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 (2019). Is there a Curriculum Path? Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 16 (1) p.1-2 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci Is there a Curriculum Path? Alice Casimiro Lopes1 State University of Rio de Janeiro If we consider the history of the curriculum, it is possible to say that some theories are presented in defense of a curricular trajectory. The instrumental theories and their planning proposals are the major expression of this idea of trajectory, even tough other critical theories of instrumental registers also operate with some idea of future to be achieved. Sometimes these theories try to avoid an uncertain future, try to create a landscape that sustains itself on a simplified past and also creates a safe path. This path is conceived as a road, maybe a bumpy dirt road, that allows our children to arrive in the foreseeable future. However, is this safe path possible? Even as metaphor, is it possible to work with those ideas of “future” and “path for the future”? We can imagine a continuos road after a curve on a bumpy dirt path, but it is just a fantasy of future, not a norm. With the words of Paul Auster (Auster, 1990), I prefer to say that, “in the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose”. After a simple bend – in the horizon –, we just have to take a chance, we just have a “perhaps”. Derrida addresses “perhaps” as the one that deprives us of all security, leaving the future “à venir” (Derrida, 2004), without calculation and strategies to define this “à venir” (to come) as a preprogrammed future. There is neither the experience of the event without the experience of perhaps, of one can be (Derrida, 2003). The concerns of those who bet on social change and the formation of future generations and who want to produce some guarantee of bequeathing to the future the best knowledge, the best of us, are understandable and admissible. But even if we are provisionally able to stabilize a notion of what the best knowledge is in a curricular political conflict, who we are producing via such stabilization will always be in question. What power relations produce our ideas of who we are? In this approach, the meanings of curriculum are always postponed – and any stabilization of meaning and production of identities occurs only in provisional and precipitous ways. Thus, the metaphors of path and future are only one of those “produced identities”, preciarious and without a final fixation. Maybe it is impossible not to deal with the path, as it is impossible not to think about future. The curriculum policies are sedimented constructions that create these ideas of path and future all the time. However, we can try to think about curriculum policies in a different way. This issue includes different approaches on curriculum and all of them are trying to create a new possibility of thinking the curriculum policies. There are articles from different countries and traditions. The first article is about the inclusion discourses and the meanings of secondary education that are present in the curricular policies, (Camila Carlachiani, from University of Rosário, Argentina); the second one questions how the policy of curricular https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci Lopes. Is there a Curriculum Path? 2 Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 16 (1) 2019 https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/ centralization has been approached by discursive researches and how the discursive perspective helps us to challenge the current hegemonic model of curricular policy without establishing a normative closure (Veronica Borges, Viviane Peixoto Cunha, from State University of Rio de Janeiro, and Clarissa Craveiro, from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil); the third one analyzes the trajectory of the curriculum policies of gender and sexuality in Brazil (Gustavo Oliveira and Anna Luiza Oliveira, from Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil); the fourth article tries to deconstruct the horizons that permeate curricular thinking in a metaphysical register (Hugo Heleno Camilo Costa, from Federal University of Mato Grosso, Brazil) and the last one tries to deal with the epistemological basis proposed by Latin American authors of the decolonization and Deaf studies (María Francisca Lohaus-Reyes, University of Chile). Perhaps these TCI articles may be a contribution to questioning the idea of curricular path. Perhaps they can improve the idea of democracy in curriculum policies, without the idea of a planned future or a known path. Or even without an idea of path or future. Notes 1 alicecasimirolopes@gmail.com References Auster, P. (1990) The New York Trilogy. New York: Penguin Books. Derrida, J. (2003) A universidade sem condição (University without condition). São Paulo: Liberdade, 2003. Derrida, J. (2004) Como se fosse possível, “within such limits” (As if it were possible, within such limits). In: Derrida, Jacques. Papel-Máquina (Paper-Machine). São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, p. 257-290. https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/ mailto:alicecasimirolopes@gmail.com