O LEGADO DE PAULO FREIRE PARA AS POLÍTICAS DE CURRÍCULO E PARA O TRABALHO DOCENTE, NO BRASIL TO CITE THIS ARTICLE PLEASE INCLUDE ALL OF THE FOLLOWING DETAILS: LOPES, Alice Casimiro (2016). What are we meaning by Curriculum? Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 13 (1) http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci What are we meaning by Curriculum? Alice Casimiro Lopes1 State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil With the incorporation of the post-structural studies in the field of Curriculum, any attempt of full representation of what the Curriculum is, any attempt to identify once and for all the meaning of the Curriculum, any attempt to answer definitively to the question “what does Curriculum mean?” is questioned. In the policy, it is deconstructed the claim of an accurate correlation or correspondence between enunciated proposal and the school Curriculum. There is not reference (as outside presence) to the language that guarantees the possibility to stop the floating of meaning. There is not one final meaning for the Curriculum (or for any identity). Thus, it is argued the thesis of the failure of all curricular prescription and of all normativity (Lopes, 2015). This normative emptiness is comprised of the impossibility of fullness, of foundation. There is no foundation for the Curriculum: a theory, a sense of common content, a fixed curricular community. Such impossibility refers to the possible dispute in relation to the attempt to reach the absent fullness, and to the defense of a radical investment in the Curriculum, simultaneously theoretical and political. In this direction, the Curriculum theory is not the producer of the rationality that constitutes the norm to be followed or to guide the policy, for example, to guide the choices of contents/curricular values and identities in the schools. The theory refers to the risk of investigating the unexpected, the contingent, to deconstruct hegemonies, to unsettle certanties, to reactivate disregarded possibilities. The articles of this TCI issue particularly reaffirm the unsettled nature of what it is understood to be the Curriculum. From the question “what are the tasks of Curriculum scholars for the 21st century?”, theme posed for the 5th IAACS (International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies) Triennial Conference held in Ottawa Canada in May 2015, Peter Cole questions the very rules of traditional grammar to present us an intriguing text. In this way, the author tries to express the orality of his St' át' imc culture and how he signifies himself as an Indigenous scholar. Janete Carvalho, Sandra Silva and Tânia Delboni present a research by which they defend that “teachers and students bring experience you school life, they create the possibility of relying on life relationships woven from different lines that connect you each to other, creating to other possible areas will be Curriculum development”. The authors make use methodologies of the school life studies, a significant curricular field in Brazil, and cross such methodologies with the studies of Spinoza and Foucault. Myriam Southwell, in turn, in a study developed in Argentina, incorporates the relations between universal and particular from the discourse theory of Laclau, crossing education history and the Curriculum. In the words of the author, she seeks to question “the most outstanding elements on which the discourse of inclusion in our region was Lopes. What are we meaning by Curriculum? ‘ 2 Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 13 (1) 2016 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci built”. Simultaneously she argues that, nowadays, the school expansion reconfigures the “school format”. Silvia Moraes and Ludmila Freire present the results of a research on the global citizenship. This study focuses on a Brazilian university, a British university and a third one in Portugal. The authors find ground in the ecology of knowledges of Boaventura de Souza Santos, a critic response to the presentism of Pinar and the notion of floating signifier of Laclau. They argue that the university stands as a discursive context for building citizenship e why they conceives citizenship as a floating signifier. Mei Wu Hoyt tries to answer the questions: What forces mobilize or sustain the process of the internationalization of Curriculum studies in this local context? When local cultural and curricular efforts meet the international, how do they work with, through, and around the process of “complicated conversation”? What is the nature of such a process? In order to do that, she studies the Curriculum studies center at South Central Normal University in China. Her study is based on the works of Pinar and the notion of rhizomic matrix. In different ways, the texts provoke us, destabilize certainties and operate with distinct notions of Curriculum. As in other works of TCI, the field seems to seek to build other ways to investigate, that can account for the complexity, of the fluid, floating, contingent nature of the Curriculum. In this movement, we cease to ask what Curriculum means, and start to ask what we are meaning by Curriculum. We hope that other authors present themselves to participate in the attempt to respond to this issue. Notes 1 alicecasimirolopes@gmail.com References Lopes, A. C. (2015) Normatividade e intervenção política: em defesa de um investimento radical (Normativity and political intervention: in defense of a radical investment). In: Alice Casimiro Lopes; Daniel de Mendonça. (Org.). A Teoria do Discurso de Ernesto Laclau: ensaios críticos e entrevistas. São Paulo: Annablume, p. 117-147. mailto:alicecasimirolopes@gmail.com