The cultural commitment in the identities of the arts teachers in Chile

Abstract

The paper shares the first phase of the research “Professional identities of artists-teachers in Los Lagos Region. Transformations of the social in cultural commitment”, carried out in Chile. The main objective is to know the professional identity of the art teachers of the Los Lagos Region and to understand how they contribute towards cultural development. We present the results of a survey that targeted a group of 97 art teachers in the south of Chile and sought to gather information about the main professional experiences that affect the identity formation of these educating artists. The structure of the online survey was divided into five sections, since each one covered the dimensions that influence the conformation of the identity of the artists-teachers. Namely, (i) the training and professional trajectory, (ii) characteristics of their art practice, (iii) conflicts of their art-teaching practice, (iv) needs of the art-teaching practice and finally, (v) contributions to the cultural development of the region. The analysis of the survey was carried out through the statistical program SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), which allowed to generate crosses and variables among the questions of the five dimensions indicated. Among the most relevant results we could see that the diversity of backgrounds in terms of initial teacher training, along with years of professional experience were relevant crossings, as they pointed out various ways of linking with the commitment of cultural development and their identities.