The Notion of Competences in Brazilian Educational Policy and Curricular Reform

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: The Micro and Macro Politics and Practices of Neoliberalism and Schooling

Abstract

Curricular policies have been paramount in the educational reforms taking place in Brazil since the 1990’s. The state control over the curriculum has been strategic in the implementation of the neo-liberal educational project envisioned in the 1996 Law of Directives and Basis of National Education.

This study investigates how competence-based education appears in Brazilian educational policies as an organizing principle of the curriculum. The objective is to uncover how the neo-liberal discourse embodied in curricular policies 'acts' as a social fact in the making of people in the schooling process.

Drawing on Popkewitz’s approach of studying curricula as systems of reason that entail grids of of practices to produce the ‘reasoning’ of schooling (2008), this textual study analyzes the Official São Paulo State Curriculum documents which exemplifies the pedagogical principles underlying Brazilian educational policies and reforms.

The Pedagogy of Competences, which embodies the notion of competence- based education, adopts a teaching methodology based on projects and problem solving where knowledge is associated with savoir-faire for ‘everyday life’ and contextualized within the economic demands of labor market. This aligns with the neo-liberal guidelines for education found in global documents such as UNESCO’s Jomtien Declaration (1990) and the Delors Report (1996).

That same neo-liberal rationality underlies the Official São Paulo State Curriculum and is conveyed in the principles it enumerates for its organization; whether curriculum as culture; curriculum as competences, the priorities are the development of literacy, the problem-solver or lifelong learner, and curriculum contextualized by the imagined demands of a global knowledge society. The principles organizing the curriculum envision a young autonomous citizen that is capable of acting, thinking, and interacting globally in a ‘fast-paced’ and ‘ever-changing world.’

I argue that the translation of the competence-based principle into school curriculum in the analyzed documents reduces competences to strategies and activities for the development of capacities to build competences which ends up limiting its significance as a formative principle (Ramos, 2002) while at the same time (re)producing a neo-liberal school reasoning.

References
Delors, J. (1996). Learning, the treasure within. Report to UNESCO of the International commission on education for the twenty-first century. Paris: Unesco.
Popkewitz, T. S. (2008). Cosmopolitanism and the age of school reform. Science, education, and making society by making the child. New York: Routledge.
Ramos, M. N. (2002). A educação profissional pela Pedagogia das Competências: para além da superfície dos documentos oficiais. Educação & Sociedade, 23(80), 401-422.
São Paulo (State) (2010). Currículo do Estado de São Paulo. Fini, M. I. (coord.). São Paulo: SEE.
World conference on education for all, Jomtien, Thailand, 5-9 March 1990 (1990). New York: Unicef; UNDP; Unesco; World Bank.

Author

• Valeria Andrade Silva, Universidade Nove de Julho/FAPESP