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Print version ISSN 0104-4060On-line version ISSN 1984-0411

Educ. Rev. vol.37  Curitiba  2021  Epub Sep 06, 2021

https://doi.org/10.1590/0104-4060.77129 

DOSSIER - National Bases and History Teaching: clashes, challenges and possibilities in/between basic education and teacher training

Teaching History in the Base Nacional Comum Curricular: the historian attitude becoming competences1

Maria Aparecida Lima dos Santos* 
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8106-4978

*Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul. Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brasil. E-mail: maria.lima-santos@ufms.br


ABSTRACT

Current curricular policies have presented narratives that project a professional profile aimed at the “new” teacher model. In this process, the meanings of teaching have been fixed through the centrality that some signifiers took in the curricula structuring for Basic Education and teacher training. In this article, we observe that the signifier historian attitude, a central element in the discourse, focused on the History component present in the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC) [National Common Curricular Base], when being juxtaposed to the signifier competence, present in the Base Nacional Comum de Formação de Professores (BNC-FP) [National Teacher Training Base], incorporates meanings based on neo-technical pedagogy, in translation and recontextualization processes that are underpinning a hybrid character. Our analysis was grounded on the understanding of the curriculum in cultural practice terms, which involves describing the curriculum as culture, as a place of enunciation, in opposition to a vision of a prescribed and privileged curriculum from a linear power conception. We observe that, since History teaching has been devoid of its fundamental relationship with historical knowledge, there is a need to set up undergraduate courses limited to training teachers to teach history. This is because there is teaching into a technique transformation process that prioritizes the learning to do in the curriculum structuring. In our view, this deprives teaching of its formative and political dimension and the initial training in the domain of the fundamentals of Science History and its ways of producing knowledge.

Keywords: History teaching; National Common Curricular Base; National Teacher Training Base; Competences; Historian Attitude

RESUMO

As políticas curriculares contemporâneas têm apresentado narrativas que projetam um perfil profissional voltado ao “novo” modelo de professor. Nesse processo, sentidos de docência têm sido fixados através da centralidade que alguns significantes vêm assumindo na estruturação dos currículos voltados à Educação Básica e à formação de professores. Neste artigo, observamos como o significante atitude historiadora, elemento central no discurso voltado ao componente de História presente na Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC), ao ser aproximado do significante competência, presente na Base Nacional Comum de Formação de Professores (BNC-FP), incorpora, em processos de tradução e recontextualização de caráter híbrido, sentidos calcados na pedagogia neotecnicista. Nossa análise fundamentou-se na compreensão do currículo como uma prática cultural, o que envolve descrever o currículo como cultura, como um lugar de enunciação, em oposição a uma visão de currículo prescrito e privilegiado de uma concepção de poder linear. Observamos que, estando o ensino de História destituído de sua relação constitutiva com o conhecimento histórico pela sua transformação em técnica dada à primazia do como fazer na estruturação do currículo, incorre-se na constituição de cursos de licenciatura limitados ao treinamento de professores para ensinar História, o que destitui o ensino de sua dimensão formativa e política, e a formação inicial do domínio dos fundamentos da Ciência História e de seus modos de produzir conhecimento.

Palavras-chave: Ensino de História; Base Nacional Comum Curricular; Base Nacional Comum de Formação de Professores; Competências; Atitude Historiadora

Introduction

The intense circulation of texts and discourses disseminating the idea that we are experiencing a crisis in education and assigning the responsibility for this state of affairs to the teachers has influenced curricular definitions for teacher professionalization, projecting thus a professional profile aimed at the “new” teacher model (DIAS, 2014).

We understand that this effort to control representations is justified by an equation that makes quality dependent on control. Thus, it is essential to highlight that these reports comprise a mosaic of other curricular and educational documents and policies, inserted, in turn, in an arena of political negotiation where struggles for “signifixation” occur (GABRIEL, 2015). Seen in this light, its analysis may allow some of the subjects of these struggles to be perceived not as essences but as practices that fight around meanings for teacher education that are slowly and gradually introduced in the last four decades in curricular policies, highlighting that

This dynamics of producing curricular policies implies recognizing the representations of these policies, expressed in legal texts and curricular proposals, as being precarious, marked by apparent ambivalence and contradictions, resulting from the negotiations between different discourses that dispute the hegemony for teacher education (DIAS; LOPES, 2009, p. 80, our translation).

