A Word from the Editor

As I had written in our previous issue of SHARE e-magazine, this is going to be a turbulent year for our teaching profession, particularly in the City of Buenos Aires, where, as it is public knowledge, the current administration of the city has decided to close all 29 tertiary colleges of education in their jurisdiction and subsume them into a to be created university, UniCaba, which supposedly will be devoted exclusively to teacher education. In our particular field: the education of future teachers of EFL-ESL, all eyes will be on what happens to the most traditional “profesorados”, namely Lenguas Vivas “Juan Ramón Fernández”, Instituto del Profesorado “Joaquín V. González” and Escuela Normal Superior “Sofía Broquen de Spangenberg” as enrolment of prospective students has dwindled to an unprecedented low (the final shot might have come from the government itself, most probably) after announcements of a impending closure had been made (although the closure was planned for 2019). Another cause for concern will probably be the new curriculum for “Profesorado en Inglés”. I can only pray that the policies that the previous administrations of the province of Buenos Aires have implemented for our area are not transposed to the city. In the province of Buenos Aires the curriculum was changed in such an obnoxious way that new “subjects” without any academic rigour were invented off-cuff (for example Grammar and Phonetics were removed from the curricula only to be replaced by the still today ill-defined “Language and Written Expression” or “Language and Oral Expression”). After all, who cared? I was a delegate of an Instituto Superior de Formación Docente to a meeting in the city of Avellaneda where the drafts (pre-diseño) of the new curriculum design were to be “discussed” and in the face of general criticism had to hear the meeting coordinator shrilly shouting to the top of his voice that “I do not need language athletes, what I need is good teachers of English, never mind if their pronunciation far from ideal or they make language mistakes”. That was the end of the very democratic discussion. I do not have much hope, but still I can only hope things will be different over the Riachuelo this year.

Dr. Omar Villarreal
Editor