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: Costa, Hugo Heleno Camilo. (2019) Curriculum, context and otherness. Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 16 (1) p. 61-74 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci Curriculum, Context and Otherness1 Hugo Heleno Camilo Costa2 Federal University of Mato Grosso, Brazil Introduction The view that the proposition of something that dissolves the supposed problems that a generic school would be going through is recurrent. In this direction, readings are constituted in the curriculum field, which, often colliding with each other, affirm horizons that can be reached when a certain orientation is (or is) assumed for the school, as discussed by Pinar et al (2017) and Garcia-Huidobro (2018). At the same time as the affirmations of solutions in this field are current, so too are the questions about the paths defended for the school. Thus, not infrequently, different readings aim to propose a way for a school, recurrently interpreted as that space to be thought, treated, understood or produced by some logic that may favor it in the best, most productive, emancipatory, entrepreneurial or critical direction. The concern that mobilizes this article is to draw attention to how much a political- curricular thinking3 can be taken as a meaning-producing textualization for the school. But this would not be enough, because it would continue to point to a view of school as locus that can be controlled by a logic of transparency of the senses that constitute it. Therefore, I do not focus on the term school as given object in the world, but I draw attention to the perspective of context, understanding it as an interesting conception of proposition or movements to the other. I refer, therefore, not to a specific space-time, a particular school, but to the presupposition about the transcendentality of access to otherness when we aim at the significance of what is and how it should be. Thus, I assume as a scenario to think about the way policies and theorizations in the curriculum field operate in a context control dynamics, whether it is meant as a school, as a social movement, as a space for the formation of a given subject, the world of work, space in which given experience occurs. It is the applicant is a question of a controllable environment assumption, on which a world reading find its resonance and productivity in relation to the subject/otherness. Therefore, they are important questions: how to ensure priority contexts? And what is the other to be produced / found 'in' or 'from' a given contextual intervention? These questions aim to incite the limited character of a transparent context in terms of meaning, a context as a meeting point with the otherness that would be given from an a priori conception of what the world is. In opposition to such conception, in this article, which consists of a post-structural investment in the curriculum, I highlight the perspective of context from the proposal by Jacques Derrida, with a view to thinking about its deconstructionist power in the curriculum studies, the curriculum policy, particularly focusing on the discussion of knowledge, taking it as an example to this discussion. This work is linked to the efforts of different other researchers who have incorporated discursive readings, particularly Derridean, into the field of Education, such as Aquino, Corazza and Adó (2018), Biesta (2017), Carvalho (2007), Couto Junior and Pocahy ( 2017), Fabbrini Costa. Curriculum, Context and Otherness 62 Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index (2005), Jordan and Buhrer (2013), Miguel (2016), Monteiro (2007), Ponzoni (2014), Skliar (2003), Valenzuela Echeverri (2017). In the curriculum field, specifically, I highlight works such as Carvalho (2015), Costa and Lopes (2018a; 2018b), Cunha, Costa and Pereira (2016), Egéa-Kuehne (2013), Green (2017), Lopes (2015), Souza (2008), Gough et al (2003), Reis and Paraíso (2014), Macedo (2015; 2016; 2017), Macedo and Miller (2018), Ng-A-Fook (2014). Such works concentrate efforts on criticizing structuring perspectives on the curriculum, the school, and the presupposition of what the subject and the meaning of the world become. In this sense, these contributions draw attention to the stealth character of otherness, pointing to deconstruction as a powerful interpretative horizon to the traditions that aim to pave the curriculum field, through themes such as knowledge, the subject, the school, the culture, the experience. Given these contributions, this work focuses on a collaborative exercise through the search for the deconstruction of horizons that permeate curricular thinking in a metaphysical register. This is not a superationist expectation in which milestones of a Western logocentric view would be supplanted. But it is important, as the philosopher points out, a movement of inscription in the very scenes of affirmation of such markers, so that, in revisiting the installations, we can tension them in their limits or operate in their margins, highlighting their precariousness (Derrida, 1982). In a previous work (Costa & Lopes, 2018a), approaching official documents, we sought to think about the relationship of an expectation of control over context / contextualization through the idea of knowledge. In that work, we highlight the perspective of knowledge as property that, if well involved in supposed contextual aspirations, would lead to the formation of subjects capable of acting in all contexts in a plausible manner. In that approach to documents it helped to think of how different documents, although they can be read as productions linked to governments and / or groups of power, reiterate generic perspectives that make it possible to read a movement of structuring the curriculum and, consequently, the names triggered in the curriculum debate. Here I outline as problematization the way, in addition to the official documents, different emblematic works in the curriculum field tend to operate the perspective of context as a given in the world, reasonable, transparent to analysis. I focus on the perspective of context by considering it as a mark of different moments of curricular political thinking, which, focusing on the Brazilian scenario, I define as theoretical discussions of the curriculum field and official documents, such as the National Curriculum Guidelines for Secondary - DCNEM (Brazil, 1998; 2012) and the National Curriculum Common Base for Secondary - BNCC-EM (Brazil, 2018). I argue about control reading as to what is interpreted by context via, for example, knowledge. I point out that, not only in the scope of critical readings to what could be read as efficient and / or traditional, technicist, but I highlight different works, focused on different approaches to