Introduction

In this article, I make a kind of curriculum map as conceived, written, conceptualized, and disseminated by Sandra Mara Corazza in her production on the topic presented in the Curriculum Working Group (WP) during the Annual Meetings of the National Association of Postgraduate Studies and Research in Education (ANPEd, initials in Portuguese from Brazil). In addition, I will incorporate into this map some of the sensations aroused by her presentations when I watched them at the time they were made. I chose to go through her production presented in the ANPEd Curriculum WG because it is the most critical event for disseminating educational research. Since 1986, it has had a specific WG for discussions of research on curriculum. Sandra Corazza participated intensely, for a period of 10 years, in the activities of ANPEd Curriculum WG, being also the coordinator of the WG, from 2002 to 2003. She was also a member of the ad-hoc Committee of the WG and the ANPEd Scientific Committee. During this period, she presented five studies of great importance in the changes she was making in her research and academic production.

In addition, I went through her production published at this event because, when immersing myself in the reading of Sandra Corazza’s academic production, the author’s investment in presenting the theoretical struggles, which she engaged with in the curricular field from 1994 to 2001, was evident. Likewise, the concepts prioritized by her to explore an understanding dear to her production: that a curriculum does not exist by itself, is not fixed, and is not eternal or universal because it is “[…] by conquering and reconquering that the game of inheriting and bequeathing takes place […] that pedagogy and curriculum are made of” (^{Corazza, 2005a}, p. 8). After all, it is in this game that we will make inheritances “[…] other things, different, unprecedented, novelty, to also leave them as an inheritance to those who will come after us” (^{Corazza, 2005a}, p. 8).

The analysis of Sandra Corazza’s production on the curriculum presented in ANPEd Curriculum WG and later published in different academic journals and books enabled us to understand that the author leaves traces in her writings that allow – by following the problem questions that mobilize her research and the changes made in her thinking and curricular research approaches – to see the creations and creatures she used to move and produce in the field of the curriculum in her way, which is a very original and particular way. By dismantling Sandra Corazza’s writings – to answer the question, “what is there recorded of her creations on the curriculum?” – I could see that her production follows the contours of what we can call a combative and novel ethics-politics. It undertakes to construct a writing about a curriculum in which, by fighting what has already been produced in the field, conventional processes are torn apart, and makes emerge, through the language that it twists, retwists, and composes, an ethical-political struggle that makes a curriculum utterly dependent on the teachers and their creations. In this article, I show how Sandra Corazza’s production links curriculum with the power of a teacher who creates. After all, in addition to betting on the thesis that “[…] the teacher creates theory, practice, and method because, when educating, translating, there is no way not to create them” (^{Corazza, 2018}, p. 1), I was able to verify, as I hope to show in this article, that the author bets on the creative teacher, who deconstructs, unlearns, loses, forgets, abandons what has already been done so that a curriculum can be revitalized and participate in the force of transformation and creation that we need in education.

With its most varied developments and cuts, the curriculum, in the production analyzed here, is not presented only as a space of representation or struggle for representation. In the analyzed production, the curriculum is a space “of creation in education”. There is a desire for a “[…] professor to go around the contours of other languages, collecting what pulls them out of fear, sadness, and frustration to improvise, create” (^{Corazza, 2005b}, p. 104) in the curriculum. Furthermore, of course, when linking the curriculum to the action of a teacher who moves, questions, undoes and redoes, it is in the minor curricula that it is necessary to invest. After all, it is in it that improvisation, experimentation, and creation can be carried out, inferring from the analyzed production.

The minor curricula are those “[…] made by us, educators, whom every day in our classrooms produce encounters, manage knowledge and cultures, move with a difference and make clashes with the major curriculum and its thirst for control and prescription” (^{Paraíso, 2019}, p. 36). I argue, in this article, that, by focusing on the need to permanently interrogate the curriculum’s sayings, doings, and wants, it is in the minor curricula that Sandra Corazza sees possibilities for invention and resistance. After all, it is in the minor curricula – those that emerge “in processes of exteriority to the State” (^{Corazza, 2010}, p. 160) and that demand the will to power of a teacher – that we can build “the future we want change” (^{Corazza, 2001c}, p. 14).

