Cecilia Braslavsky: Construction of the Educational Field in a Democratic Argentina

In this article, the author describes Cecilia Braslavsky's pioneering work in the training of academics and technical-professional teams in Argentina. She divides the paper into two parts. The first one covers a period (between 1983 and 1993) in which Cecilia, along with other intellectuals from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, proposed creating new perspectives to consider the problems of the education system and at the same time to train new generations of professionals able to confront the period just beginning in the country, at the end of one of the bloodiest dictatorships in Argentina's history. The second part of the paper describes her role in the training of professionals between 1993 and 1999. In this period, Cecilia had new concerns. Ten years after the return of democracy and after having trained a complete generation of leaders in the educational field able to carry out interesting diagnoses and go beyond the ideologies imposed by the military government, the focus of her concern shifts to a training of specialists which, without neglecting the theoretical aspect, will focus on transforming the situation in which they are acting, in order to guarantee a better distribution of educational goods. In this context, and without entirely abandoning her vocation for training undergraduate and graduate students, she places the emphasis on practice, and moves to training professionals who, with a solid theoretical education, can in parallel attempt to change reality. (Contains 3 tables and 2 notes.)