curriculum. In a first section of the text, I place the perspective of context in Jacques Derrida's thought, keeping it associated with the ideas of différance, writing and dissemination. In the second section, I focus on how a structural view of context tends to support approaches to knowledge as structuring of practice, understood as being exposed to apprehension and coordination. For this, I focus on traditional and critical approaches of the curriculum, as well as fragments of official curriculum documents, nuances of readings based on the calculation of what is supposed to be the practice, the context and how the knowledge structures and guides it. I point out that any attempt to control the knowledge, the practices of teachers and students, as well as any other identification involved with the field of education, is in a vain https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index Costa. Curriculum, Context and Otherness 63 Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index motion in the face of the generative potential of all meaning. Similarly, in a third moment of the text, I put into perspective the idea that practice as a production of knowledge, within the scope of a discursive approach, cannot be read as limited to a particular institution or privileged moment, idealities and teleologies. I conclude by considering that all production of meaning is a practice of reading the world, a movement in favor of the hegemonization of a given focus, is already the production of a context, sustained in the attempt to mention, to refer to the other that wants to control or respond in the curriculum. Context as an event In different works Derrida focuses on deconstruction of markers of Western logocentrism/metaphysics as a destabilizing alternative, critical of aspirations to absolute and totalized truths, for different ways of thinking about the world. Among its arguments, it beckons the reading of the world through what it calls “text in general” (Derrida, 1981), as a textualization that would fuse the boundaries of different productions, turning them into moments of an endless and uncontrollable text. It is a general text driven by difference, interpretive betrayal, and impossibility of access to sameness. From this scenario proposed by the philosopher, I draw attention to the idea of context, which Derrida (1982) already argued to be a little treated issue, having in its articulation with the discussions of writing and différance (Derrida, 1982). I do this in order to highlight the discussion of knowledge, which I argue is structured in different approaches of curricular thought as a way of constituting skilled subjects to consciously decide in previously conceived contexts. For Derrida (1982), a context is an interpretative construction, based on the presupposition of an implicit, albeit structurally vague, consensus that aims to sustain what should be treated within its limits and / or to continue the dialogues on the horizon of a intelligibility and a truth of meaning (Derrida, 1982), so that norms or agreements can be established. For the philosopher, a context is never absolutely definable, not saturable by any previous knowledge or calculation. This structural non-saturation would derive from the rupture dynamics of the context itself (Derrida, 1982). This is because the iterability - as a repetition or quotation of what it is meant to refer to - leads to the fact that, as much as one seeks to retain and contextualize the quotation, the meaning of what one intends to reproduce or communicate can never be kept intact. In this reading, the unconscious, singular and intense character of the translation as an iteration / writing is highlighted, considering its productive dynamism and, simultaneously, its ability to fend homogenizing aspirations of writing/textualization, to split full contextual pretensions. To think of the iteration / translation as a means of involvement, irresistible and permanent betrayal, consists in pondering which contexts are fragile (in) founded, because they are constituted by a faith (Derrida, 2002) to be dealing with the same thing in relation to a given name or signifier. It is important to conceive of contexts as fractured in their structure, since the additive repetition of différance leads to failure the expectation to mention the referential, which is supposed as the origin or common space of the context itself, which is crossed by the differential dynamics of the meanings articulated under same name/context/signifier. By signaling the context we are no longer in it or accessing it, but changing with the idea of what we are (trying) to mention, we are supplementing and engendering other contexts, inhabiting another contextualization. To mention is, therefore, to break, to iterate the meaning of otherness as an outburst, to be in another context. Derrida (1982) marks the iteration as mobilized by différance, which supplements and makes something new happen, contaminates the intention and makes every performing / speaking / writing / translation act express something other than what it was meant https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index Costa. Curriculum, Context and Otherness 64 Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index to say. From this perspective, it is argued that every utterance is exposed to contextual rupture. For the philosopher (1982), the iterability, while authorizing, corrupts the rules and codes that it constitutes, diffuses the alteration in repetition, the dissemination of meaning by quoting. Derrida (1982) considers the context as impossible to saturate and coordinate, given that iterability / writing / translation is the bearer of a game, a spacing, an independence from what could be considered as origin or living intention. Thus, it marks the indeterminacy of the context of the production of something, the limitation of the meaning intention and the utterance beyond the context, given the supplementary operation of the iterability that, from now on, changes with the intention affirmed to itself (as full, as presence). Although the affirmation of the limits of context is necessary, it is already interdicted by différance, emphasizing the fundamental fluctuation that motivates every sign. Derrida (1982) argues that any brand, thought of as writing, is potent in operating beyond its supposed meaning and, being primarily conceived as a disruption of presence in the brand, can be mentioned, quoted. The affirmation of the limits of intention, of consciousness, breaks with every given context, leading to the indefinite constitution of other contexts which, in turn, are also absolutely unsaturable. The ability to be cited or duplicated, finally, the iterability of a name or an idea, is not an accident, but, according to