Selective processes for access to teaching work in Spain

critical review

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the literature produced in Spain on "selection processes for access to the teaching profession". The analysis questions the implicit and explicit conceptions that the literature in question presents on this subject. To this end, all the texts published in the last fifteen years in Spanish referring to the selection system for the teaching job in the public sector in this country were selected. The article starts from the assumption that attention to the professionalization of teachers is something recurrent in times of educational reform, placing teachers in an ambiguous place that moves between two extremes: the search for their empowerment as political subjects and their disciplining. The analysis reflects that academic literature, often without assuming its own place of knowledge power, is the bearer of positions that must be problematized for their potential effects. From this work we conclude that the pretense of neutrality and objectivity that academic knowledge sometimes assumes in the social sciences leaves invisible its ideological and political dimension.