Discursive Fluctuations of the School Library Program in Chile: A Critical Policy Analysis

Abstract In Latin America, school libraries were founded based on the hopes of fostering democracy and reducing social and educational inequalities. Nevertheless, current dominant discourses relate school libraries more closely to the demand to improve academic results. In this article, we explore what we consider to be an intensification of neoliberal discourses about school libraries by studying the case of the Learning Resource Centres (Centros de Recursos para el Aprendizaje, CRA) in Chile, a program that has been exemplary compared to other Latin American countries. With a Critical Policy Analysis (Bacchi 2009. Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to be? Australia: Pearson, 2012. Engaging with Carol Bacchi. Strategic Interventions and Exchanges. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2015. “The Turn to Problematization: Political Implications of Contrasting Interpretive and Poststructural Adaptations.” Open Journal of Political Science 5 (1): 1–12), we question the problems that the CRA produce and aim to solve and their transformations through time. We focus on four public policy documents tracing how school libraries are related to the global educational reforms of the late 1980s and the 1990s and how they are assessed in the 2010s. We read the documents sketching out three exclusions that, we argue, lay the foundation for a neoliberal intensification of the CRA program: the exclusions of pedagogical innovation, of other learning resources beyond books, and of the local community.