In her academic production on curriculum published in ANPEd Curriculum WG, by betting on minor curricula that are or can be made by teachers, Sandra Corazza seeks a sophisticated, complex, and varied conceptual arsenal to explore pedagogical themes articulated with curriculum. Many times the field, when working with the critical and also post-critical perspectives of curriculum, took it as “a fact”, as given, as being merely technical, without problematizations, such as class, didactics, teacher, childhood, assessments, descriptive opinions… Furthermore, it is precisely by bringing to the curriculum field the discussion of these pedagogical themes, already almost forgotten by curricular theories in their problematizations, that Sandra Corazza, when betting on the teacher’s will to power, brings the new to the field. It makes them to think of curriculum in a very different way than usual in the pedagogical and curricular fields. This is what I seek to show below, bringing what she produced and presented in ANPEd Curriculum WG at the time when she actively participated in its meetings and activities.

Sayings and Doings in Curricula: clashes with the existing because they are transcendental meanings of the curriculum that make the new difficult!

The first sense of curriculum produced by Sandra Corazza and presented for the first time at the then ANPEd annual meeting, in 1994, was that of “[…] curriculum as a space for the dissemination of transcendental meanings” (^{Corazza, 1994a}; 1995c¹). That same year, 1994, Sandra Corazza had started her doctorate in the Postgraduate Program in Education at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS, initials in Portuguese from Brazil), supervised by Tomaz Tadeu da Silva. By that time, she was already working on a research project entitled Pedagogical Constructivism as a Transcendental Meaning of the Curriculum: Reason and Obscurantism in Education (^{Corazza, 1994b 2}). In the wake of the intense criticism that Tomaz Tadeu had been making of pedagogical constructivism (^{Silva, 1993}; ^1994a; ^1994b), Sandra presents her first problematizations about pedagogical constructivism in the curriculum in the ANPEd Curriculum WG. The study presented makes it evident that her writing did not come to calm down, but for the good fight. Dense work, with questions and a solid critical stance, calls for a good fight through deconstructing what had become the great truth for education. Her first words in the WG were: “The Curriculum has transcendental meanings that make the new difficult!” (^{Corazza, 1994a}, p. 1). By “[…] deconstructing these transcendental meanings and showing their making, perhaps we can make the new appear. One of these transcendental meanings is certainly pedagogical constructivism!” (^{Corazza, 1994a}, p. 2). So, Sandra, with deconstruction strategies – learned mainly from Jacques Derrida but also from Cleo H. Cherryholmes –, puts bare pedagogical constructivism, showing how this “[…] psychological-epistemological theory, by presenting itself and being presented as social theory”, ends up being spoken and heard “as a powerful and global meta-narrative, whether in its conceptual formulations or its pedagogical and political practices and ideals” (^{Corazza, 1995c}, p. 220). Pedagogical Constructivism, as the transcendental meaning of the curriculum, states Sandra Corazza, serves “[…] as a rational/mystical belief that the neoliberal/neoconservative state needs to install its educational policies” (^{Corazza, 1995c}, p. 227) that seeks to “[…] break the right to education, by instituting […] the logic of the market” (^{Corazza, 1995c}, p. 227).

The year of 1994 was the height of constructivism in the pedagogical discourse in Brazil, Latin America, and several European countries. Years later, constructivism was still a discourse considered so accurate that it gained a prominent place in Brazilian curriculum policy when it was indicated in the National Curricular Parameters (^{Brasil, 1997}) as a suggestion of pedagogical theory to subsidize the work of Brazilian elementary school teachers (^{Moreira, 2010}). After Sandra presented this work on that occasion, there was a strident silence in the room. Nobody commented, nobody asked anything about the work… However, nobody moved either. After minutes of silence, some participants addressed questions to other presenters in the same session. We raised many hypotheses about that silence. We never quite figured it out. ^{Paraíso (2005)} wrote the following about this silence:

Some lines of post-critical research presented in the ANPEd Curriculum WG, such as the line of constructivism as the curriculum’s transcendental meaning, seem to dissolve as soon as they are traced. They disappear in the silence given in response to their restless force. The uncomfortable silence after her presentation at the WG is still present today. There is no sequence of these lines, and no continuity in the traces started. Maybe because, at that moment, the lines were too strong, alive, and cutting. Perhaps because it has introduced a novelty in the field. Maybe because it was still outside of the box thinking. Is that really why? Maybe; just maybe… In any case, what is evident is that in the curriculum map, not all lines proliferate, even though they are strong enough to make curricularists uncomfortable, for a long time, concerning the topic addressed and also the silence received. The line of constructivism as the transcendental meaning of the curriculum, which a curricularist extends in the arena of Curriculum WG, is not taken up by anyone on the post-critical curriculum map. That line […] stops there. Nobody takes it back or tries to extend it in the analyzed territory. At least for now…

(^{Paraíso, 2005}, p. 74).