the philosopher, is what a signifier cannot do without to have his operation considered “normal” (Derrida, 1982). From this statement, Derrida questions what would be a mark in the world that could not be mentioned. Writing as supplementation, which intervenes in communication beyond it, which is dynamized in a dissemination that can never be reduced to polysemy, cannot be thought of as the object of the hermeneutic decoding or unveiling of an original truth or meaning. As conceived by Derrida, the interpretive betrayal enclosed in writing does not, on the other hand, neglect the existence of intention or consciousness. Intention may have its place, but this place is no longer able to coordinate all meaning. For Derrida (1982), the intention is not present to itself and its content, but constitutes an absence to transcendentality. This “essential absence of intention in the actuality of the utterance, this structural unconsciousness” (Derrida, 1982, p.369), which the philosopher points out as preventing the full saturation or apprehension of a context. According to Derrida, for a context to be controllable, intention would need to act as its dominant guideline, which would confront it with the need to be absolutely present and transparent to itself and others. In this sense, Derrida (1981) considers that there is no transcendental knowledge or consciousness, absolute control of meaning and, therefore, there is no knowledge about the limits and properties of context, but only a movement of generative dissemination of new senses. To this the philosopher attributes the impossibility of the prevalence of a teleological and totalizing dialectic that enables a certain occasion, moment, regardless of its distance/proximity, to be reconciled into a textual totality that guarantees a supposed truth of meaning. Dissemination, which is considered to be inherent in all involvement with language, provides only the production of infinite semantic effects and the limitation to the return to a simple origin. It is the “supplement and the turbulence of a certain lack” (Derrida, 1981, p. 45) that fractures the edges of the text in which the world is meant. With this, I do not think that the contextual disruption, through dissemination/différance, is a disagreeable expression, but I point out that, when we suppose to treat the same, we are already supplementing, betraying, producing other meanings in relation to what we aim to deal. It is to recognize in Derrida (1981) that we play with parentage or similarity, with the simulation or fiction of a presence that is purely absent. https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index Costa. Curriculum, Context and Otherness 65 Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index From this reading, I focus markers of curricular thinking that I think tend to project contexts as susceptible to a knowledge, access, analysis, continents of truths. These are conceptions of context marked by the presupposition of awareness and / or precision of their limits in terms of meaning. I argue that contexts are being read as exposed to calculated action, conscious intervention. Curriculum policy and the context of knowledge Based on Lopes and Macedo (2011), Macedo (2006) and Pinar (2017), I draw attention to perspectives of curricular thinking that, although distinct from each other, as traditions tend to remain in the logocentric4 register of control and calculation of the curriculum, knowledge and the subject produced from it, about unforeseen contexts of practices. I consider that such practices tend to be supposed to be restricted to the work of teachers and students in the school environment. Reading that, I argue, neglects the perspective that every statement about contextual practices are also contextual practices, that every production of knowledge, in a given context, is an event that, interpretatively revolving possible records, seeks to respond to what is challenging and questions the identity. For the authors, as well as for Pinar (2017), since the beginning of the twentieth century, curriculum studies have sought to define its object in different ways, ranging from aspiration to precision about the best proposition of curriculum guides for educational networks until the understanding of what happens in the daily life of each school. Lopes and Macedo (2011) point out that the curricular tradition has, as a recognizable center, the search for the organization and conduction of processes understood as related to the educational process and, therefore, to the control of the experience, the practice of teachers and students. From the conceptual organization proposed by Lopes and Macedo (2011), I base this discussion focusing on what could be read as a first approach5 or moment of more organized curricular thinking as a field. So I take Bobbitt's behavioral / efficientist arguments as well as his contemporary rivalry: Dewey's progressive proposals. According to Pinar et al (2017), the first one tends to be associated with more restrictive and directive approaches to the curriculum, understanding it as control and social administration based on scientific matrices. Its perspective is the focus on knowledge and learning for solving tasks and the achievement of goals set as common and desirable for education. The second, also based on the resolution of social problems, is pointed by Lopes and Macedo (2011) as less coercive from the point of view of knowledge control, being linked to the defense of a more democratic education, based on the critique of inequality and valuation of the child's experience as a way to bridge the gap between formal educational presupposition and student interest. Among such views, the difference in the way they think about the orientation of school practice, the production and the purposes of knowledge is highlighted, being central to Bobbitt's efficiency the preparation of the child for the productive world, for adulthood. Dewey's (1959) progressivism, on the other hand, would be based on the defense of learning as a continued process of knowledge production and not as a stage of adult education. However, as pointed out by Biesta (2014), the author operates a projection of the subject to be constituted via knowledge in a given childhood and school, structuring, in this sense, the curricular production (Dewey, 1959). According to Lopes and Macedo (2011), progressivism is organized as a social criticism, so that the knowledge of the child allows the reflection on social problems with a view to intervention for a more democratic society. For this, Dewey's (1959) progressivism uses a set of propositions to ensure the development of an education articulated with the common social experience in school contexts. In this, a meaning of what the school context is and what