levelled challenges in making higher education choices. Such choices were firmly anchored in differing levels of aspiration, and were strongly mediated by both family and school social capital. As a result, we propose an addition to traditional conceptions of choice: students (and their families) who act as strategic choosers. This outcome challenges the notion that first-in-generation students encounter unitary trajectories or equitable choices in encountering higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using qualitative data from two Chilean public schools, I interrogate the expectation that standardised testing motivates staff to critically self-assess themselves and to be accountable for failing evaluations. The research findings bring new insights into looking at ways in which school members, especially head managers, strategically debate, highlight and obscure scores, classifications and ranking positions to generate narratives of institutional success, while defending themselves from negative outcomes. Members are both disciplined by state technologies, but are also actively committed to produce school identity narratives in creative ways as a manner to make sense of the school and maintain its value. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]