Curricula and literacy: among codes, deviations, and experimentation

ABSTRACT

This text is an invitation to join a cartography held during a master’s degree research problematizing the macro policies of curriculum centralization and education regulation, which aim to standardize curricular movements in everyday school life. In the relationship between macro/micro policies, the text presents the statements of teachers and children in conversation networks about the curricular experiences produced amidst the hard lines of literacy policies. These flexible and escaping lines cross the school daily life, in movements that agency life processes, an open and susceptible map to question the effects that literacy, curricula, school and learning concepts can produce in educational processes. The text dialogues with Deleuze and Guattari to think education from an invention perspective and argue that, within the fissures of macro politics, it is possible to create curricular movements intertwined with art signs through experimentation as resistance to reproduction attempts. It concludes (always open to new experiments) that, in everyday school life, between forms and forces, there are life-affirming collective curricular movements in an exercise of thought that opens up to the new, the unthinkable, splitting postulates and inventing other ways of existing, with art.

Keywords:
Literacy PolicyPractices; Collective Curricula; Difference; Signs of Art; Collective Resistance

RESUMO

Este texto é um convite para entrar em relação com uma cartografia de uma pesquisa de mestrado e problematiza as macropolíticas de centralização curricular e de regulação da educação, que visam à padronização dos movimentos curriculares no cotidiano escolar. Na relação entre macro/micropolíticas, apresenta, em redes de conversações, as enunciações de professoras e crianças acerca das experimentações curriculares produzidas entre as políticas de alfabetização, em meio às linhas duras, flexíveis e de fuga que atravessam o cotidiano escolar, em movimentos que agenciam os processos de vida, num mapa aberto e suscetível, na intenção de problematizar os efeitos que as concepções de alfabetização, de currículos, de escola e de aprendizagem podem produzir nos processos educativos. Dialoga com Deleuze e Guattari para pensar a educação na perspectiva da invenção e argumentar que, nas fissuras das macropolíticas, é possível criar movimentos curriculares entrelaçados aos signos da arte, por meio da experimentação, como resistência às tentativas de reprodução. Conclui (sempre aberto às novas experimentações) que, no cotidiano escolar, entre formas e forças, há criação de movimentos curriculares coletivos de afirmação da vida num exercício de pensamento que se abre ao novo, ao impensável, rachando postulados e inventando modos outros de existir, com a arte.

Palavras-chave:
Práticaspolíticas de Alfabetização; Currículos Coletivos; Diferença; Signos da Arte; Resistências Coletivas

Introduction: Someone said that it has to be this way, so let’s do it in another way!

During a time of macro policies that centralize curriculum and regulate education, aiming at the standardization of curricula movements in the school routine, there has been an unstoppable search for better results that supposedly measure those who can progress and those who will likely fail. In this neoliberal and neoconservative logic, public education seems to be taking large strides towards privatizing curricula and teaching with an increasing movement from private institutions in the public sector, dictating the ways of being in school. With this movement, there is a growing number of school dropouts and, consequently, of social inequalities.

Private initiative involvement in public education has been overwhelming since the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC - Common National Curriculum Framework) approval and implementation processes (Brasil, 2017), attempting to standardize the meanings of quality education. This scenario constantly challenges us to break away from this universal logic that conceptualizes education and schooling from the perspective of competencies and abilities grounded by results. We agree with Macedo (2019, p. 41) when stating that this policy approval was an inflection moment because, even with some level of curriculum centralization in Brazil, there has never been a “definition of what should be taught in each subject throughout the different school years in the whole country.”

However, as Macedo (2019), we highlight that though BNCC (Brasil, 2017) represents a hegemony of education and schooling, such universal policy is not able to erase antagonism. After all, who is to say that knowledge needs to be organized into boxes? Who says “it is this or that, and that is it, no questions asked!” does not realize that we are multiple. One needs to look closer, more carefully, to see the details, feel the smells, the tastes, and life that beats and screams in school routine. One needs to enter a relationship with difference (Deleuze, 2018), letting it multiply in the curricula. A curricular hegemony that insists on erasing difference does not seem to take into account that life cannot be imprisoned.

An education grounded in curriculum patterns that seek results and produce a hegemonic narrative about what quality in education is and how to reach it, creating a discourse of control over what will be taught and learned (Macedo, 2014). In this movement, it insists on restricting knowledge, as if it was exclusive to science (Machado, 2009). However, who said that there cannot be other ways of thinking? Philosophy, by creating concepts that mobilize us into acting in chaos; art, with the percepts that provoke us to leave this world without taking our feet from the ground; and science, with its non-static roles, are forms of thinking (Deleuze, 2003).

