Gender equality and competency-based approach: issues of teacher education

Abstract

Competency-based approach is generalized through compulsory training given to future teachers in Spain. This approach is technically based, as a guarantee of supposed ideological neutrality that makes this perspective unquestionable. However, a procedural logic dependent on implementation is overlapped by the competences, which manages to limit the reflective capacity of the subjects in the information society. This initiative contributes to the strengthening of gender representations that discriminate against women and tend to go unnoticed by the methodological tools that are offered. We defend that competency-based approach takes a fundamental part of a larger project promoted by international organizations, for the deployment of a neoliberal ideological model through the institutionalization of a cognitive rationality. We also denounce the model inability to question gender mandates, due to its dependence on implementation and consequent impossibility to explore the levels in which the meanings sociohistorically attributed to women and men become immutable.