Indeed, if silence produced controversies, this did not paralyze Sandra, who continued to problematize procedures and practices dear to pedagogical constructivism. In the following year, 1995³, Sandra Corazza presented new a new study in the Curriculum WG, now calling into question an evaluation practice central to constructivist curricula. She enjoyed absolute prestige in critical pedagogical practices: the Descriptive Opinions. Although there were still remnants of elements of a deconstruction inspired by the production of Jacques Derrida, there is in this study another perspective that starts to subsidize Sandra’s analyses: the “Foucauldian and Cultural Studies perspective” (^{Corazza, 1995a}, p. 47). Considering Descriptive Opinions as a power device, Sandra Corazza explores the “[…] relationships between curriculum, culture, school knowledge, identity, and power” (^{Corazza, 1995a}, p. 47). She shows their strategic functions for the cultural policy of childhood-school and school knowledge. This is, as the author argues, “[…] to exercise a permanent questioning of the systems of thought and the problematic forms of social experience in which we find ourselves” (^{Corazza, 1995a}, p. 47).

We see in this study – which, unlike the one presented in the previous year, was thoroughly discussed and debated by the researchers participating in the Curriculum WG – a fascinating practice in the academic production of Sandra Corazza that runs through her entire life as a researcher. Which is the practice of problematizing, interrogating, deconstructing, and assigning other meanings to terms and practices used in pedagogical theorizing commonly as a technical issue. Here is the assessment that Sandra Corazza scrutinizes. It is with this in mind that the researcher begins her intervention in the WG that year when she says: “Evaluation has been treated, by some segments of educational theorization, as a merely didactic, technical, cognitive, or attitudinal issue; or else, by a more critical approach, as a generic embodiment of power!” (^{Corazza, 1995a}, p. 48). Furthermore, she continues: “In this study, I proposed to […] incline such treatments consecrated by the current pedagogical discourse about evaluation” (^{Corazza, 1995a}, p. 48).

In this study, Sandra Corazza takes a perspective inspired by the production of the French philosopher Michel Foucault and “its derivatives for the field of Critical Theory of the Curriculum” to launch some “looks” at the Descriptive Opinions aiming at their denaturalization. She focuses on the Descriptive Opinions “[…] as an important strategy of the cultural policy of the school, in the domains of production-control-domination of childhood-school and the curriculum practiced in the education of these same children” (^{Corazza, 1995a}, p. 49). In addition, Descriptive Opinions are analyzed as “[…] a pedagogical practice of moral regulation, which constitutes or transforms the experience that children have of themselves and which, therefore, becomes an exemplar of the relationship between curriculum, identity, and power” (^{Corazza, 1995a}, p. 49). Descriptive Opinions are “one of the evaluative devices operating” in the school investigated by the author. When analyzing them, the author describes “[…] their strategic functions in the process of moral regulation, towards the constitution of identities of social groups and particular subjects, with homogenizing cultural effects and, therefore, discriminatory and excluding” (^{Corazza, 1995a}, p. 48). One of the conclusions presented in the study is that the prescriptions analyzed in the opinions

[…] embody one of the many political instruments of cultural discrimination used by the school in its relationship with social groups, by attributing the power to legislate on who is included and who should be excluded; by fabricating personal and social identities; by prescribing a catalog of moral regulation for admissible and inadmissible social and subject positions; by creating and promoting class and gender divisions, inferiorizing and excluding; finally, by shaping the armor of everyday school conduct and the subjects who must wear it

(^{Corazza, 1995a}, p. 55).

Descriptive Opinions are, therefore, considered a curricular practice that mobilizes different modern knowledge identified by the author. Inspired by the Foucauldian understanding of ethics as a “practice of oneself”, since “[…] there is always something in us that fights against something else in us” (^{Foucault, 2000}, p. 257), the author calls for us to abdicate “[…] minimally from the modern pedagogical power-knowledge that has been instituted until now on the childhood-school (of which opinions constitute a device), so that this – and, consequently, we, the contemporary subject narrated there – manages to be a little different from what was said/made of him” (^{Corazza, 1995a}, p. 56), and for us to, at least, try to “[…] make the education they gave us something different than what resulted from it” (^{Corazza, 1995a}, p. 56).