So, why do they insist on prioritizing one at the expense of the other if what is at stake are the relationships among philosophy, art, and science? What effects do this ways of thinking can provoke in the school routine and literacy practicespolicies¹? Knowledges have different natures, but why hierarchize them if it is interesting to cross and be crossed by them? In this dispute field, between macro policies that seek to dictate ways of actingfeelingthinking education, we rely on the movements of active micro policies and the creation of other and new meanings to literacy, curriculum, school, and learning, in a thinking exercise that surpasses the “true or false” game, the “this or that”, to think about differences in curricula.

By active micro policies, we understand the movements that focus on what affects school routine and collectively question and propose other possibilities for curricula, teaching, and educational action. We agree with Rolnik (2015) that these movements aim to keep the power of life. In this sense, a constant exercise of thinking other curriculum configurations of life affirmation is necessary.

To Deleuze (2003), thinking is creating. It is moving like a nomadic wanderer, aimless, rambling through an open space, and escaping any attempt of control, evenness, and standardization. It is circulating agencies of desires into non-linear, not timed. An intensive time, of multiplicities. It is not to let oneself be timed because one moves through the force of collective action, making connections, and curriculum combinations.

Nonetheless, in a universal logic, someone insists on limiting learning time, determined by the correct age to read and write, consolidate, and recover what was not lost. How does one recover what they never had? They forgot there was a pandemic in the middle of the way and wanted to continue from where things stopped as if life had halted there.

As if this was not enough, they also want to dictate the correct ways of learningteaching, as in the Política Nacional de Alfabetização [National Literacy Policy] (Brasil, 2019), which advocates cognitive science as the only necessary knowledge, defining literacy as “the teaching of reading and writing abilities in an alphabetic system” (Brasil, 2019, p. 18), into a logic that delegitimizes other knowledges and seeks to establish a homogeneous methodology that disregards multiplicities and excludes difference.

Analyzing this policy, we understand, as does Caldeira (2022), that PNA (Brasil, 2019) is reactionary and conservative, using certain principles to establish specific knowledges as the sole acceptable truth for literacy and aiming to implement particular ways of managing life, curriculum, and school, “when discrediting knowledges historically built in the literacy field”(p.6). As Caldeira (2022), we also affirm that, by highlighting cognitive science, PNA (Brasil, 2019) affirms itself as the truth and denies other knowledges, extending this thought to the training of literacy teachers. It also makes families co-responsible for educating their children so that literate students can no longer be a risk to contemporary economic challenges. A literate child, as fast as possible, becomes a demand in this policy discourse.

In 2023, one more macro policy declared its national commitment to children’s literacy, through Decree n.º 11.556, from June 12, 2023, which established the new literacy policy, Compromisso Nacional Criança Alfabetizada [National Commitment Literate Child]. The policy aims to guarantee Brazilian children the right to literacy, thus creating successful school trajectories (Brasil, 2023). The XXIX Fórum Permanente de Alfabetização, Leitura e Escrita [Permanent Forum of Literacy, Reading, and Writing] from Espírito Santo (2023), organized by the Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas em Alfabetização, Leitura e Escrita do Espírito Santo (NEPALES- Study and Research Center in Literacy, Reading, and Writing from Espírito Santo) questioned this macro policy, stressing the importance of problematizing the discourse disseminated by this legislation.

In this sense, it is important to ask: what interests can cross the lines of this commitment? To whom does the literacy policy propose building successful trajectories? If the policy brings to light conceptions and methodologies of education already questioned, who does it serve? A policy that justifies itself by making cities and states responsible for the non-guarantee of literacy, in pandemic times, when the federal government seemed inexistent. Who does it want to convince?

They seem to forget that the school context is not limited to the school. It crosses the whole complexity of society (and is crossed by it), whose ills are intertwined with the lack of housing, social assistance, and public health policies. The effects of this deprivation of rights touch school, curricula, and the ways of being in the world. Thus, we should question the effect of these policies in the curriculum processes and think about collective forms of resistance amidst these power relations in everyday school life. Why, to what, and to whom do the produced curriculum movements make sense?

In this movement, we reaffirm the need to problematize the interests materialized in the macro policies discourse that cross school routine. The document ‘Guidelines to formulate and implement strategies of continuous training in the scope of the national commitment literate child’ (2023) presents as attributions and responsibilities of education municipal secretaries the collaboration in “identifying and selecting possible partner training institutions that will act in the implementation of the Plano de Formação do Território Estadual [State Training Plan]” (Brasil, 2023, p. 23).

