Global Microlending in Education Reform: Enseñá por Argentina and the Neoliberalization of the Grassroots

Abstract

This article examines the workings and underlying assumptions behind Enseñá por Argentina (Teach for Argentina), one specific program that takes part in the larger and expanding network of Teach for All, by thinking about the ways in which a global push for redefining teaching and teacher education encounters local characteristics and histories, thus producing something different. My focus on the Argentine program will serve two interrelated purposes. First, it helps us to better understand the production of a particular kind of neoliberal subject, the social entrepreneur who functions as the engine for change. Second, the study engages in questions about the transferability of models in socially, politically, and pedagogically diverse contexts, through what I call policy microlending, of teacher education and of particular artifacts within it to organizations that channel discourses about change coming from the grassroots.