Arts education in Latin America and the Caribbean, the challenges of teacher training.

The case of Chile and the Visual Arts.

Abstract

This paper focuses on the issues and challenges to the training and professional development of teachers in Latin America and the Caribbean. The first part explains why it is necessary to teach art in schools and gives an account of the situation of the subject in the school context in different countries in the region. The second part focuses on teacher training, highlighting the tensions and shortcomings of teacher training in Arts Education. At the regional level, we observe that there is an enormous number of teachers with little or no arts training who teach the subject. We also found marked differences in the training of teachers depending on the public or private nature of the establishments where they work. For example, in countries such as Chile, Colombia or El Salvador public schools have a higher percentage of teachers specialised in the subject. This article proposes an in-depth study of the case of Chile and the visual arts, based on fieldwork in which 44 teachers from the metropolitan region belonging to different types of schools were observed and interviewed.