This struggle is present in Sandra Corazza’s entire analyzed production: making the curriculum and with the curriculum something different from what they did with the curriculum that formed us! Doing with ourselves something different from what they did of us! This demands that we question the terms, knowledge, and pedagogical practices used in the school. After all, they were used to make us what we are today.

It is also interesting to note that the problem of constructivism is already being diluted in this study until it disappears from her production to give way to the problematization of other pedagogical practices. There are already embryos for forming a new problematic field that will increasingly become central in Sandra Corazza’s problematizations, investigations, concerns, and writings: childhood. It and the curriculum will become the central theme of her academic production.

In the following year, 1996, Sandra Corazza presented another study entitled Eyes of Power on the Curriculum (^{Corazza, 1996b 4}) to a room full of researchers, who, increasingly, gathered to listen to the partial results of research she presented in ANPEd Curriculum WG. The Foucauldian perspective is deepened in this study to make a kind of genealogy about the knowledge and powers used in the Descriptive Opinions that scrutinize, normalize, and produce children in specific ways in the school curriculum. Sandra Corazza starts her presentation by saying:

The eyes that look at children at school and in the classroom are never impartial, not even disinterested, much less descriptive. Their perspectives – whether curricular, didactic, pedagogical, psychological, sociological, philosophical, or anthropological – are historically committed to certain power-knowledge relations and involved in the constitution of specific policies of cultural identity and representation, not others

(^{Corazza, 1996a}, p. 47).

Still focusing on Descriptive Opinions and their normalizing force in school curricula, Sandra Corazza initially explores what she called the “Uses and Customs” of Descriptive Opinions in this study. Next, she addresses the “Didactic Continuities” of these Opinions – since she sees a “[…] continuous line that extends the meanings seen in the researched school practice to the guidelines provided by the didactic texts”. In the third part of her study, the author explores what she called “Seeing, Knowing” to show “[…] some of how modern pedagogy appropriated and reterritorialized the medical positivities of looking at and producing knowledge, to create and put to work their evaluative devices of observation, self-assessment, and written opinions”. Finally, she discusses the “Normative Penalty”, establishing there “[…] correlations between the modern normative form of penalization and school evaluation” (^{Corazza, 1996a}, p. 47-48).

Drawing attention to the looks of power in the curriculum, the author shows that these looks have nothing of innocence since, through these Descriptive Opinions, a new power to judge is exercised. The author argues that these Opinions, seen as a “look of power in the curriculum”, place “[…] the children in a permanent process of clarity, production, normalization, and pathologization”; until “[…] him/herself internalizes his/her transparency and can become a civilized, self-normalized Western individual” (^{Corazza, 1996a}, p.66). She draws attention to the fact that it is not because they are descriptive and “soft” that these opinions exercise less power. On the contrary, the “[…] softness of their gaze, said to be humanizing, is invested as a technique of power, and this is what contemporary pedagogical discourse repeatedly continues to conceal” (^{Corazza, 1996a}, p.66). Corazza ends her presentation by asking us, researchers in the curricular field, about the eyes we use to look at curricula. After all, asks the researcher, “[…] until when will we continue to look at these eyes of power over the curriculum, in an innocent way?” (^{Corazza, 1996a}, p.66). Our bodies – of researchers from the curriculum that watched her – that moved from side to side as if they could not find a comfortable place to be, denounce that the question touched us in full. It was a summons there to leave the comfortable place! Everything in the modern curriculum needed to be tweaked, revised and turned over. This produced much discomfort.

It is evident that, from 1994 to 1996, Sandra Corazza presents studies that produce a series of clashes with the existing curricula: she deconstructs the transcendental meanings of the curriculum. She shows how the modern knowledge, which the curricula operationalize and constitute us, makes it difficult for the novel in the school. She analyzes the cultural policy of evaluation in schools and its effects on the constitution of children. She makes a kind of genealogy of the powers that prescribe proper ways of being students at school. She breaks down knowledge and powers that mark, moralize, and govern children through opinions and “gazes” in different curricular practices. In summary, Sandra Corazza – in her research presented and discussed in ANPEd Curriculum WG – focuses, in these early years, on exploring the sayings and doings of the curricula that produce subjects and make it difficult for the new to come in education and life. It was for the novel that researcher Sandra Corazza was clamoring.