These principles make it possible to evolve from a perspective that conceives the so-called Base Nacional Comum de Formação de Professores (BNC-FP) [National Teacher Training Base] as an “entity” that “imposes” a ready, prescribed “curriculum”, for another that understands it as a discursive production that seeks to determine the significance and meaning of projects that seek hegemony. Thus,

The curriculum is itself, a discursive practice. This means that it is a practice of power, but also a practice of significance, of attributing meaning. It constructs reality, governs us, constrains our behavior, projects our identity, all of which produce meaning. It is, therefore, a discourse that is produced at the intersection between different social and cultural discourses that, at the same time, reiterates meaning set by such discourses and recreates them. Of course, as this recreation is surrounded by a power relationship, at the intersection, which makes it possible, not everything can be said (LOPES; MACEDO, 2011, p. 41, our translation).

This notion of curriculum, in a post-foundational approach (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1987; BURITY, 1997; FERREIRA, 2011; GABRIEL; CASTRO, 2013; GABRIEL, 2015), repositions the language role in the interweaving of reality and is guided by the discourse being perceived as a theoretical category notion - and not descriptive or empirical - thus seeking to account for the meaning production rules, where a given phenomenon finds its place in the social world and a given discursive formation (GABRIEL; CASTRO, 2013). It is important to highlight that to consider the post-foundational approach in its questioning of essentialist readings of the world does not mean adhering to the idea that “everything is valid” because what is being “questioned is not the possibility of operating with fundaments but rather its ontological status” (GABRIEL; CASTRO, 2013, p. 83).

Curricula, in general, and those aimed at the teaching of history in particular, express visions and choices, reveal tensions, conflicts, agreements, consensus, proximities, and distances and should be seen as a cultural practice, as places for contextualized utterance in disputes (MACEDO, 2006). Curricular documents understood as power spaces, operate as a system of significance, within which the meanings are produced by the subjects (LOPES; MACEDO, 2011).

When operating with the notion that curricular policies interweave several speeches by reframing certain terms, we mobilize the idea that the discourses in curricular policies undergo recontextualizations and hybridization in such a way, that “the curricular principles are refocused and reframed, often being geared towards purposes that are different from those initially established” (LOPES, 2005, p. 265).

Based on these assumptions, we consider it significant to acknowledge the BNC-FP as part of the efforts to control representations that flow in the educational environment (MACEDO, 2016), and we are particularly interested in exploring how the signifier historian attitude, which emerged as a central element in the discourse of the BNCC, focusing on the History curricular component when brought close to the signifier competences, incorporates, in hybrid character translation and recontextualization processes (DIAS; LOPES, 2009), meanings based on neo-technical pedagogy. We hypothesize the meanings combinations that fluctuate around the signifier competencies, established as the pedagogical foundation of the Basic Education curriculum and the BNC-FP project, meaning cause effects that lead to the gradual emptying of the cultural, political component of knowledge related to Historical Science, and, as a result, of the formative dimension of the History teaching within the curriculum of undergraduate courses.

To present our analysis2, we organized the text into three moments. In the first one, we discuss how the project of affirming a sense of teaching associated with learning to do took center stage through the significant competencies, which became the pedagogical foundation of BNC-FP and BNCC. At a second moment, we develop our argument of how this sense has been linked to the signifier historian attitude, emptying the dimensions regarding scientific knowledge, making it hybrid, and bringing it more and more intensely closer to neo-technical pedagogy. We end with our final remarks.

The pedagogy of competences substantiating the BNC-FP.

The legal framework listed on the first page of the BNC-FP presents the reader with a list of documents within which there have been impressions circulating that the reforms have been established deliberately and systematically over the past three decades in the field of educational policies in Brazil. In this process, a series of hybridizations and deletions occur due to the recurring and gradual presence of some key signifiers around which some consensus (hegemony) has been established, in particular, that of competencies, which is considered the foundation of teacher training and, simultaneously, the qualification of Basic Education students. To proceed with the analysis, we are working with the concept of a narrative, in a discursive perspective, “[...] in the context of the post-critical theories of the Curriculum, which revert to thinking of it as a time-space for the production of meanings, identities, difference, dispute of meanings about the processes and world phenomena” (MONTEIRO, 2014, p. 27). With this element in mind, we highlight the centrality based on the matrix by competencies for teacher training which appears in the narrative of the document as established by the Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional (LDB) [Brazilian Directive Law] - Law n. 9.394/96 (BRASIL, 1996) -, of the Reforma do Ensino Médio [High School Reform] - Law 13.415/17 (BRASIL, 2017a) -, and of the BNCC (BRASIL, 2018a), and the CNE/CP Resolutions n. 2/2017 (BRASIL, 2017b) and n. 4/2018 (BRASIL, 2018b), called “BNCC-Basic Education”. Therefore, from this point of view, setting up a list of skills becomes a legal necessity. In the excerpt from the document highlighted below, we observe how the notion of guaranteeing essential learning acquires the statute of a constitutional right in the narrative to justify the need to establish the “relevant professional teacher competencies”.