should be the social experience for https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index Costa. Curriculum, Context and Otherness 66 Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index the subject would already be defined. The tension between technical perspectives and social experience made possible, according to Pinar (2017), Tyler's eclectic proposition, whose curriculum model, although intended to articulate the two views, focuses on the efficiency rather than progressive perspective. According to Lopes and Macedo (2011), Tyler defends a model based on a precise link between curriculum and assessment, reducing the curriculum to a set of propositions and the evaluation for the function of verifying curricular effectiveness. According to the authors, the prescriptive character of the curriculum is what is in common between efficientism, progressivism and Tylerian rationality. Although the referred theorists are focused on different problematizations, they converge in the sense that the school is a context of application of presupposed knowledge and, therefore, exposed to control and rationalization. In common, such curricular readings have gathered around a knowledge view linked to the academicist view, which would be based on the presupposition of scientific knowledge as the basis for the construction of subjects to act in a society perspective. Critical readings of such views led, in general, to two others, critical- reproductivist and emancipation and resistance. These approaches, despite the differences, advocated ways of knowing capable of raising awareness / forming subjects to a critical social reading, for recognition of their condition in the social structure of classes and, thus, mobilizing them for transformation, involvement with counter-hegemonic purposes. In response to efficiency and progressivism, the critical movement also affirms the interpretation of contexts as exposed to determinations of what is external, superior and hegemonic: ideology and power (Pinar et al, 2017). For Pinar (2017) and Lopes and Macedo (2011), the affirmation of the centrality of knowledge in the critical movement focuses on the presupposition of neutrality, drawing attention to how different proposals, such as efficiency and progressivism, even if conflicting, reduce the debate about knowledge to methodological or systematic concern in curriculum development. As highlighted by Pinar et al (2017), the theoretical investments aligned under what may be called the critical-reproductivist approach turn to the questioning of school and curriculum as mechanisms of control, alienation and social reproduction. These views are based on macrostructural readings based on Marxist thinking, to think about the relationship between economic base and superstructure (Lopes & Macedo, 2011). Despite their distinct concerns, more or less deterministic, authors such as Althusser, Baudelot and Establet, Bowles and Gintis, Bourdieu, Young and Apple, have their perspectives directed to the view that the school and therefore knowledge are reproductive mechanisms of social structure and ways of knowing. Highlight as emblematic (besides considered foundational to reproductivist theories) the thought of Althusser. For the author, the hierarchies between different knowledges, the selectivity in access to them, the focus on methodologies that do not lead to criticism, and the way they are proposed to form subjects who should act in specific positions in the social structure, reiterate the school and the production of knowledge as a means of reproduction and social control. In this way, the school, as well as other scopes called “ideological apparatuses”, can be read as a transparent context to the interpretation of the researcher, who through macrosystemic analysis would know every form of being and doing inside. The school would have nothing but the univocity of the domain of a given ideology. Critical-reproductivist readings were also considered alienating because they reaffirmed what they criticized, as Giroux (1988) points out, by calling them “discourse of despair”. Such readings have come under harsh criticism from movements driven by the influence of cultural studies and other microstructural approaches in the curriculum field (Pinar et al, 2017). https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index Costa. Curriculum, Context and Otherness 67 Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index The thought of emancipation and resistance (Lopes & Macedo, 2011) opposes the view that the school is a mere space for reproduction of the social structure of classes, reproduction and transmission of world readings. This movement is mainly influenced by phenomenology, hermeneutics and existentialism, being supported also by works by Freire, Pinar, Giroux, McLaren and Willis. Such readings commonly advocate the experience, the practice of knowledge production, the dynamic reality lived in schools, as critical to macrosystemic readings, which would tend to underestimate the life, nature and productive character of the school context, from and in relation to the expression of the daily life of the subjects (Lopes & Macedo, 2011). In this direction, for example, Giroux (1988) points to the focus on human agency as a possibility of understanding the processes of mediation, accommodation and resistance to the logic of capital, as well as the social practices of domination. Resistance thinking (Giroux, 1988) stated that it is a gross mistake of reproductive thinking to neglect the need to produce a conception of agency that could favor the empowerment of subjects through their ways of knowing. For the author, the reproductive theory concentrates all its critical argumentation on the reiteration of the reproductive power of the school in the capitalist society. With these arguments, the authors of resistance built the opposition to reproductivist thinking and assumed, according to Pinar (2017), the lead of critical thinking in the curriculum field, through an inversion of the interpretative perspective. They came to advocate school-centered approaches in contextual local experiences, seeking their interaction with broader social contexts. There were also works that advocated counter-hegemony, in response, focusing on everyday / contextual / experiential power, projecting the subject as active and potent in the production of knowledge through the empowerment of his world readings, via a critical appropriation of the world through knowledge produced by local solidarity networks. I agree with Lopes and Macedo (2011) to read that the projected conflict between traditional and critical thinking and, within the scope of the critical movement itself, between reproductivist and emancipation and resistance approaches, marks the search for