Todos iguais... todos diferentes... problematizando os discursos que constituem a prática curricular da Secretaria Municipal de Educação do Rio de Janeiro (SME/RJ)

Abstract

In this study I have analyzed the developments of the curricular proposal of the Municipal Education Department of Rio de Janeiro Multieducation in everyday school life, to verify how cultural differences are treated, as a way of understanding the process through which multicultural policies assumed in the system s discourse are consolidated. I opted for a methodological approach which would view the curriculum as cultural production, in which knowledges and powers could be seen as a field of signification, a scenario in which cultures fight for legitimacy, a contested territory that involves negotiating ambivalent positions of control and resistance. In that attempt to consider the multiple possibilities that the discourses can offer beyond the visible aspects, I took a qualitative approach of an ethnographic nature involving a documental analysis and participating research. While doing this research, I looked for theoretical data in cultural, post-structural and post-colonial studies that discuss inter-relationships between curriculum, identity, culture and difference. I made use, principally, of studies by Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau when they discuss concepts that involve constructing the difference as a discursive practice and signification: notions of discourse, enunciation, articulatory practices, negotiation, hegemony, between-place, chain of equivalence, antagonism/agonism, empty signifier and the actual notion of the subject. I concluded that pursuing an intense deconstructive activity means to propose the possibility of coexistence with the paradox: permanence on the frontier, which characterizes undecidability the intervals, the between-places -, that can produce fertile structures making it possible to rethink the differences. Knowing that the meaning is built on articulatory practices, in the field of discursivity, I feel that the documents guiding the curricular practice of the SME/RJ have sought over the years to construct nodal points that allow pedagogic practice according to hegemonic knowledges, although without losing the dialogue and negotiation with the other fields of knowledges.