Curriculum and power: reflections on the training meetings for rural education in the municipality of Campina Grande-PB

Abstract

This article consists of an exercise of reflection, based on a training agenda for educators of rural schools, which sought to analyze the power relations that are expressed by the dimension of education with educators in the city of Campina Grande-PB. The research adopted the qualitative approach, and research techniques such as, dialogue with the bibliography and records of direct observation, carried out during the exercise of the research to make the thesis for the acquisition of the Ph. D. that is in progress. Thus, we present a description of the training meetings promoted by the Department of Education (SEDUC) of Campina Grande in the year 2022 for educators of rural schools reflecting the power relations that are expressed by the dimension of the curriculum. In this article we bring an excerpt of these training meetings thinking from the debate of the curriculum as power (SILVA, 2005), of the processes of hierarchy and symbolic domination (BOURDIEU, 1997) that can be expressed in teacher education practices, in the challenge of the construction of critical interculturality (FREIRE, 1987) and cultural dialogue (MARTINS, 2005) necessary for a curriculum that gathers beliefs, ideas, images, modes of meaning, symbols and diverse knowledge. At the end, we point out elements of regularity in the formative meetings that signal a monoculturalist tendency of curricular standardization, highlighting the focus on exposure and instrumental character from workshops, the study and exhibition of a model as a reference to be followed, the invisibility of the actors involved in the educational process and the new terms for practices already known that reinforce power relations and the hierarchical position of the curriculum in the analyzed scenario.

Keywords: Curriculum. Rural education. Power relations.