As a warning to society and public managers about the risks of privatization that surround the chosen paths, with the increasing opening to private agents in public schools, the Associação Brasileira de Alfabetização (ABALF- Brazilian Literacy Association) positioned itself with a manifest about the increasing participation of private bodies in public school. We agree with ABALF that, faced by the proposals of the Compromisso Nacional Criança Alfabetizada (2023) regarding the institutional choice for teacher training, we need to pay attention to the proposals offered and the concepts that “ground the ‘packages’ of literacy teaching and evaluation, which always follow the ‘training packages’ of literacy teachers” (Manifesto ABALF, 2023, p. 3).

In our research group Com-Versações with Post-critical theories and teacher training, coordinated by Janete Magalhães Carvalho (UFES), we continue to affirm the importance of collective resistances in school routine amidst power relations. Therefore, active micro policies movements engender problematizations about the effects of curriculum policies to collectively think other possibilities for the curricula amidst the macro policies that try to dictate ways of actingfeelingthinking education.

When mapping the research territory², a public elementary school in the city of Serra³, in the state of Espírito Santo, we dove into everyday events, following curriculum processes aiming the hard lines of the rhizome (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011), with binaries, linearities. prescriptions, and control, knowing (luckily!) that the lines can break. What was then determined, established, can be problematized, undone, though in a different way, and interrupted in scape lines.

In conversation networks, during the cartography (Rolnik, 1989) of school routine, teachers and children discussed the curriculum constitution crossed by macro policies in the research movement. Their wish to talk with the researchers about the curriculum movements produced in that spacetime was the participation criteria for the research. The meetings with the teachers from the 1^st to the 4^th Grade took place during the school routine, in the planning hours, in the afternoon, following the logic that a cartography has no beginning nor end; as a rhizome, it does not start nor finish, it meets in the middle (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011). The conversations with the children took place in the school’s outdoor area (which we call here woods because many trees surround it) during the afternoon class.

In the school routine, we connected flows and intensities to produce reality, not simply represent it. We followed the movements engendered and would simultaneously unweave the loss of meanings from certain worlds while forming others to express affections “towards which the current objects became obsolete” (Rolnik, 1989, p. 15).

Throughout the text, we present in italics excerpts of sentences produced in conversation networks with teachers and children participating in the research. The enunciations were recorded during the conversation networks about the curriculum movements produced between macro/micro policies and their effects in the educational processes.

The enunciations of teachers and children presented in this text do not refer to a centered subject but to multiplicities; thus, we do not name them. As Deleuze and Guattari (2011), we understand that multiplicity has no subject nor object, just determinations, magnitudes, dimensions, in a power game that is not given a priori, but in the relationships woven daily.

The public school in which the research was held is located in a territory where children from the 1^st to the 9^th Grade circulate. Their families have different socioeconomic-cultural situations. We joined that daily routine as a territory of multiplicities and a spacetime of knowledge, creation, events, movements of deterritorialization, and reterritorialization (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011), always provisory.

The enunciations in the text intend to provoke the thought about the effects that the concepts of literacy, curricula, school, and learning can produce in the educational processes. In this movement, we must ask: what effects in the school routine are produced by a curriculum that tries to define what has to be taught and punishes with tests that intend to prove those who could not advance?

“I do like BNCC, I think it’s a document that gives us a guide, but it’s not something that has to be closed. Is it enough? No. If there were another document that we could rely on, I think this would be better. But, like, [...] I think it gives me a good framework; it is a framework, right?” (Teacher’s enunciation).

In school every day life, one should question macro policies’, such as BNCC (Brasil, 2017), interests and imprisoning attempts, whose strategies are connected to neoliberal and neoconservative policies. These policies hold teachers responsible for school failure and see evaluation under a business logic that separates those who know from those who do not, awarding performance and pushing public education towards privatization.

With Alves (2019), we learn daily that teachers create necessary and possible practicestheories to live. Deleuze and Guattari (2010; 2011) provoke us to resist these macro policies, creating other ways of actingfeelingthinking curricula in the gaps of what is established. Creating curricula related to the intensive life and that create scape lines amidst macro policies. Lines of life and breathing, which make us stutter in our own language.

