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Chile's General Law of Education (LGE) states that one of the purposes of education is the spiritual development of all its schooled population. In turn, other legal documents claim that the Institutional Educational Project should define how schools are to approach that statement. This article analyses the frequency of keywords, based on a theoretical framework and revision of the Vision and Mission sections of the Educational Projects of 20 schools from Valparaíso, in order to show how this statement is approached and what those approaches imply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chile’s General Law of Education states that one of the purposes of education is the spiritual development of all its schooled population. Furthermore, guidelines in Chile’s education system place school directors as key players in student’s learning. This article presents the results of a research involving school directors from Valparaíso, Chile. The aim of this research was to identify how directors of secular and religious schools understand their students’ spiritual development. We studied this aspect in particular through semi-structured interviews conducted with 20 participants. Results show that directors understand spirituality as a typically human ability that can be strengthened in schools and, thus, they believe it to be highly important in schools. In addition, they see a strong relation between spiritual development and ethical and moral development. This study also shows differences in how secular and religious schools’ directors understand this relation. This opens the way for more in-depth analysis regarding spiritual development in Chile’s education system, especially considering that directors generally believe it to be a part of a holistic and quality education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion classes are found throughout the entire school system in Chile. These are mostly conducted by Catholic teachers who form their own professional identity from internal demands (imposed by the Catholic Church) and external demands (imposed by the school culture, social media, students and their families). This paper presents a reference framework for the professional teacher identity and analyses the linguistic structures and persuasion strategies present in three documents that directly question this group of teachers, building an identity profile of them. Discursive mechanisms are identified which legitimise identity traits. The way in which said productions influence the thoughts and actions of their readership is also analysed. A documentary study design is used based on critical documentary analysis. The investigation shows breaks in the discourse and an existing tension between the mission and the profession, underlining that the Catholic religion teacher is first and foremost an evangeliser. The performance capacity of this discourse on the listeners is discussed along with the effect of the almost complete absence of references to teaching professionalism and the possible influence on the development and results of the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]