Wants in/from the Curriculum: fractures of modern infantility and ways of subjectivation of the infantile

In 1999, Sandra Corazza presented, in the Curriculum WG of the 21^st ANPEd Annual Meeting, a study entitled: The curriculum as a mode of subjectivation of children (^{Corazza, 1999}; ^{2001a 5}). Explaining that her study is nourished and inserted in the field of post-critical theories about curriculum, the author reminds us that these theories do not formulate any prescriptive subjectivizing policy but invite us to “[…] expose the cunning of self-knowledge, renouncing the practices that imprison us to their identifications” (^{Corazza, 2001a}, p. 57). Post-critical theories of curriculum encourage the creation of “[…] a historical and critical ontology of subjectivities, making them ‘strange’; to unmask the contingency of its fixed truths; to unearth its historical roots; to discover the functioning of the subjectivation processes that occur in a particular domain of knowledge-power” (^{Corazza, 2001a}, p. 57).

Once again, Sandra Corazza establishes another change in her production about curriculum, meaning it as a subjectivizing practice. Locating her work in the territory of Michel Foucault’s “ethics of the self”, the author recalls that this ethics “causes us to stop tolerating our subjectivizing conditions”. This ethics makes us “[…] perceive the violence of self-identifications”, exposing “[…] the costs of having been able, until then, to tell the truth about ourselves” (^{Corazza, 2001a}, p. 57). With this approach, she explores the modes of subjectivation of children by the curriculum and understands that the curriculum is a language which always wants to change something and/or someone.

Her research then turns to subjectivation, “[…] which concerns what we are, what we do, and how we signify ourselves” (^{Corazza, 2001a}, p. 57). The author explains that conceiving the curriculum as a mode of subjectivation implies “[…] analyzing its knowledge, languages, forms of reasoning, sciences, types of experience, normative techniques” as being “[…] linked to the relations of knowledge and power that cross bodies to record in consciences” (^{Corazza, 2001a}, p. 57). Investigating the curriculum as a subjectivizing practice, the author explains, “[…] requires isolating and reconceptualizing a specific dimension derived from these powers and knowledge, but which does not depend on them nor is reduced to them: the dimension of subjectivity” (^{Corazza, 2001a}, p. 57-58).

I can still feel the package of sensations provoked in us – researchers – by listening to Sandra’s critique of childhood subjectivity; by hearing about what we are, the cunning of self-knowledge, the functioning of subjectivation processes, and the practices that imprison us in our identifications. I can still feel the tremors as we hear the call to “[…] unmask the contingency of the truths fixed upon ourselves”; to “dig up the historical roots” of our constitution. Sandra Corazza has already fascinated all of us researchers who listened to her. Above all, she chooses a particular domain of power-knowledge to analyze that is very dear to us: the curriculum for children.

Taking advantage of our state of commotion, the author says what she came to: I want to tell you that, concerning the curriculum and the ways of subjectivation of children,

[…] it is possible that the time has come to forget the old powers, that are no longer exercised; the old knowledges that are no longer useful; the old beliefs, in which we do not even believe anymore, and the old ways of producing ourselves as subjects, which no longer correspond to the subjectivities that we have been constituting

(^{Corazza, 2001b}, p. 66).

Without giving us time to think about these goodbyes, Sandra continues her argument: “[…] from within our curriculum, the child makes fun of us”. This perhaps “[…] because he knows that we listen to him and look at him as if he were a subjectivity that still plays at being Greek, Christian… while what he has been set up is the exercise of new practices of freedom” (^{Corazza, 2001a}, p. 66).

The new modes of enunciation of the infantile, “El Nino” and “La Nina”, shown by Sandra Corazza as demarcating the fracture of modern infantility, made us hold our breath provisionally. These “two emblematic figures”, the researcher affirms forcefully,

Are the most impolite children of today. They don’t know how to read; they never went to school; they aren’t tyrannized by the media culture; they don’t watch television or have a computer. They do not need to resolve any Oedipus complexes; they have neither a father nor mother. They are not expropriated or raped; it even seems they don’t play

(^{Corazza, 2001a}, p. 71).

While the author described these two ways of enunciating the infantile that terrified us, we continued with bated breath to only let go when the sweet childhood of the Baby Jesus was mentioned, which we still insist on seeing in our curricula and our children.

As if that was not enough, each following sentence chilled and tormented us because it told of the farewell and death of a type of childhood, producing “missing the dear dawn” of our lives. In a kind of poetry of subjectivation, as if she had anticipated the state of commotion that took us by the announced death of that childhood that was also known to us, Sandra Corazza states it is “[…] possible to think that the ‘death’ of subjectivities by too familiar is the opposite of death. Perhaps the practices to kill them will finally release their languages, on the outside of their silence” (^{Corazza, 2001a}, p.74). Furthermore, she adds: “As in the sirens’ song, perhaps their seduction consists in the void they open, in the fascinating immobility they provoke in those who listen to them” (^{Corazza, 2001a}, p.74).

