Curricular and Educational Practice Policies

Abstract

This text discusses an ethnographical study made in a Primary Education school of the municipal public system of Rio de Janeiro. Its purpose is to analyze the impact of the current curricular policies in that school. I took part in Teachers’ Meetings and in different activities of the various pedagogic projects implemented by the school and also talked to the students about school life. In this way, I saw the many strategies the teachers introduced for accompanying the different curricular proposals. As a whole, an immense array of problems was noted, resulting, on one side, from the actual school organization or from the limits of school organization and, on the other, from the times in which we are living. In my work of observing pedagogic practices, I picked out some aspects that seem to me fundamental for outlining the scenario in which its school curriculum or curricula are structured. Thus, through a discourse on quality and efficiency – reflected in the results observed – the Municipal Education Department was imposing a new institutional culture, new profiles of activity and new subjectivities. In other words, what I found was that the teaching work was being controlled by criteria of efficiency, constructed in management spaces of school activity outside the school. On the other hand, I also saw many kinds of recontextualization of those proposals in the school’s everyday life.