Any policy project that tries to imprison, blame, connect quality of education to results, that excludes the difference, and that puts the rights of all people to literacy at risk must be questioned. Therefore, it is essential to ask in the learningteaching processes: how do the concepts of education, school, and literacy help us to think educational processes? Where are these concepts grounded? In the privatization logic? Because this is different from the public one. What is the meaning of a policy that reduces life to results? We rely on policies that affirm life. Schools also create policies recognizing others, not seeking consensus but a common ground that recognize differences. Policies established in everyday action with the practitionersthinkers⁴ of curricula, with children, who bring their demands to create the curriculum, as a teacher state:

“I think that from the moment you open up to listen to them (children), you have to do that, because they bring their own demands. They will bring them, so they will create the curricula for you, it’s not a question of planning, you can sit down, do a nice plan, will it go the way you imagined? It never does, because it is alive, it’s dynamic”.

We believe in curricula as conversation networks and complex actions (Carvalho, 2009) involving the active participation of practitionersthinkers in the processes of learningteaching. Curriculum movements that surpass the logic of prescriptions that seek to order and define the pedagogical work. We believe in breaking away from this single way of thinking teaching, curricula, and literacy. We believe in the curricula of/from difference that does not let itself be imprisoned because they are nomadic and always run away.

Therefore, in this article, amidst teachers and children’s enunciations in the unpredictable movement of cartography dealing with processes and not crystallized results, we argue that it is possible to create curriculum movements intertwined with art signs through experimentation as resistance against reproduction attempts. We conclude (while always open to experimentations) that, in the school daily routine, amidst forms and forces, collective curriculum movements that affirm life are created, in an exercise of thought opened to the new, the unthinkable, breaking postulates, and inventing other ways of (re)existing with art.

Multiple theories and curricula productions: is there a recipe to teach literacy?

Who is to say one should take this way and not the other? In fact, perhaps, it would be more daring to create (un)paths, absurdities, to arrive suddenly, and act in the relationship of the meeting with its multiplicities, in the daily repletion, which is never the same. Repeat, repeat, until difference disseminates and creates differentiation processes. Acting between macro/micro policies, creating other possibilities amidst the event, which is routine itself with its complex weaves that are uncontrollable.

Next we share, in italics connected to the text, teacher’s enunciations about macro policies, produced in conversation networks that express ways of actingfellingthinking children’s literacy processes from the 1^st to the 4^th Grade, from a public elementary school. Our intention in these conversation networks with teachers was to question the effects that the conceptions of literacy, curricula, school, and learning can produce in educational processes.

“BNCC tells me that I have to work with the student starting from the text to the part. I work by starting from the parts to the whole because I have been working this way, and I see a much better result”.

Teachers’ discourse points out its support on a practice that tries to detour how to work with literacy, as proposed at BNCC (Brasil, 2017). However, the work’s objective seems also be connected to the macro policy that wants to reach the best results, helping the hegemonic logic of a particular concept of education and schooling, as we already explained. In this sense, even if the ways to reach results change, the descriptors present at BNCC (Brasil, 2017) “work as prescriptions that seek to order and define teachers’ work, as a device of the neoliberal normative that is gaining space” (Frangella, 2021, p. 1154).

“I saw my students reading in 45 days. Words. They read words in 45 days. Later, it was much easier to insert them into the world of phrases and, later, the text. Today they interpret texts [...] We haven’t produced written texts yet, I work a lot with oral texts”.

A discourse of a practice that takes safe and well-defined pathways, where there is no possibility of detour or shortcuts, there is only linearity, sequences, patterns, which can attest to the process (Frangella, 2021). Do practices that dare to walk through a script with well-defined beginning, middle, and end match the complexities of school routine? Do they open space for differences to emerge?

“I’m following the discourse, which we start from the text, so that the student can understand the context, but then we need to go there, you know, to the traditional way of working a syllabic family, working with the spelling issues, to resume it because they still have difficulties with this spelling issue, but most of them are reading and interpreting, and not in a mechanical way. They are getting it”.

In these comings and goings between the different ways of actingfeelingthinking the educational processes, is there a defined path to learn? In fact, what concepts do we have to learn? Does learning take place only through recognition? Is there a space only for learning that establishes cognitive science as truth, as Caldeira (2022) reminds us, and denies other knowledges? Do we rather prefer a learning that occurs amidst problematizations, the inventions of their own problems (Deleuze, 2003) and is not limited to ready answers? Can literacy take place through creation?

“I start with the letters, symbols. You recognize the symbols and the sounds. Recognizing the symbols and sounds, where can I find, within what I already have in life, what I can see in that symbol, in that sound? Notice if I use that sound in the everyday life. If she [child] experiences reading at home or if she listens to music, I also deal with the issue of culture because, waiting or not, it is a cultural good”.

Can paying attention to the meaning of curricula for practitionersthinkers create fissures in the macro politics that insist on defining that we learnteach? Amidst the macro policies that present cognitive science as universal in the literacy processes, what is it important to consider? Maybe we should deterritorialize. Question the ways of learningteaching and the truths we carry in our formative processes. Open up to the new, the unexpected, experience other ways of actingfeelingthinking literacy.

“I’m also concerned about listening them. So, when I do an activity, ah, for instance, we were working with the biunivocal, we had a storytelling, I took some words from the text, and we talked, then I asked them to bring words that they knew with that sound and they would bring it all at once, like, ah, the P, ah, pan, pan with a P [...]. One of these days, we were revising the G sound, and then a student said Gohan, a cartoon they like, this is the sound of G, I wrote on the board. So, if it is from their culture and it makes sense to them, I use it. I try to bring what they are already used to, what they consume, so that I can also understand what they consume. What narratives are there in what they consume? Also working on this because these narratives demand a place in the world. They establish us, we are narrative. So, these things from their culture, their daily lives, I try to use in the classroom. So, it’s from the text. They already use the language they know. They talk all the time, they just don’t know how to read and write. So, it’s from the relationship they have with the language. At least that’s how I try to work”.

Teachers’ enunciations provoke us into thinking how the effects that the concepts of literacy, curricula, school, and learning implied in different theoretical-methodological can incite learningteaching processes. What emerges in the relationship with these movements? Creation? Reproduction?

We agree with Paraíso (2023) that different curriculum theories present definitions and dimensions inserted in cultural practices. The curriculum is a field of dispute and fight, an uncontrollable territory. The decisions about their possibilities are up to the teacher; hence, it is important to know the different dimensions of curriculum theory in order to work attuned to and committed to current dilemmas.

Thus, we have an ethical-political-aesthetical commitment to establish ways of existing in the curriculum practices. In this sense, it is important to ask: What meanings are these curricula producing? What collective movements do we need to agency to think other curriculum forms?

As Lopes (2013), we agree that when considering that knowledge is a discourse connected to power relations, we question the notion of curriculum as a selection of certain knowledge at the stake of others, and the logic that there is a centered subjects with a fixed identity, as well as an emancipated and conscious subject able to guide social change.

Throughout the history of curriculum, truths of a tradition were built, creating a single way of thinking curriculum, which often disqualifies other teachers’ knowledgesactions and other ways of thinking (Deleuze, 2003), with philosophy and art.

Not being able to provoke changes in the macro policy scope does not invalidate the attempts of acting in their gaps, nor to use the event in our favor. Resistances take place in the power relations. Life screams and tries to leak in the tension between macro/micro policies. Are we just going to watch life scream so as not to be suffocated? Deleuze incites us to affirm life, creating other ways of escaping what is being established and that seeks to decrease action power. So, we can experiment! After all, why insisting in pedagogical practices that make no sense nor affirm life?

We can always substitute one word for another. If one does not please you, does not suit you, take another, use another in its place. If each one does this effort, everyone will be able to understand each other, and there would be no reason to question or make objections. There are no words of one’s own, [...] there are only amiss words to designate something exactly. Let us create extraordinary words, with the condition of using them more ordinarily. [...] Nowadays, we have new ways of reading and, maybe, writing (Deleuze; Parnet, 1998, p. 3-4).

Therefore, a particular theory should not be fixed, if the multiplicities cannot be controlled. One cannot say ‘it is this way, and not that one’, if the difference cannot multiply. There is no ready recipe to learn, nor to control how this meeting will happen. One needs to be open to other meanings of school, education, teaching, curricula, literacy, in a thinking exercise not conformed to the dominant meanings, nor to the demands of the established order (Deleuze; Parnet, 1998). A thought open to the new, to the unthinkable, cracking postulates, and creating other ways of (re)existing. Let us be daily challenged to create other ways to teachlearn!

In conversation networks, teachers talked about curriculum movements thought to contribute to children/students’ learning, attempting to minimize the effects of in-person class suspension during the Covid-19 pandemic. Among these movements, there was the project by the Municipal Secretary of Education, with an increase of teachers’ workload to think curriculum movements with children previously indicated by their teachers. The project started in the school during the second semester. About this movement, a teacher pointed out:

“The project seeks to boost children with difficulties. There are many children with problems of text interpretation, mathematics, children that don’t know how to read and write [...] that are not literate. In fact, that is the intention of the project, to potentialize something that they already knew and advance to the next level but, actually, the children that arrive have a lot of difficulties, some, you know, not all of them, but for seventy percent it wouldn’t be a boost, it would be the ABCs really, start from scratch, b plus a, ba”.

The difference is still pointed out as “difficulty about this or that”. What movements are needed to affirm life and difference in the school routine? In the logic of an education grounded on alphanumerical codes, there is not space for difference. What we have is the use of codes as a machinery that disseminates and projects the quality wanted, so as to establish the rules to a mechanical calculation that affects the regulation of teachers’ work, grounded on an imposed normativeness (Frangella, 2021). In this perspective, we reaffirm that there is no space for difference. This machinery needs to be problematized to open space for other possibilities.

According to the teacher, not all families are committed with the movement that schools considered important, though it started only in the second semester.

“It’s an important movement, but it started late. I think it should have started in the beginning. I don’t know how some children will do this advancement thing, and we would also need a partnership. The school is doing its share, but it would need a greater partnership with the family, of care, of following up. I have children that are with me and with the family, these children have already changed from water to wine, the improvement has been great”.

As Carvalho (2009), we believe in curricular movements in conversation networks and complex actions, thus, the active participation of practitionersthinkers in school routine is needed to problematize what affects the collective body and the proposition of other curriculum possibilities. Therefore, it is essential to think about the curriculum movements we are collectively building in the school routine. What do we intend with the established processes? Do we want to ground our practice aiming to reach results that disregard differences? To act in the gaps of what is established and affirm other ways of being in school?

Despite starting after the beginning of the school year, the participant teachers thought that the curriculum movement was important but also pointed out the need for greater family involvement in this process and the involvement of more education professionals, as there is only one teacher in the shift and a large number of children in the project.

Regarding children’s relationship with the knowledge seen at school, a teacher’s statement incites us to question the learningteaching processes during a period in which the consequences of Covid-19 pandemic still reverberate.

“I see it with my 4th Grade students. I look at them and think, how can they be so unprepared, how much did they lose, you know, if the family is not there, they cannot recover all they’ve lost, you know? These children are very unprepared. I walk here, in all the classrooms, the 1 ^st and 2 ^nd Grade students, they have a certain maturity that my 5th Grade students often don’t have”.

What effects did the pandemic cause in the school routine? What movements need to be thought to involve all children/students in the learningteaching processes, without blaming them for the possible consequences of what they couldn’t have? What effects did the pandemic cause in teaching, curricula, and our ways of actingfeelingthinking education?

“What is clear to me is that grade/age doesn’t work in the practical sense, because, either I want it or not, it is a process, and this process has been undertaken with several traumas, and these traumas create a situation that I, as a teacher, cannot see as ideal. Because what is in the documents demands an ideal situation that I don’t have any longer. And this make things hard, because I can no longer plan based on what is the Grade but based on the students I have today. And today, I have no intention to go much beyond. Each day is a different day. If the student could do something today, if he understood the process he needs, you known, ah, I know how to do this and move forward, this is good enough for me”.

When thinking about literacy, we need to question the contexts in which children/students participate, as well as the theoretical-methodological bases that support these educational processes. We have already said that one should not point paths and that we prefer (un)paths in the learningteaching processes, because they can open up to deterritorialization and engender escape lines toward other lands. Just as wanderers love!

However, in the age of market policies, one must be careful and problematize the intention of what is proposed as the silver bullet for all literacy problems. As we have seen, this problem is intertwined with the lack of other needed public policies.

According to the Ministry of Education, the Política Nacional de Alfabetização (PNA) was established to increase the quality of literacy and to fight illiteracy in the country (Brasil, 2019). To do so, the policy grounds itself in the cognitive science of reading, focused on the phonic method, which explores the relationship between letters and letters and sounds, advocating this method as the only literacy method, violating constitutional principles, such as the “freedom to learn, teach, research, and disseminate thought, art, and knowledge”, as stated in Brazil’s Federal Constitution (Brasil, 1988, Art. 206, II).

Considering we are in the 4th year of this policy implementation and the new one, Compromisso Nacional Criança Alfabetizada, does not add anything and we also have to deal with the pandemic aftermaths in thus period, it is important to question the effect of these policies focused on a certain learningteaching in the curricula produced in our schools. Why prioritizing recognition at the expense of difference? What is the intention of the policies implemented without the participation of those that actfeelthink the curricula?

It is also important to ask: Is that the policy we wish? What movements we have been establishing in the school routine to problematize such policies? Policies that disregard the teachers’ inventive power need to be questioned! Policies that reduce literacy to coding and decoding need to be rejected! We cannot allow them to reduce us to codes; We establish each other by recognizing others in a power relation intertwined by discourses from those with something to say, a reason to say it, and someone to say it to.