Emotion had already taken over the WG when the author ended her presentation by saying: “It may be time to say goodbye. In fact, the curriculum as a way of subjectivation of children touched, shook, surprised, made us cry, moved… It produced a kind of before and after in the production concerning researchers’ curriculum in the field and in Sandra Corazza’s academic production itself on curriculum.

After all, when Sandra Corazza spoke of the farewell to a type of infantile, it also simultaneously seemed a kind of farewell to an approach type in the research. Her study’s last paragraphs speak of writing in the territory of the curriculum’s ethics, in another register of the political: “From a tragic-political, as for Nietzsche […]. Not residing in anguish and sadness, nor nostalgia for lost unity. […] But, defining itself in the multiplicity, in the diversity of the affirmation, in the plural joy, in the joyful laughter of being and becoming” (^{Corazza, 2001a}, p. 74). We have here, perhaps, the germs of embryos of what would become Sandra Corazza’s investment to get rid of what had already been done and look for the “future”, which, she said, she wanted to see changed.

Another Investment to show the Risk(s) of Hybridity in Curriculum Policies

The following year, in 2000, Sandra presented a study, at the invitation of Curriculum WG, no longer only for curriculum researchers. She participates in a panel, ANPEd Special Session, along with professors Reinaldo Fleury, from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC, initials in Portuguese from Brazil) and Silvio Galo, from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP, initials in Portuguese from Brazil). The panel was coordinated by Professor Alice Lopes, from the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ, initials from Portuguese from Brazil) – at the time, she was professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ, initials in Portuguese from Brazil) and coordinator of the Curriculum WG. The Baependi Room – where the event occurred, at the Glória Hotel in Caxambu-MG – was utterly packed. People, having nowhere else to stay, were sitting on the floor close to the speakers or the windows and doors, huddled together to listen. The panel was composed of the Curriculum, Popular Education, and Fundamental Education WGs and had as its theme: Curricular proposals: between the official and the alternative⁶. Sandra Corazza named her speech as Alternative-official curricula: the risk(s) of hybridism (^{Corazza, 2000a}). The following year, her study was published with the same name in the Revista Brasileira de Educação (^{Corazza, 2001b 7}).

When many of us who were there expected another scathing critique of the official curriculum and the defense of alternative curricula that “[…] told other stories. Stories that, by being ‘alternative,’ undermined ‘the inevitability’ and ‘naturalness’ of the dominant narratives” (^{Silva, 1995}, p. 185-186), and that brought examples of the alternative curricula that Brazil had built in the 1990s, such as the Plural School in Belo Horizonte, the Citizen School in Porto Alegre, the Democratic and Popular School of the Rio Grande do Sul State – to mention just three of the various proposals considered as alternatives built at that time and highly acclaimed –, here comes Sandra Corazza tormenting us with that risk of hybridism. This risk of hybridism showed how much the alternative and official curricula, those of the left and the right, had similar discourses, knowledge, and narratives.

Sandra Corazza says: I will argue that “[…] we have not managed to consolidate policies, curricula, pedagogical proposals, or alternative discourses” (^{Corazza, 2001b}, p. 101). We did not succeed for a straightforward reason: “[…] not that we failed, but because, due to many factors (relevant to our historical, professional, and subjective condition), we lost the direction, the limits, and the differential, which allowed us to distinguish what was ‘official’ from what was ‘alternative’” (^{Corazza, 2001b}, p. 101). Giving no respite to the murmurs that were made in the room, she continues:

Because we are subjects of this era and no other, we cannot experience education and Pedagogy in the same way as before. That’s why we practice them as the new hybrid beings that we are. Beings that, among other characteristics, have, in their doings, thoughts, and words, a portion of an ‘official’ curriculum and another portion of an ‘alternative’ curriculum. When we lose the distinguishing factors between ‘official’ and ‘alternative’, our curricula are now represented by the union trait that now links the two words

(^{Corazza, 2001b}, p. 102).

Furthermore, despite the buzz that increased and spread throughout the room, Sandra continued: “As much as this hurts me (and it ‘hurts’), I will carry out the analytical exercise of seeking discursive similarities between the National Curriculum, expressed in the PCNs, and the ‘School Constituent Movement’” (^{Corazza, 2001b}, p. 17). This movement of “[…] building the Democratic and Popular School aims to define principles and guidelines for the education of the state public network of the Party of Workers government of Rio Grande do Sul” (^{Corazza, 2001b}, p. 17-18).