The essential learning, foreseen in the BNCC-Basic Education, to be guaranteed to the students, in order to reach their full development, under the terms of art. 205 of the Federal Constitution, reiterated by art. 2 of the LDB, requires the establishment of the relevant professional teacher competences (BRASIL, 2019, our translation).

We know that the speeches and texts that have been circulating in the last decades and that emphasize teaching professionalization “bring the idea of a professional profile in defense of teaching quality, through the teaching profession regulation” (DIAS, 2014, p. 9, our translation), a function that has consolidated itself around the assertion of the notion of competences within the curricular proposals and, associated with it, that of skills. Within the narrative of innovation and entrepreneurship, which contributes to guiding teaching work depreciation discourses, these terms have been stated as being more significant due to their fluid and polysemic character, as opposed to those of knowledge or qualification (PIMENTA, 2002). However, despite the plurality of conceptions that fluctuate within these signifiers, we believe that, in the most recent policies, a certain sense has been prioritized as a hegemony strategy, positioned as an element around which the curricular policies are recommended by BNCC and BNC-FP are being intertwined. This is what we observe in what is established as the BNC-FP’s teacher training fundamentals, which, in article 2, states that “teacher training implies the development, by the licensee, of the general competencies provided for in the BNCC-Basic Education, as well as the essential learning guaranteed to students [...]” (BRASIL, 2019, our translation, our emphasis).

Although this centrality is legally justified, there is no definition in the BNC-FP of what is understood in the document by competences. But it is precisely the “absence” of this definition that makes it possible to glimpse at the disputes for the anchoring of a meaning of teaching, on the one hand, and learning on the other. When juxtaposing the excerpts that determine the role of general competencies in the proposed curriculum, we note that, in the BNC-FP, the signifier gains prominence as an assumption of teacher training, along with essential learning, and, in the BNCC, to which these meanings are associated, the general competencies are found “substantiating” the rights of learning and development.

SOURCE: Prepared by the GEPEH / UFMS team.

BOX 1 MEANING OF COMPETENCIES AT BNC-FP AND BNCC. 

In the BNCC, in an essentializing perspective, competencies become the materialized “substance” of learning and development rights, and this meaning is incorporated into the BNC-FP: “Teacher training implies in the development, by the licensee, of the general competencies provided for in BNCC-Basic Education - that substantiate, in the pedagogical scope, the rights of learning and development” (BRASIL, 2018a, p. 8).

Add to that the almost exhaustive repetition of the term in the document, which appears in 258 passages against 150 of the word rights, in a total of 600 pages. Although we can consider the articulatory possibilities and the provisional closings that aim to build consensus between subjects and projects that face each other in the discursive arena of policies, we note a process of gradual erasure that gains prominence in the BNC-FP when we observe the quantitative relationship, indicated above, considering that the document has 20 pages: the term competence is stated 27 times in the first 12 pages, and 17 times in the 8-page annex, totaling 44 times, against 9 times the use of the word right(s) in the entire document. Together with the exhaustive repetition, always triggering the meaning established in the BNCC, the total link of the two documents can be added to the meanings of general competencies, as can be seen in the box below.

SOURCE: Prepared by the author.

BOX 2 GENERAL COMPETENCIES IN THE BNCC AND BNC-FP 

The recontextualization produced, that makes the teaching practice in the BNC-FP a training policy object, allows one to observe the establishment of meanings that are engaged in two dimensions, which are absent in both documents, when we expand the discursive spectrum to think about the place reserved for knowledge (and, in our particular case, for historical school knowledge) in the chain of equivalences established: that of the purposes (teach for what end?) and that of the objectives (why teach?). Both dimensions are combined and incorporated by the signifier competencies, emphasizing the hybrid character of the speeches circulate in the curricular arena.

Far from the learning and development rights (BONINI; DRUCK; BARRA, 2018) meaning, drafted by the Grupo de Trabalho sobre Direitos à Aprendizagem e ao Desenvolvimento (GT DiAD)3, and in the insertion within curricular policies of definitions that establish a synonymous relationship with the signifier competencies, there is emptying that moves agglutination and substitution, by recontextualization and hybridism, more potent. Apart from this, attempts are made to fix meanings that aim to validate certain voices that undermine others, formulate consensus, and guide changes for certain purposes (LOPES, 2005, p. 60), because the gradual replacement of the signifier learning rights, which was consolidated in the documents approved in 2017 (EI - Educação Infantil [Early School Education], and EF - Ensino Fundamental [Primary and Middle School] and 2018 (EM - Ensino Médio [High School]), can be understood as part of the process initiated during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government (1994-2002), when the expression learning expectations was adopted, which, later, when the Plano Nacional de Educação (PNE) [National Education Plan] was drafted - Law n. 13.005/14 (BRASIL, 2014), was replaced by learning and development rights. In that period, the terms were increasingly linked to evaluation and school flow:

At the “Learning expectations and the PNE” seminar, entities in the education area concluded that the adoption of a notion such as learning expectations reinforces the notions of performativity and competences adopted since the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government, which establish a principle of strictly functional and pragmatic management between the government and civil society, whose regulation is established by setting measurable goals that should lead to accountability mechanisms and the encouragement of comparisons and competitions between schools (MACEDO, 2016, p. 47, our translation).

