Between the hygiene and the salvation: Cognitive framework, metaphors and educative work of psychologists in Chilean schools

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to understand the metaphors produced by psychologists to organize and define their work in Chilean schools. Considering that metaphor, rather than a rhetorical embellishment, is a linguistic figure that affects our ways of perceiving, thinking and acting in social reality, in this research, positioned from the Critical Discourse Studies, we examine its ideological potential to build and perpetuate particular visions of the world. According to this, we interviewed seven psychologists who work in schools classified as "emerging"within the framework of the Chilean Policy called Ley de Subvención Escolar Preferencial . We analyze discursively the information produced with a special emphasis on the rhetorical movements that revealed metaphors. Our main findings were two frameworks that join metaphors that psychologists use to explain their work in the schools: hygienist frame and salvation frame. Each one promotes particular conceptions of education, roles of school, the participation of the actors, and psychologist s work. Conflictly interconnected around a structural metaphor that conceives education as a commodity and school as a company, these frames are discussed from the interconnections between psychology and education in a context of educational neoliberalization and from the need to build alternative frames to market hegemony.