Curriculum, Culture and Investigation with Routine or About the Creation of Educational Policies in Schools

Abstract

The text in question aims at problematizing the curricula carried out in the routines of six institutions of the Municipal School Network of Vitória, ES, Brazil weaved with the practical theories invented by their actors, highlighting the relationships they made between curriculum and culture. This is about the unfolding of our investigations that aim at understanding the different meanings negotiated by teachers and students concerning curricular processes going on in our schools. At the same time, these studies rely on a theoretical-methodological-epistemological perspective that can question and understand the multiple space and time determinations of the curriculum, and thus contribute to broadening the possibilities of these actors’ knowledge, action, and power. The present emphasis on the discussions about the relationships between curriculum and culture derives from our own condition of researchers of school routines, which allowed us to realize that even when engaged in projects intended for combating a number of cultural discrimination processes at the institutions, teachers and students carry on producing new forms of exclusion. At the same time, under anonymousness, they develop survival tactics inspired by micro resistance that are the basis for micro freedom. Thus, in our study, understanding the networks weaved between culture and curriculum does not mean to analyze how actors follow current curricular prescriptions and teaching projects that are based on cultural aspects deriving from these prescriptions. It does not mean to make classroom procedure propositions either, but it aims at questioning the practical-theories devised by these actors while weaving their own networks.