Line 5
School curricula and their contemporary challenges
Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Luiz Roberto Alves
The contribution of interdisciplinarity in undergraduate courses has lasting effects. It influences both the training process of undergraduate students and their subsequent pedagogical action. Given this understanding, it is clear that all aspects of this perspective must be considered, such as its influence on the selection of study subjects and the approach adopted. For some authors, interdisciplinarity requires adapted teaching methods and compatible methodologies (a topic studied in line 3). Next, to understand the impact of this training perspective on the pedagogical activities of individuals as teachers in basic education, it is necessary to consider the disciplinary structure in which they are immersed and with which they must interact, adapting their projects and seeking to establish partnerships at all levels of the school structure. In this context, there is a need to reflect on the transformations undergone by the interdisciplinary understanding of phenomena, crossing the boundary between the teacher’s training process and their arrival at school. Is collaboration between teachers sufficient to recreate discussions in an appropriate manner? What other possibilities exist?
The answer to these questions lies precisely in understanding what the school curriculum is and what it does. Understood here as a cultural action, it is not a block, a list or a static, fixed set of predefined content. It is precisely a space for action and transformation, present in
Pesquisadoras associadas:
- Arcenira Resende Lopes Targino, (Pós-doutoranda)
school life, historically constituted, a dynamic object that allows educators and managers to make decisions about what and how to work. At the same time, contemporary society transforms this technical object in two ways. First, by altering its essence by bringing to the agenda a new type of situation to be faced (here we refer to civilisational risks and other complex problems discussed in line 6). Second, through structuring initiatives such as the current platformisation of education and its potential for rigidity, which removes from the school the connection between who it is and what it teaches.
To address this context and investigate the curriculum from a cross-cutting and interdisciplinary perspective, line 5, “Curricula and their contemporary challenges”, organised diverse and complementary research within a concentric core structure. At the forefront, at the centre of the process, is research into what curricula are and how they have historically been constituted in Brazilian schools. To this end, research conducted through focus groups, enriched by the analysis of official reference documents, should identify elements of the thinking of teachers working in schools in three states: São Paulo, Santa Catarina, and Piauí. While the first represents the local reality, known to researchers, the second brings the perspective of the tradition of what a ‘good school’ is, and the third provides information on a strategy that has allowed the state to perform well in standardised tests used to evaluate education in the country. Line of research 5 seeks to understand teachers’ views on the curricula with which they interact. The aim is to identify whether it corresponds to the idea of a living and pluralistic technical object as described above or whether, on the contrary, it represents for them a rigid, fixed and finished control tool, as seems to be indicated by the idealistic political thinking that advocates the platformisation of basic education.
At the same time, investigations conducted by researchers working in this field should provide information on a broader set of realities representative of situations that characterise the Brazilian context, such as the periphery (with its own identity) and the buffer zones between urban and rural areas. The latter becomes particularly interesting when one considers the existence of movements that advocate specific approaches in clearly urban or rural areas, leaving the border between the two as a territory in constant dispute that materialises the clash of perspectives.
Ultimately, it is the correlation between the results obtained in all these contexts that should inform what the curriculum in Brazil is like today. It is hoped that this will contribute to the positive evolution of debates on controversial topics such as educational platformisation, the issue of grades and the performance of states, promoting their evolution towards creative, free, autonomous and humanising schools. This is how line 5 should contribute to the common goal of the thematic project: to conduct a realistic and mature discussion about the arrival of bolder models of interdisciplinarity in the schools of tomorrow.
Keywords: curriculum, culture, society, school, teaching, interdisciplinarity
Undergraduate and postgraduate students:
- Ian Vinicius Guimarães dos Santos Rusig /Bolsista FAPESP (FE/USP)
- Andressa Silvestre Miranda Barbosa – Iniciação científica / Bolsista Fapesp – (IFSP)
Scholarship teachers:
- Raphael Filippe Carvalho Atallah – SEDUC / Bolsista Fapesp – EP2
- João Paulo Jeannine Andrade Carneiro, – SEDUC / Bolsista Fapesp – EP4