Curriculum, Policy, Practice

Abstract

Investigations into curriculum practices have always had great prominence in the curriculum field, to the point where the notion of curriculum in action has become one of the most powerful concepts in curriculum theory. From the phenomenological approaches, through the work of Paulo Freire and the concept of currere by William Pinar, to the most current discussions that focus on school daily life and teaching knowledge, curriculum practice is based on questioning the prescriptive approaches to curriculum. Given this tradition, emblematic studies, so as not to use the word classic, in the most diverse theoretical approaches, tend to focus on curriculum in action as almost synonymous with curriculum endowed with the most meaning, the part of curriculum that really should be considered in research and in school. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why policy studies have not developed a more consistent dialogue with curriculum practices, and its broader emphasis is on the education field beyond school. To the extent curriculum studies as political text assumed Marxist theoretical approaches (Pinar et al, 1995), they became characterized by ideas of centralized power in the state apparatus established to regulate practices. With this, policy assumed a link to institutive rationalistic concepts of a set character of policies over practices. In this way, policy would be a set of rules, in given socioeconomic relations, resulting or not from a social consensus or a hegemonic process, capable of materializing in institutions that define subjects’ way of acting or being. The instituting and even subversive dimensions would be designed in the field of social practices that would exert a counter-hegemonic action. Based on this dichotomy that deepened the separation between the ontic and the ontologic, it was no wonder that curricular policies and curricular practices were interpreted as distinct and unrelated dimensions. When an eventual relationship was made in this field, it often assumed an orientation of approaches from correlating theories, in which curricular practice was a reflection of a broader framework, a space of implementation or resistance. In this regard, curricular practices had their productive and creative dimensions denied. Many studies have been conducted in this perspective with a view of questioning texts and policy guidelines, but research was not always developed about the practical dimensions of policies beyond the attempt of making them a space to corroborate constituted theses based on a wider social structure. The broadening dialogue between the curriculum field and cultural studies, postcolonial and post-structural, as well as the accelerated process of changing socialcultural landscapes, with the narrowing of inter-relations between different cultures, has contributed in part to the overcoming of this interpretive model. For example, theoretical and methodological changes widespread in studies of educational and curriculum policy, with the arrival of every way with which we operate being around the signifier globalization (Lingard, 2009), has helped to change the relationship between policies and curriculum practices. With global cultural flows, the deterritorializations and disjunctures (Appadurai, 1996), classifications and