Dialogues and Circumstances as Unavoidable Topics in Curriculum Field

Abstract

The twenty-first century offers a new twist for curriculum field. Basting its theses, may be able to put forward new ways to live the international with the particularities of the local. For this, it turns to the dialogues and conversations as articulating metaphors between different contexts. When Pinar denominates curriculum as a complicated conversation means a cross into stories and politics, between the local or national and the international. But taking the challenges to curriculum studies, the curriculum notion enters in discursive frame where its floating signifier makes an ambiguous and polysemic word. That is why, when curriculum refers to conversations and dialogues identifies the discourse as a main category for understanding practices, theoretical constructions and the subjectivities of its speakers. It identifies curriculum like a social event, and considers it is a signifier politically and cultural involved. As a floating signifier, provides senses that printed in the language-game of the later Wittgenstein. Likewise, to refer to dialogues includes culture, identity, subject, difference and antagonism. The special feature of this scenario is evidenced by the philosophical rupture at the end of the twentieth century between modernity and postmodernism. Since then, a new perspective in curriculum studies emerges showing that disagreements in the curriculum field are necessary for its intellectual growth. It breaks with the hegemony of its field during the twentieth century, and establishes differences, equivalences and articulations with signified in postmodern scenes. In Latin America, it is important to make studies that address current curriculum problems referring to unavoidable topics as those subjects, which cannot be evaded, dodged or go unnoticed. I understand that the unavoidability lies in the event shapes between dialogues and circumstances which, as a meeting point, generates a change of direction in our curricular journey. What is unavoidable is the discourse that generates tension in the critical theories' paradigms and their post-critical framed in the de Alba’s curriculum-society relationship. Latin American curriculum studies present events in the dialogues between Lopes and de Alba, Díaz Barriga and García Garduño or when Pinar mediates in the curriculum studies in Mexico or Brazil. These dialogues and circumstances are metaphors that symbolize the languages of the curriculum in the post-critical times. Topics that become conceptual knot whose marks contain notions, genealogies and subjectivities are: (1) field emergency, (2) tension between critical and post-critical theories, (3) Curriculum/Didaktik relationship and (4) curriculum research from new perspectives.