Without being paralyzed by the audience’s reactions, Sandra Corazza then shows two lists with fragments of the curricular proposals of the National Curricular Parameters (PCN, initials in Portuguese from Brazil) and the School Constituent of Rio Grande do Sul, without identifying which proposal it was. She said: “[…] I selected statements from the two curricula, grouped them into themes under a common title, and suppressed their identification data”. Furthermore, she invites: “I proceeded this way, intending to invite you to a ‘game’. The game consists of identifying which educational proposal belongs to whom. Which is FHC Government’s, and which is Olívio Dutra’s?” (^{Corazza, 2001b}, p. 17-18).

We were stupefied by the similarity of what we saw when called to enter the search game to recognize which discourse was from the alternative/left proposal and which was official/right. In fact, we could not identify to which proposal those fragments belonged. Similar curricula, although one was from a neoliberal government and the other from the left. One had been carried out in closed offices with the participation of a few specialists chosen by the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (^{Moreira, 2010}). The other with the active participation of elementary school teachers in the Rio Grande do Sul State, community members, unions, social movements, and the most different education specialists (^{Moreira, 2000}). Still, there were many similarities.

So, after the scare, Sandra was asked countless questions on that occasion. Objections of all kinds, such as: 1) “The vocabulary may be the same, but semantics may be different, and you have not explored that”. 2) “The construction processes were different, which counts for a lot”. 3) “But the two proposals are official; are you really bringing an alternative proposal?”. 4) “You did not say anything about the effective curriculum; that is where the difference comes in”. 5) “Everything you said is wrong. That is not it. Never was. It just looks like it is. You were completely wrong”. 6) “What you are doing is, in addition to being complicated and dangerous, equating to the proposals of right and left government curricula!”. And so, the objections continued…

It is worth noting that, when Sandra Corazza published her study in the Revista Brasileira de Educação in the following year, she incorporated in the article comments on each of these objections she had received at that time (^{Corazza, 2001b}, p. 103-105). Accepting the whole barrage of questions, comments, criticisms, and objections she received, which gave her almost no time to breathe or respond, the author says:

Despite these objections, I argue that our current curricular proposals are not between the official and the alternative. They are in the middle, the join dash, and the connecting hyphen. They are fusion, association, and combination. Our alternative curricula, produced in almost thirty years of work in non-governmental organizations, unions, social movements, schools, villages, and universities, are present and embedded in the National Curriculum. Furthermore, this, the official one, is also here in the curricula we organize and implement and teach to organize and implement.

(^{Corazza, 2001b}, p. 106).

Leaving no doubt in the evidence that the curricula of “left” and “right” governments were united, merged, associated, and combined, she felt that we wanted some way. However, the path we knew had to be made by following, walking, inventing… Sandra Corazza then concludes her study by summoning to creating. She says:

To dismantle, undo, and disjoin what is there, represented by the join dash between alternative curriculum–official curriculum, I think we can evaluate, in the Nietzschean sense of ‘creating’. Doubting alleged educational values in themselves. […] Affirm the relativity of values […]. Assess the value of our actions and convictions, guided by these values because we were the donors who provided value and meaning to the words that are both in the national and alternative curriculum […]. By doing this (as much as it hurts, and it ‘hurts’), we will first accept that we are involved in this risk/trait and run the risks of political-educational hybridism. Second, we will be better able to exercise our creative power and produce curricula that do not yet exist. […] By exercising our creative will […], we may, who knows, […] undo the risk of connection, which made our curricula no longer unofficial. […] Knowing that, if your trace has reached this far, it is because, as such, it was created. If it was created that way, it could be traced in other ways

(^{Corazza, 2001b}, p. 106-107).

This is how Sandra Corazza ends her words, leaving me perplexed; and, at the same time, conscientious of the need to disjoint, unlearn, undo, imagine, and create a lot. It was undoubtedly in this that she began to invest in her research. Her entire academic production from then on undergoes numerous changes. However, Sandra Corazza continues researching and writing without ever failing to express her “wants” for another education, another curriculum, or another class. Wants that demand invention and creation in education.