the overcoming of a technical rationality, in a first moment. In another way, there is also the defense of the distension from a formal curriculum view, read as insufficient with the lived dimension, to a perspective of valuing the daily experience as knowledge production by the subjects in their local contexts. I consider that the conflicts marked by different productions, as they form a broader discursive field, continually affect the curricular production, also in the production of official documents, constituting the possibility of reading the curriculum policies as subsumed in a broader scenario of production of meaning. Without assuming that such theoretical perspectives are transferred to curriculum documents directly, but by interpreting that, in a discursive reading, they are moments of a general text of curriculum policy, I focus on fragments of the texts involved with the National Curriculum Guidelines for Secondary - DCNEM (Brazil, 1998; 2012) and the National Curriculum Common Base for Secondary - BNCC-EM (Brazil, 2018), which mark what I have called here from a perspective of curriculum structuring via knowledge and context control. Produced at different times and governments, these texts involved in the DCNEM and BNCC-EM constitution movement are mentioned here not at random, but because they are considered texts of great repercussion in the public and academic debate. I consider that these are moments of attempts to represent a broader textuality of politics, besides assuming a character of obligation and foundation for the production and proposition of curricular changes in the most different levels of government and spaces of power. As a background, the text of DCNEM (Brazil, 1998) projects as specific contexts contemporary scientific, behavioral and https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index Costa. Curriculum, Context and Otherness 68 Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index social transformations as a way to support a given worldview. Such a view, stated as inexorable, is supposed to impose on society an unknown view of society, but which will be appropriated through integrated knowledge via interdisciplinarity. Knowledge is attributed to the ability to achieve social inclusion, preparation for the world of work, ethical, flexible, autonomous and critical training of the person produced by secondary level, so that it can act and adapt to the most different social contexts. Knowledge, projected at the center of what is the function of education / curriculum, carries the opportunity for the formation of competences and skills capable of producing socially included subjectivities that would be knowledge producers and citizens (BRASIL, 1998, p.16).Citizenship and competence, with the potential for preparation to do everything, in this case, would be constituted by knowledge. Such reading allows the conjecture that citizenship, subjectivity and ways of conceiving the world are conditioned to a knowledge not obtained, but virtually proposed by DCNEM. Knowledge capable of ensuring the construction of a polyvalent subject and bearer of a critical potentiality defined by what is given as critical. From the perspective of the document (Brazil, 1998), a specific knowledge is capable of producing a certain subject adjusted to act in all contexts supposed to be guaranteed for life. Such knowledge is assumed to be capable of enabling access to supposed “true meanings about the physical and social world” (Brazil, 1998, p. 27), knowledges considered competent to the formation of subjects capable of analyzing and producing solutions, of orienting to correct decision in the face of challenges, to provide adaptability to new situations (Brazil, 1998, p.27).The acquisition of such knowledge is defended as fundamental to the production of subjects by the school and through disciplinary knowledge. The defense that knowledge must be contextually appropriate is specifically supported in the absence of a given subject. With this, we have a movement that tends to limit the meaning of the context through what should be known in it, on it and for it, defining it as given of knowledge, as having known properties in its entirety prior to the experience. This stands out when topics such as work and employment, also assumed to have fixed meanings, are assumed as priority contexts for curriculum production, being understood as contexts in which knowledge must constitute competences with preparatory potential for the subject to be in different situations in “ world of occupations” (Brazil, 1998).Thus, it is argued that knowledge cannot be fragmented, as in a traditional disciplinary model, but should be interdisciplinary and contextualized (Brazil, 1998, p.37), appropriating the knowledge of different disciplines for the formation of competent subjects to act in different contexts. In the DCNEM proposed in 2012, although mobilized by the mission to achieve the purposes not achieved by the DCNEM disseminated in 1998, it is proposed the need for higher qualification of subjects for the industrial development of the country. In this sense, the formation of the ideal subject for the privileged context of the work and the continuous changes of this work is brought together in the missions of promoting social inclusion and citizenship. This perspective allows the idea that the production of subjects for the world of work is necessarily to form autonomous, critical and reflective citizens / workers who can deal with the challenges ahead of a world that is admittedly dynamic. To cope with the creation of ideal conditions, the school is now perceived as a primordial context for the “systematic dissemination of scientific knowledge built by humanity” (Brazil, 2012, p. 150). Nevertheless, the text defends the importance of the school making a connection with the students' life projects, so that it can succeed in the educational process, in the production of knowledge (Brazil, 2012, p.155). As in the 1998 DCNEM, the 2012 ones start from the principles of interdisciplinarity and contextualization as a way to ensure the importance of scientific knowledge, to which school subjects would be related. Such https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index Costa. Curriculum, Context and Otherness 69 Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index configuration is considered fundamental to the production of competent subjects, as well as to the production of meanings in privileged contexts, controlling the forms of operation of such knowledge with the appropriate senses / meanings, seen as ideal for a contemporary society view. An integrated scientific knowledge perspective, in this case, is taken as the founding presupposition of the ways of knowing circulating in the curriculum. The contextual