Curriculum, Context and Otherness

Abstract

In this paper I seek to question the tendency of curriculum policies and theorizations to operate a contextual control logic. I question the recurring assumption of context as something controllable, in which a given world view would find its resonance and productivity in relation to a given subject / otherness. For this, I place, in a first section of the text, the perspective of context in Jacques Derrida's thought, keeping it associated with the ideas of differance, 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 exposed to apprehension and coordination. In this sense, I highlight, among traditional and critical works of the curriculum, as well as in fragments of official Brazilian curriculum documents, nuances of readings based on the calculation of what is supposed as practice, context and how knowledge structures and guides it. 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 meaning production is a world intervention / reading practice, meaning production, a movement of hegemonization of a certain focus, it is already production of a context, sustained in the attempt to mention, reference to the other that seeks to control. Key-words: Curriculum Theory, Curriculum policies, Deconstruction.