Education for sustainability and the curricular choices of High School Sociology teachers in Brazil

• In Event: Brazilian curricular issues in three layers: educational policies, curriculum in school and subject curriculum

Proposal

This research analyzes the curricular choices of Sociology teachers in the construction of their planning for High School in Brazil. Sociology has a history of intermittency as a compulsory subject in the Brazilian secondary education (Moraes, 2011), so that is the reason for this subject does not have a consolidated set of school knowledge (Santos, 2012). In 2008, it was reinserted in the secondary education with the objective of contributing to the citizenship practice. This makes the teacher’s role in the Sociology curriculum construction decisive. The purpose of this study is to understand the principles of recontextualization (Bernstein, 1996) that teachers use to articulate sociological knowledge with education for sustainability. The theoretical-methodological approach used is the Relational Analysis (Apple, 2006), a tool that allows us to understand that the curriculum cannot be understood in isolation, but as part of a wider social context. The Sociology curriculum construction can be seen as a struggle for hegemony and common sense (Williams, 1979) in education. Theoretically, the debates on curriculum history (Goodson, 1995), on curriculum (Apple, 2006) and implicit epistemological conception of the teachers (Sacristán, 2000), recontextualization (Bernstein, 1996) and culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995) sustain this study. As a methodological procedure, I use semi-structured interviews, a tool that allows teachers to bring up to the interviews their theories to support their curricular assumptions (Zago, 2003). Preliminary results indicate that because there is no consolidated knowledge within the discipline, teachers recontextualize the sociological knowledge from different fields and because the subject of sustainability is little worked in the training of teachers makes this subject to be worked in an interdisciplinary way with other disciplines.

Author

• Gabriel Schenkmann Arnt, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul