TEACHER APPRECIATION IN DISPUTE: TRAINING, CAREER, AND NEOLIBERAL RATIONALITY

Abstract

This article analyzes the valorization of teacher education as a field of dispute between different educational projects, taking as its empirical reference the career plan of the Municipal Education Network of Niterói (RJ), based on the dissertation by Yamaguchi (2024). It is grounded on the assumption that teacher valorization is a historical, political, and contradictory construction, shaped by tensions between the conception of education as a social right and its increasing subordination to neoliberal rationality (Laval, 2004; Freitas, 2018). Methodologically, this is a qualitative study of a documentary and analytical nature, based on the interpretation of legal and normative documents, as well as data produced in the aforementioned dissertation (Minayo, 2007; Yamaguchi, 2024). The theoretical framework draws on critical scholars who understand teacher education as a socially situated and historically constructed process (Saviani, 2013; Freitas, 2007). The results indicate that, although there are institutional advances in the valorization of teacher education, these are reconfigured by mechanisms of regulation and control that challenge their emancipatory potential, particularly in contexts influenced by managerial and neoliberal logics (Laval, 2004). It is concluded that teacher valorization constitutes a field of dispute in which antagonistic educational projects coexist.