Andrea Alliaud: “When we demand so much from the school, it becomes disoriented and loses the sense of what it has to offer”

Andrea Alliaud in the Ticmas auditorium, at the Book Fair

After finishing teaching, Andrea Alliaud was present in the Ticmas auditorium, at the Book Fair, to talk about teachers and their art of teaching and being educated to train. Doctor in Educational Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires and with a Master’s in Educational Sciences (FLACSO), Ella Alliaud gave an answer to a question that often bothers her: Why do teachers find it difficult to be evaluated?

“Emilio Tenti, who was Director of my Master’s thesis at FLACSO, always says that the school he was examining; now in this context of crisis, it is the one that is going to be examined”, recalled Alliaud and added: “The school is criticized, the school is questioned. And I think it has to do with the fact that the modern school is a historical product, that it emerged in the 19th century and that school; although it is quite different from today’s school, but in some respects it is quite similar. What many authors call the form or school grammar.

Regarding the school as a historical product, the author highlighted “that it continues to function with time and space as in Modernity, dividing knowledge by subjects, placing teachers in classrooms in front of students, also grouped by age. Today we ask that school of Modernity, which had certain social goals, to have very different ones. For example, we ask the school to include traditionally excluded social sectors, but also that those who enter the schools learn”.

Despite these criticisms of the current school, Alliaud highlighted, as in his book teach today (Paidós, 2021), that the school examination also “opens up multiple challenges for us, which for me are worth facing. And as teachers, and as trainers, we have to be prepared to face them creatively”.

Andrea Alliaud in the Ticmas auditorium, at the Book Fair

What do we expect from the school?

“We ask more and more of the school,” she said, “today we ask it to teach us to live with others, to respect diversity, to share. That teaches us to learn to learn; much more complex skills because those skills are really what today’s societies are demanding of us, and more and more is being asked of schools. A school that paradoxically continues to shape its grammar, its original format”.

As he pointed out in his book The artisans of teaching (Paidós, 2017), Alliaud took up the idea that “When we demand so much from it, the school becomes disoriented. You lose your sense of what you have to offer.” And he added: “Faced with so much demand, the school can lose its certainty and what can happen, in the worst case, is that it becomes blurred.”

“For many years we trained teachers thinking that the teacher was trained and then went to the classroom and applied; this is the famous little word, which for me must be banished from all pedagogical fields”, Alliaud raised. And he ironically: “she goes to a school today and tries to teach, or Apply rigidly what you learned. It won’t work because the boys and girls are in another. They take out their cell phones, they stop, they tell you what matters to me, they throw the book at your head. That is a school today and this must be said”.

“I continue betting on the school as a social institution in terms of the transmission of culture, in terms of the intergenerational passage and the training that occurs in educational institutions in a guided, massive and shared way, but, then, how do we teach today? We have to know that the replica or the application do not work”, insisted the author. “To teach today is to be attentive, it is to listen to the children”, Alliaud raised and gave as an example the film “Writers of freedom” (2007) where a teacher realizes that it is not possible to teach in a rigid way and creates her own method in an American school, a method as simple and as complex as giving students a voice in order to understand them and be able to educate them.

“Today the main challenge is how we can summon students. Summon them to that encounter with knowledge. How do we present to them those portions of knowledge that as adults and teachers we consider valuable”, she reflected.

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