Collaboration Among Universities and Schools in Curriculum Public Policies: Changing the Ongoing Partnerships in Brazil

• In Event: Educational Collaborations and the Ontological Turns

Abstract

Objectives: This paper relies on the commitment of 6 Brazilian universities’ collaboration with public education systems to produce curricula with teachers. It argues that it is urgent to respond to the upsurge of the economic discourses in curriculum policies with the ethical curriculum theorizing developed in universities.

Theoretical framework: In contrast to the economic discourses that populate curricular policies, there are many studies that incorporate teaching experience, autobiography and subjectivity into the discussion. Much of this literature operates with a metaphysical notion of subject and assumes that the subjective experience improves with conscious reflection. In this paper, in a post-structural inflected perspective, I conceptualize autobiographical practices as immersion in environments, connectivities and relationalities to complicate the naive simplicity with which subjects are taken as ontological presumably autonomous presences in many narrative researches. I try to displace the possibility of humanistic versions of self-reflexive experiences that support the biographical belief, operating on an intersubjective or relational ontology.

Methods: The paper is a theoretical discussion in the field of curriculum public policies. It relies on a post-structural inflected version of PAR (Miller, 2017) developed with school teachers.

Data sources: The post-structural inflection of the research implies distrusting the possibility of using data or evidence as in conventional research (St. Pierre, 2013b). The research we have been conducting with teachers has been producing many narratives, but they are taken only as disturbances, mobilized by the interpellation of the other, with which subjects are subjecting themselves. When the chronological time of the research has run out, it will have constructed some stories, but we all will remain subject-in-relationship, not-yet, to come.

Conclusions: The paper argues in favor of the understanding of public policies in curriculum as multi-locally intersubjective networks committed to the process of differentiation and taking into account concrete relationships. Instead of ordering educational action, it would be productive for public policies in education to recognize the unpredictable because it is what moves us. I mobilize the post-structural theorization developed at the University to defend the power of ontological relationality as a condition for curricular policies to become effectively public. With Ahmed (2017), I indicate that the act of theorizing, as a practice, is immersed in the world and therefore implied in the production of ways of inhabiting it.

Scholarly significance: Although several studies (Sellar and Lingard, 2013; Addey, 2017) attest that the OECD rationality does not improve the educational quality, public policies in curriculum in Brazil follow that logic pressured by partnerships among public and third sectors entities (Avelar and Ball, 2019). In this context, the reflection produced in the Universities, especially that which seeks to deconstruct the dominant empiricist logics, has been dismissed from the process, on the grounds that they are very theoretical. In this paper, I argue that complex thinking developed at the Universities is not only useful, but necessary and urgent, for a responsible political action (Derrida, 2010).

Author

• Elizabeth F. Macedo, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro