Curriculum Policy and the Dispute over Knowledge: The Construction of Intellectual Direction in the Paraíba Curriculum Proposal
Keywords: hegemony; human formation; Paraíba Curricular Proposal; critical discourse analysis; elementary and middle School.
ABSTRACT
This research project, linked to Line 1 - History, Educational Policies of PPGEd/UFCG, aims to investigate the process of hegemonic dispute around knowledge in the Paraíba Curricular Proposal (PCPB) focused on Elementary and Middle School. It seeks to understand which knowledge is validated and marginalized in the consolidation of bourgeois hegemony and which human formation is prioritized by this document. Public school and school curriculum are understood as fields of dispute immersed in a neoliberal project developed in Brazil and intensified after the 2016 political rupture. This conjuncture directly affected the approval and vertical guidelines of a National Common Curricular Base (BNCC), whose directives materialize in the Paraíba state proposal. Methodologically, it adopts the historical-dialectical materialism approach grounded on the reflections of Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, mobilizing the categories of historicity, contradiction, hegemony, educating State, educational principle, and omnilateral formation. This theoretical framework articulates with bibliographic and documentary research through the three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by Norman Fairclough, which encompasses the dimensions of text, discursive practice, and social practice. It is also supported by the contributions of Michael Apple, Miguel Arroyo, and Gaudêncio Frigotto. Preliminary results point to a "stillborn production" of the Paraíba proposal, characterized by subordination to bourgeois national knowledge, the erasure of local territorial identities, and the discursive silencing of minorities and subalternized groups.
Keywords: hegemony; human formation; Paraíba Curricular Proposal; critical discourse analysis; elementary and middle School.