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Session Submission Summary

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

Wed, April 17, 10:00 to 11:30am, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Pacific Concourse (Level -1), Pacific F

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel aims to contribute with the international debate concerning the issues of school curriculum providing a robust landscape of the Brazilian context. This portrait will present three distinct layers of this theme, that are relative autonomous while strongly linked one to another. Bourdieu would say that these layers could be seen as separated social fields (Bourdieu, 2004), for they have their own rules and possibilities for the agency, and Bernstein could call them recontextualizing fields (Bernstein, 2006), depending on the social agents and institutions located in them. Both authors would probably agree that those layers are connected and have relative autonomy.
The lenses of Sociology of Education constitute the theoretical-methodological approach we embrace in this panel – and in our work as researchers and educators in Brazil. It is mainly represented here by the guidance of Michael Apple and Basil Bernstein theoretical sources. Although they have disagreed and debated in some points, both of them have – among many others – helped us to be constantly vigilant regarding the impossibility of neutrality when people are in charge of making decisions about educational policies, particularly concerning the curriculum, either if they are an official policymaker, a school principal or a teacher planning his/her Monday class.
At this point, it seems necessary to share a few words about the sociopolitical conditions in Brazil. From 2001 to 2013, the percentage of the population that lived in extreme poverty reduced from 10% to 4% (World Bank, 2015). During this period, there was a massive investment in primary, secondary, vocational and higher education in that country. These investments combined with investments in other areas allowed the country to grow with sustainability. Since 2016, when a state coup froze public investments in education, health, and other areas, the number of people living in extreme poverty increased by 11% and reached 7% of the Brazilian population (PNAD, 2018).
We are currently experiencing a context of uncertainties regarding educational directions in Brazil. This scenario of intense political disputes may lead to a loss of some recently acquired advances in the educational field. The studies in this panel are focused on the curriculum issues and present three different layers of curricular formulation and practice taking place in Brazilian education: a) the macro level of educational policy and the implications for the school curriculum (papers 1 and 2); b) the local level of school curriculum and the hierarchy of school subjects (paper 3); and c) the micro level of a school subject and the decisions made by teachers (papers 4 and 5). In this panel, we propose to analyze these layers in a relational way, paying attention to their political and epistemological aspects and connecting them with the local factor, which is the ultimate destination of educational policy actions. Apple (1989; 1997; 2000; 2006) and Ball (2011) argue that there are constant political disputes in the fields of Education Policy and Curriculum and that they are linked to the struggles for power. It is possible to see examples of those struggles in our papers.
The first one discusses the creation of a national curriculum in Brazil and the disputes for power in the process of defining what knowledge will be part of a national curriculum. The second paper also deals with power disputes around the curriculum through the analysis of a Brazilian movement – called School Without Party – that has been tried to guide what and how teachers should teach at schools. In the following paper, the curriculum is analyzed to examine the struggle for power to define which school subjects are more or less important in school. The fourth paper examines the curriculum in an intersection with an educational policy to understand the curricular enactment by teachers responsible for the Integrated Seminars in a High School. Finally, the presentation that closes the panel narrows a little more the focus and addresses the disputes for the power of selecting which knowledge will be taught in the next Sociology class in the high school. None of these actions occurs in an ideological vacuum, and we carry out our analyses using this methodological lens.
These policies are central to our studies in the curriculum field. According to Apple (2000; 2006), Ball (2011) and Sacristán (2000), the definitions proposed by educational and curricular policies consist of the primary curricular building and practicing elements in schools. Thus, considering the research focus on the curriculum and on the relations between it and the curricular policies that cross over it, the four studies presented in this panel are inserted in the intersections between the curriculum and the educational policy research fields.

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