We reiterate that literacy is a right to all and, therefore, literacy policies need to be connected to social rights policies. Thus, we reaffirm that the policies focused on cognitive science affirm themselves as true and deny other knowledges. Such policies need to be questioned. Policies that are justified by blaming schools, teachers, and children/students for a low performance open the way for privatization, dropout, and the increase of social inequalities.

Therefore, we insist that, despite the forces of macro policies (which are woven into micro policies) that cross school routine, the creation of curriculum movements that affirm life is necessary to resist the powers that insist on turning school’s spacetime into simple reproduction. Creating curricula that consider what children/students and teachers have to say. Collectively engender curriculum movements woven with art signs to break postulates and transport us to other worlds, in which imagination can fly away.

Other ways of learningteaching, with art!

In our research movements, we rely on the power of art signs to imagine other words, other possibilities, as does writer Manoel de Barros (2018) with the child, the bird, the wanderer, sources of inspiration. Not art as representation, but as an opening to other ways of being in the word, breaths of fresh air, of life. After all, what is the sense of a curriculum that does not affirm life?

As an image of thought (Deleuze, 2003), we connect ourselves with art, to have a bird’s freedom and fly over the school routine, landing somewhere, disconnected to the postulates that seek to imprison, dictating singular ways of teaching reading and writing and curricula.

We connected ourselves with the becoming-children in the rhizome lines (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011) with art, causing detours in how we try to control life, which urges us to escape. Through art, we become wanderers and create other (um)paths to build curriculum movements that assert an intensive life in the school routine, a beautiful life that continues to persevere.

About the importance of art in the curriculum movements, a teacher stated:

“The happiness we see in the child’s body the day after she participated in an activity that her family could or couldn’t watch, but that she enjoyed the moment, she showed something, presented herself, in which she was happy, why not? Art has this condition and needs it. Art frees. Art will not be option, but a solution”.

What effects can art provoke in curricula? A child that also participated in our research movement declared, in a conversation network recorded in the school’ spacetime called woods, about how the teacher works with children literature in classroom and how she wished it was.

“What I hate the most is what I’ve told you about the fox and the wolf. The teacher, I don’t like when she reads a text and we have to do it, because I can’t stop in my mind what she read so that I can draw, like, she repeats the things and I just think about two parts, a part is cut off. She could take many little books; we could choose a book and make up our theme. She would take the book, any book she wanted, like, Rapunzel, and we would make the story”.

The child incites us to think: Why not doing it in another way? Why not experiment instead of interpreting? In the frantic rush of school life, we cannot always stop the automatic actions, as Larrosa (2002) reminds us, to listen to children, who are also practitionersthinkers of curricula. However, they have much to say, even choosing other ways of relating with what is woven with the signs, with those who violated thought in the learning movement. Learning that cannot be controlled, that escapes recognition, dualism, and crates cracks in representation. In the violence of meeting the sign, thought opens up to think the unthinkable, going against the dogmatic image of thought, the postulated one (Deleuze, 2018).

To weave art in the curricula to make visible what is unseen! Through art, we can create other worlds, which are not related with reality, through meetings that force thought to think. About this movement, a child says:

“We get to know the things we didn’t even know. In the story, we recognize the words little by little. I also like the make believe games. We imagine other things that could not happen. We can imagine we have something in our hands, even if we don’t. There was a movie in which there was an eagle and it thought it had no color [...], but people see color, only it can’t see it. This movie can train the imagination. The eagle got a bunch of colors and some of them didn’t really exist, but it could imagine them” .

When relating with children’s discourse, we also connect with the marks of macro policies in the recognition logic, still so present in the curricula, dictating certain ways of being in the world. To imagine other worlds through art, we do not need to train imagination but to open up to the new, the un-thought, and shaking what is taken as a fact (Frangella, 2021). We need to let imagination flow! Give wings to imagination!

So, it is necessary to provoke displacements, deterritorialize, imagine other worlds, create other ways to teach how to read and write… and why not through art? Who said it has to be this or that? It can be everything together! A teacher told us about this movement of opening up to other possibilities with art.