application of this knowledge would ensure the neutralization of the gap between theory and practice, producing subjects who are aware of what is defined as desirable in the contexts predicted for life (society, work, for example). The appropriation of scientific knowledge is effective (...) with contextualization that relates knowledge with life, as opposed to little or nothing active and meaningless methodologies for students. These methodologies establish an expository and transmissivist relationship that does not put students in real life, to do, to elaborate. (Brazil, 2012, p. 167) Scientific knowledge, once interdisciplinarized in its contextualization, along the DCNEM texts (Brazil, 1998; 2012), signals the expectation of knowledge capable of constituting subjectivities to operate contextually. In a rough perspective, BNCC-EM (Brazil, 2018) intensifies criticism of the curriculum's disciplinary organization, often associating disciplines with the difficulty of constituting competent subjects to operate in supposed contexts for life, such as daily life, the exercise of citizenship and the work, as it points out that: [...] proposes the overcoming of the radically disciplinary fragmentation of knowledge, the stimulation of its application in real life, the importance of the context to make sense of what is learned and the student's protagonism in their learning and in the construction of their life project. (Brazil, 2018, P.14) With this, it takes the disciplines as fragmentary bodies of knowledge, unable to deal with the formation of readings on such a common context. It also beckons for curriculum integration and contextualization as ways to achieve a given knowledge derived from the articulation of knowledge with experiences, both (previously) possessing the meaning of “real life” to the student subject. From this perspective, it is possible to interpret that the production of such contextual knowledge would be defined a priori of the subject, since in the affirmation of the text is punctuated the view of what the subject must "know" and must "know how to do", with a knowledge and context already set for their lives. While the document stresses the importance of curricular production being linked to life projects and the meanings of the contexts of a supposed real life, it advances the definition of meanings, for example, by establishing what characterizes as important for the subject and his future experience, as in defending “fields of experiences” and, consequently, expected learning (Brazil, 2018, p.51).I consider emblematic of this movement of structuring and control of life contexts the idea of competence, defended in the BNCC-EM, which points out that the pedagogical practice has as its purpose the clear indication of what students should "know" (considering the constitution of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values) and, above all, what they should "know how to do" (considering the mobilization of this knowledge, skills, attitudes and values to solve complex demands of daily life, the full exercise of citizenship and the world of work) (BRASIL, 2018, p.12) These defenses aim to guide the pedagogical practices in schools as having to be aligned with a project of meaning of the student and teacher, their life and performance, the meaning of the experiences (in and out of school), and emphasize the school as a space-time of production of operational know-how, as pointed out by Macedo (2015).I agree with the author in interpreting https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index Costa. Curriculum, Context and Otherness 70 Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index that such perspectives point to an opposition to the imponderable, uncontrollable dynamics of school, life, cultural flows that mark this or that context, which cannot be probed, whose meanings are produced contingently. The reduction of knowledge to a functional condition of know-how, which must be an operation planned in / for a given context, with a fixed meaning for the other, marks an important dynamic of a broader curricular textualization. It is, by the discussion that has been conducted in this text, to constitute the perspective of a deconstructionist inscription in the relation with documents, theories and studies of the curriculum. The aim is to highlight the power of a logocentric sense in the field, which seeks to control what is the other of / in school, life, work, society, daily life, the context of a subject, which should be known for a promised future. I consider these perspectives as moments of a broader curriculum policy, in which every decision, to agree or disagree, aims to recover opportunities to propose to otherness (through names such as knowledge, for example), to anticipate it where it is not, because it is (strangely) to come. Conclusions Working with the idea that knowledge could be omnipotent and functional for every context (school, work, family, society, etc.) points to an attempt to calculate (and thus reduce) ways of knowing the world. I think it is the denial of dealing with the unknown other, of placating the unknown questioning of an “wholly other” otherness (Derrida, 1996) that continually imposes the need to revolve our forms of knowledge, whatever they may be, to "give" the response to what is assumed as inescapable. I consider that the context is not calculable, just as the knowledge presumed to be operated in it is not a property carried by a subject with a transcendental reason / consciousness. Conceiving the context as not being able to be dominated by a logic or even retaken, knowledge can only be considered as a result of the decision to answer, which comes from a subjectivation (Derrida, 1996).That is, with every motion of control, what is projected as sufficient knowledge (to answer what is imposed as questioning [never know where and how]) resides in the moment of madness (Derrida, 1996), in the decision in answer, at which time we suppose that subjectivation is precipitated. Supported by Lopes and Macedo (2011), I think of the curriculum as text and, in this sense, retaking the Derridean concern that mobilizes these lines, I argue that both traditional and critical perspectives, as emblematic paths in the curriculum field, tend to assume knowledge and the context as exposed to control and rationalization. I emphasize this reading taking into account the state-centric character that marks macrostructural views, defending the verticalization of power, from top to down, in terms of control over the context of school practice, over the production of knowledge. Also, the perspectives of emancipation and resistance, which in defense of the vivid and latent character of subjective experience in the context of school practice, reiterate the verticality