Conclusion: curriculum and the will to power of a teacher

In this last presentation in the ANPEd Curriculum WG, Sandra Corazza makes it clear that the work of creation in the curriculum belongs to all teachers. In the following two years, in 2002 and 2003, Sandra Corazza was coordinator of the ANPEd Curriculum WG and withdrew from the WG. Later, she started to participate in ANPEd-Sul meetings. She presents studies and participates in round tables in the ANPEd-Sul Arts WG. These are other times from other productions that also deserve to be mapped and analyzed because many other meanings of curricula are produced and disseminated there.

However, the production analyzed here shows an unbridled desire to interrogate the curricula of the present, to problematize the most different aspects of the existing curricula to create the new one. This was only multiplied in the academic production of Sandra Corazza, as her enormous, diverse, and dense academic production attests. Perhaps because of her long experience as a primary school teacher, before completing her doctorate and starting her career as a higher education professor, Sandra Corazza, in her production on curriculum, bet on the teacher’s creative capacity, on the will to power of the teacher, and problematized different pedagogical themes with which all of us teachers deal. She insisted that “[…] educational practices do not exist by themselves, are not fixed, are not eternal, nor are they universal”. Furthermore, it is “[…] conquering and reconquering […] that pedagogy and curriculum are made” (^{Corazza, 2005a}, p. 8). She emphasized and intensely lived her thesis that “being an educator” is not just about “accumulating”; but also “[…] abandon, drop, spend, and, in this expense, reacquire, resume, to be able to revitalize” (^{Corazza, 2005a}, p. 8). For intercessors to move the curriculum and its themes, Sandra Corazza looked above all in the Philosophies of Difference – but also in the Curriculum Theories, Cultural Studies, Arts, and Literature. With a questioning look at pedagogical themes, she brought new problematizations and conceptualizations to themes that, despite being dear to pedagogical theorization, are often taken for granted, both in educational theory and outside it. Sandra Corazza took these themes in her academic production on curriculum as problems. She then conceptualized them quite differently from what is usual in the pedagogical field, making unexpected arrangements, extending the language to the maximum, exposing her “stuttering”, making other connections, and creating other senses.

In the field of curriculum, he managed the plan, the class, the didactics, the teacher, the child, and childhood with dreams, fables, goddesses and gods, difference, affirmation, natural phenomena such as el niño and la niña, etc. By doing so, she made the curriculum language stutter, twisted the words, turned nouns and subjects into verbs, verbs into locutions, and joined unusual words turning them into concepts. She produced compositions and explored sensations, forcing them to explain themselves and bringing novelties to the field of curriculum. This is what Sandra Corazza did in her production on the curriculum presented in the ANPEd, which I tried to show in this article.

New sayings, new wants, and new doings in the curriculum were her struggle from beginning to end of her research, as was evident in her production analyzed here. A desire for creation in the curriculum made her uneasy and to move continuously, without pause. As I hope I have made evident in this article, Sandra Corazza changed all the time: her study material, her theoretical tools, her working method, her writing, her reading, her thinking, and her research. If I can draw a line that runs through the studies that Sandra presented in the Curriculum WG of ANPEd and continues throughout her work, it is a poetic activity. “Poetizing in the curriculum means producing, manufacturing, inventing, creating new, unpublished meanings. This is so that everything stated in the curriculum does not become paralyzed, fixed, permanent, or become “it is!” (^{Paraíso, 2005}, p. 79). This demands a teacher with a will to power; uncomfortable with what we are doing with what they have done to us; concerned with the minor curricula they create.

Sandra, the researcher-poet, has invested much work in creating new meanings, new connections, and new dreams in and for the curriculum. This is what her productions have mobilized in the field of curriculum. That, I hope, we can extend and multiply as part of the tradition of “receive and deliver modified”, as she defended being our task as educators/researchers committed to the needs of the time in which we live. A time that she named, in her composition with Gilles Deleuze, “Time of Pure Difference” (^{Corazza, 2005a}).

Having the firming of life as a production line of hers and her teaching, it is evident that Sandra Corazza loved what she did! She loved being and presenting her studies in the ANPEd Curriculum WG. She loved the events that were these performances; the buzz, the objections, the emotion… she loved being part of ANPEd and meeting with fellow researchers in Caxambu-MG to discuss their research, talk, and chat. She researched and wrote with passion. She loved life and fate. She knew, Nietzschean, that there is no higher value to life. This is how curricularist Sandra Corazza lived, who thought loud, fast, and continuously. It is as if I could hear her: That is what I wanted! I did so! Furthermore, I have no doubts: she would live it all over again!