“I worked with them the text “Ou isto ou aquilo” [Or this or that]. [...] When I started reading, in the first stanza, when it says or we have rain or we have son, or we have son or we have rain, a child questioned that sometimes it is sunny and that rain starts, that, sometimes, it is raining and the sun arrives, then we started to make this movement. In each stanza I read, I asked them if it was really this of that, and they started talking, discussing, thinking about strategies. They were really on board and wanted to participate in the activity. Even the students that don’t participate much were interested on counter-arguing and trying to think about strategies to not be this or that, so that both things could happen. And then it kind of became a debate, they stated to build arguments between them and to talk. They would say: ‘oh, no, this one didn’t work,’ and would kept talking about the text in this way. For example, when it says, ‘or you wear gloves and not the ring, or you wear a ring and not the gloves’ they thought one could use the ring over the glove and people would see that the ring was there, and the glove as well. Another child also said that one can wear the ring under the glove. Other people won’t see it, but the person would be wearing it, she would feel it, and notice that the ring is there. So it doesn’t have to be ‘or this or that’, one can use both at the same time in different ways, over or under the glove. The part of the money, as well, ‘or you save money and don’t buy sweets, or you buy sweets and spend the money’. They thought that one doesn’t need to spend all the money, you can use some with sweets and keep the change, you can save it and do both things, you can keep the money and have the sweets. The movement was this. They discussed the text in this way, thinking about strategies to contrapose Cecília [Meireles, the author of the text].”

Curriculum experimentations woven with art can create gaps in curriculum fixations that seek to dictate a single way to teach how to read and write. They can shake literacy policies that, by emphasizing cognitive science, affirm themselves as true, deny other knowledges, and share the responsibility with children/students and their families, as Caldeira (2022) states. In this sense, amidst macro policies, different theories, and conceptions of literacy, curricula, school, and learning that cross curriculum movement, this article invites us to think: Who is interested in practices void of meaning, in which the practitionersthinkers of school routine only have to reproduce? In fact, why do we reproduce without experimenting? Experimenting through thought (Deleuze, 1992) to breakaway from the fixed idea of curriculum and to five other meanings to educational processes, with art.

We believe in school as a collective body (Carvalho, 2009) to establish curriculum movements that force thought to question what is established, to question what is the meaning, to enter the relation with what is thoughtlivedfelt and that makes life overflow. We believe in curriculum movements that are willing to experiment, instead of reproducing. Experiencing other ways of being in school, with art, displacing thoughts, and transporting us to other possibilities, imagining other ways of being in the world. As a child, who likes to create, reminds us:

“Every day, I take a book to read. I tell stories that I make up in my mind and she (friend) says ‘oh, what a lack of imagination!’. So, what’s the problem? Can I no longer imagine things? She says the stories are nonsense”.

As an invitation to experiment, with no intention of convincing, but of contaminating, we finish this article produce diving into the school routine, into a cartography constantly open to experimentations. We affirm that in this spacetime, amidst forms and forces, there is a creation of curriculum movements that reiterate life, an exercise of thought opened to the new, to the unthinkable, breaking postulates and creating new ways of existing, with art. We insist: we need to dare to experiment!

Experimenting the creation of other worlds, in the encounter with art, is diving into an experience of thought that is not in accordance with reality. Experimenting is to cause fissure in the macro policies of regulation and control of the ways of learningteaching. Experimenting curriculum movements woven with art signs is to (re) exist the reduction of life to alphanumerical codes. “It does not refer to a combat in a substitution logic, seeking what to put in this place. It is an opening that does not fear what arrives unpredictably” (Frangella, 2021, p. 1165). It is wandering in nomadic lands with no intention to set roots. It is to experiment curriculum movements that affirm life, and difference, and... and... and...

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• SUPPORT/FUNDING

  Not applicable.

• AVAILABILITY OF RESEARCH DATA

  Data will be provided under demand.

• 1
  In this text, some words are written together to give other meanings to what takes place together, as Nilda Alves (2019).
• 2
  This research is part of a larger one, called “Currículos, culturas, formação de professores e cinema: cartografias de resistências inventivas nos cotidianos escolares”, funded by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa e Inovação do Espírito Santo (FAPES) coordinated by professor Sandra Kretli da Silva.
• 3
  Serra is a city in the metropolitan region of Vitória, with a population of more than 520,000, according to the census of Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE, 2022). It is the most populous city in the state of Espírito Santo, with different socioeconomic-cultural situations.
• 4
  We agree with Professor Inês Barbosa de Oliveira, when affirming that, to Certeau, human beings in daily life are practitioners and created permanent knowledge in these spacetimes; therefore, they are practitionersthinkers (Andrade; Caldas; Alves, 2019).

Data availability

Data will be provided under demand.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  26 Aug 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  22 Oct 2023
• Accepted
  07 May 2024