of the curriculum by conceiving the practice as capable of producing resistance from the down to top, as a counter-hegemony (Giroux, 1988). In this case, it would also be possible from a knowledge defined as capable of producing certain subject constituted for pre-established contexts. I think it is conjectured a vision of knowledge supposed to be able to transcend singularities, saturate (unknown) contexts, with the power to solve generic problems, affirm appropriate competences or skills to face whatever the otherness of the school event, of the curriculum, of life. My concern here is for the common presupposition, in the different perspectives and fragments of curricular texts mentioned, that the context of practice is somewhat apprehensible https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index Costa. Curriculum, Context and Otherness 71 Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index and rationalizable, either by a traditional / instrumentalist or critical logic. In addition, I am interested in highlighting the recurring readings of context as something in the world, as an object, which can be inferred from an interpretive metric, as well as tending to be delineated as a space-time open to the conscious eye, to a transparent analysis. To emphasize the perspective of the curriculum as text (Lopes & Macedo, 2011), reiterating the textual character of the world, as thought by Derrida (1981; 1982), is to consider that all meaning of the curriculum is only a form of involvement, of decision. It is important to understand every practice as a practice of meaning with a view to hegemony, the production of meanings of knowledge, of a given enunciation, produced in a context that 'can no longer be recovered', revived. Such arguments include interpreting that any movement of mention to a given context, in defense of something that is deemed important, is to create, contextually and provisionally, new contexts. Along these lines of thought, every decision, as in stating a certain production of knowledge, consists of a traitorous contextual practice. It would not be interesting, therefore, to distinguish formal curriculum contexts from practices, for every motion of meaning is possible only if practiced contextually, in a "here and now" (Derrida, 1994). Establish relationships with such conceptions may imply that not only what is interpreted as the context of practice cannot be reduced to the differential action of teachers and students in schools, but is not restricted to practices limited to physical spaces or institutions. I support the view that all contextual production, like every possibility / opportunity of production of meaning, is singular and already in an asymmetrical movement in relation to otherness. I think it is important to understand that these words (in this text, as well as in all that concerns this discussion of contexts and their opacity), mark the ambivalence of being able to influence the production of new contexts and thereby perish as transcendental truths. Notes 1This article is linked to the project “Senses of Knowledge in Curriculum Policies: Geography and the National Curriculum Common Base” (Sentidos de Conhecimento nas Políticas de Currículo: a Geografia e a Base Nacional Comum Curricular), funded by CNPq and Federal University of Mato Grosso. 2hugoguimel@yahoo.com.br 3I use the expression understanding that the theorizing that we call curriculum thinking is inseparable from the meanings that produce curriculum policies. In this direction, I agree with Lopes and Macedo (2011). 4According to Derrida (1982), logocentric thinking would presuppose that language is transparent, reason and truth are presences affirmed as continuous and ideal. For further study on the subject, I suggest Derrida (1981; 1982). 5From the conceptual organization proposed by Lopes and Macedo (2011), I base this discussion focusing on what could be read as a first approach or moment of more organized curricular thinking as a field. So I take Bobbitt's behavioral / efficientist arguments as well as his contemporary rivalry: Dewey's progressive proposals. References Aquino, J. G.; Corazza, S. M.; Ado, M. D. L. (2018). Por alguma poética na docência: a didática como criação. Educação em Revista, 34, e169875. Epub January 18, 2018. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0102-4698169875 Biesta, G. (2017) Touching the soul? Exploring an alternative outlook for philosophical work with children and young people'. Childhood & Philosophy, 13 (28). pp. 415 – 452. ISSN: 1984-5987 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0102-4698169875 Costa. Curriculum, Context and Otherness 72 Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index Brazil. (1998). Conselho Nacional de Educação (CNE). Parecer n. 15, de 1 de junho de 1998. Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais para o Ensino Médio. Brasília, DF. Brazil. (2012). Ministério da Educação. Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais para o Ensino Médio. Brasília. Brazil. (2018). Base Nacional Comum Curricular: Ensino Médio. Brasília: MEC/ Secretaria de Educação Básica. Carvalho, F. A. (2007). Biologia e cultura: significações partilhadas na literatura de Monteiro Lobato. Ens. Pesqui. Educ. Ciênc., 9 (2). pp. 238-253. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1983- 21172007090206. Carvalho, R. T. (2015). Confluências de campos de saber na análise de rituais na produção do sujeito educado. Revista Inter Ação, [S.l.], 40 (3), pp. 557-572. https://doi.org/10.5216/ia.v40i3.36462. Costa, H. H. C.; Lopes, A. C. (2018a). A contextualização do conhecimento no ensino médio: tentativas de controle do outro. Educação & Sociedade,39(143), 301-320. Epub 26 de março de 2018. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/es0101-73302018184558 Costa, H. H. C.; Lopes, A. C. (2018b). School Subject Community in Times of Death of the Subject. Policy Futures in Education, 17(2), 105–121. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478210318766955 Couto J., D. R.; Pocahy, F. A. (2017).Dissidências epistemológicas à brasileira: uma cartografia das teorizações queer na pesquisa em educação. Revista Inter Ação, 42(3), 608-631. https://doi.org/10.5216/ia.v42i3.48905 Cunha, E. V. R.; Costa, H.H.C.; Pereira, T. V. (2016). Textualidade, currículo e investigação. Educação 39(2), pp.185-193. https://dx.doi.org/10.15448/1981-2582.2016.2.19711 Derrida, J. (1982). Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx. New York and london: Routledge. Derrida, J. (1981). Positions. London: The Athlone Press. Derrida, J. (1996). The gift of death (D. Wills, Trans.). The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Derrida, J. (2002). Force of law: The ‘mystical foundation of authority’. In: Anidjar G. (eds) Acts of religion. Routledge, New York. Egéa-Kuehne, D. (2003). The Teaching of Philosophy: Renewed Rights and Responsibilities. Educational Philosophy and Theory , 35(3), pp. 275-284. Fabrini, R.N. (2005). O ensino de filosofia: a leitura e o acontecimento. Trans/Form/Ação, 28(1), 7-27. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0101-31732005000100001 Garcia-Huidobro, J.C. (2018). Addressing the crisis in curriculum studies: curriculum integration that bridges issues of identity and knowledge, The Curriculum Journal, 29:1, 25-42. DOI: 10.1080/09585176.2017.1369442 Giroux, H. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: toward a critical pedagogy of learning. MA: Bergin & Garvey Press. Gough, N.; Gough, A.; Appelbaum, P.; Appelbaum, S.; Doll, M. A.; Sellers, W. (2003). Tales From Camp Wilde: Queer(y)ing Environmental Education Research. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 8 (1), pp. 239-265. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104- 026X2011000100017 Green, B. (2017). Currículo, Política e a Pós-modernidade: Além da questão do conhecimento na pesquisa em currículo. Currículo sem Fronteiras,17(3), pp.501-504. https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1983-21172007090206#_blank http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1983-21172007090206#_blank https://doi.org/10.5216/ia.v40i3.36462#_blank https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/es0101-73302018184558 https://doi.org/10.1177/1478210318766955 https://doi.org/10.5216/ia.v42i3.48905 https://dx.doi.org/10.15448/1981-2582.2016.2.19711 https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0101-31732005000100001 https://doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2017.1369442 http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-026X2011000100017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-026X2011000100017 Costa. Curriculum, Context and Otherness 73 Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index Jordão, C. M.; Bührer, E. A. C. (2013). A condição de aluno-professor de língua inglesa em discussão: estágio, identidade e agência. Educação & Realidade, 38(2), 669-682. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S2175-62362013000200018 Lopes, A. C. (2015). Por um currículo sem fundamentos. Linhas Críticas (UnB), 21 (45), pp. 445-466.Available: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=193542556011 .ISSN 1516- 4896 Lopes, A. C.; Macedo, E.F. (2011). Teorias de Currículo. São Paulo: Cortez. Macedo, E.F. (2006). Currículo como espaço-tempo de fronteira cultural. Currículo como espaço-tempo de fronteira cultural. Revista Brasileira de Educação, 11(32), 285-296. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1413-24782006000200007 Macedo, E. F. (2015) Curriculum and Teaching in Recent Curriculum Policies in Brazil. In: Hua Z., Pinar W.F. (eds) Autobiography and Teacher Development in China. Curriculum Studies Worldwide. Palgrave Macmillan, New York Macedo, E. F. (2016). Por uma leitura topológica das políticas curriculares. Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas / Education Policy Analysis Archives, 24 (26).http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v24.2075 Macedo, E. F. (2017). Mas a escola não tem que ensinar?: Conhecimento, reconhecimento e alteridade na teoria do currículo. Currículo sem fronteiras, v. 17 (3), pp. 539-554. Macedo, E. F.; Miller, J. L. (2018). Políticas públicas de currículo: autobiografia e sujeito relacional. Práxis educativa (UEPG. ONLINE), 13 (3), pp. 948-965. Miguel, A. (2016). Historiografia e Terapia na Cidade da Linguagem de Wittgenstein. Bolema: Boletim de Educação Matemática, 30(55), 368-389. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1980- 4415v30n55a03 Monteiro, S. B. (2007). Otobiografia como escuta das vivências presentes nos escritos. Educação e Pesquisa, 33 (3), pp. 471-484. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1517- 97022007000300006. Ng-A-Fook, N. (2014). Provoking the very "Idea" of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 12 (1), pp.10-69. Available in:https://jcacs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jcacs/article/view/39590 . ISSN: 1916-4467 Pinar, W. F.; Reynolds, W.; Slattery, P.; Taubman, P. (2017). Understanding curriculum. New York: Peter Lang. Ponzoni, F. (2014). El encuentro intercultural como acontecimiento: una propuesta para el avance teórico de la educación intercultural. Educación y Educadores, 17(3), 537- 553. https://dx.doi.org/10.5294/edu.2014.17.3.8 Reis, C.; Paraíso, M.A. (2014). Normas de gênero em um currículo escolar: a produção dicotômica de corpos e posições de sujeito meninos-alunos. Revista Estudos Feministas, 22(1), pp.237-256. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-026X2014000100013 Skliar, C. (2003). A educação e a pergunta pelos Outros. Diferença, alteridade, diversidade e os outros outros. Ponto de Vista (UFSC), 5 (1), pp. 37-50. Available in:https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/pontodevista/article/view/1244 . ISSN: 2175- 8050. Souza, R. M. (2008). Língua de sinais e escola: considerações a partir do texto de regulamentação da língua brasileira de sinais. ETD - Educação Temática Digital,7 (2), pp. 266-281.DOI :https://doi.org/10.20396/etd.v7i2.808. https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S2175-62362013000200018 http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=193542556011 http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1413-24782006000200007 http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v24.2075 https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1980-4415v30n55a03 https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1980-4415v30n55a03 http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1517-97022007000300006 http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1517-97022007000300006 https://jcacs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jcacs/article/view/39590 https://dx.doi.org/10.5294/edu.2014.17.3.8 https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-026X2014000100013 https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/pontodevista/article/view/1244 https://doi.org/10.20396/etd.v7i2.808#_blank Costa. Curriculum, Context and Otherness 74 Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index Valenzuela Echeverri, C. E. (2017). Derrida, herencia y educación. Pedagogía y Saberes, (46), 77-83. Retrieved August 13, 2019, from http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0121- 24942017000100008&lng=en&tlng=es Submitted: July, 20th, 2019. Approved: August, 17th, 2019. https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0121-24942017000100008&lng=en&tlng=es http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0121-24942017000100008&lng=en&tlng=es