Through the play of language, the adoption of the notion of competencies as a pedagogical foundation is associated with an inevitable logic because it is global and irreversible, which inserts the document in a linear, continuous, and progressive flow of time. We refer here to the following excerpt from the BNCC (BRASIL, 2018a, p. 13):

The concept of competence, adopted by the BNCC, marks the pedagogical and social discussion of the last decades and can be inferred in the text of the LDB, especially when the general purposes of Elementary Education and High School (Articles 32 and 35) are established. In addition, since the last decades of the 20th century and throughout this early 20th century, the focus on skills development has guided most Brazilian states and municipalities and different countries in the construction of their curricula. This is also the approach adopted in the international assessments of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which coordinates the International Student Assessment Program (Pisa), and the United Nations Educational, Science and Culture Organization (Unesco, acronym in English), which instituted the Latin American Laboratory for the Evaluation of the Quality of Education for Latin America (LLECE, in the acronym in Spanish) (BRASIL, 2018a, p. 13, our translation).

This chain of equivalences gives credibility to a

[…] curricular unification project marked by a logic of curricular decisions centralization in a homogenizing perspective, in contrast with the vast investment made in indicating the base as an answer/solution to the lack of quality in education (OLIVEIRA; FRANGELLA, 2019, p. 25, our translation).

The centrality of the signifier competencies also points to an increasingly intense positioning of the meaning of teaching linked directly to that of practice. The antagonistic conceptions articulation within the signifier practice brings the translating process demands4 that bring together subjects in epistemic communities, defined as “a network of subjects and social groups that participate in the production, circulation, and dissemination of texts that make up curricular policies in contexts of influence and definition of texts, as already located by Ball (1998, 2001)” (DIAS; LOPES, 2009, p. 83, our translation). However, the centrality in which a certain practice meaning has gained in the body of policies in recent years highlights the asymmetry of power between the subjects and social groups of the epistemic communities that acted in its formulation. Although we can treat it as an empty signifier (DIAS; LOPES, 2009), we consider it significant to focus on some of the meanings driven in the BNC-FP, even if in a precarious way.

We are interested in highlighting that practice takes on meaning in both a qualifying element of professional competence - “§ 1 - point I - mastering the knowledge objects and knowing how to teach them” (BRASIL, 2019, our translation, our emphasis); regarding the content to be taught by undergraduate courses - “§ 2º the specific competences of the professional practice dimension are made up of the following actions [...]” (BRASIL, 2019, our translation, our emphasis); and a central characteristic element of teaching practice - “Sole Paragraph. In Group I, the following themes should also be addressed: [...] III - methodologies, teaching practices or didactics that are specific to the contents to be taught, considering student development, and that allow the pedagogical mastery of the content, as well as the management and planning of the teaching and learning process” (BRASIL, 2019, our translation) -, focusing on a didactic dimension. Thus, in the narrative established by this document, practice qualifies, substantiates, and configures teaching.

In this analysis, we want to highlight the chain of equivalences set up by the relations between the practice/content/noun/substance signifiers, as we understand that this is the casing that positions the sense of curriculum to be established in undergraduate courses concerning the place that knowledge (in our case, historical knowledge) should fill.

The document careful analysis, whose structure revolves around the content distribution in three large groups (Group 1 - professional competence; Group II - professional practice; Group III - professional engagement), makes it possible to see that (historical) knowledge was inserted in group II, producing a subordinate meaning that bestows a primary training function as a direct implication on higher education courses. Subordination occurs through the establishment of general competencies that dictate the professional training objectives and through the obligation to use the contents listed in the BNCC (the objects of knowledge) as a driving force for the structuring of the undergraduate curriculum. This last combination implies the direct linking of this curriculum to the specific skills and competencies foreseen for Basic Education.

The practice meaning that is tentatively established at the BNC-FP, far from defending the teacher legitimacy as a knowledge producer, who “understands teaching in the context of its cultural construction and incorporates the dimension of the teacher’s work as a learning element” (DIAS; LOPES, 2009, p. 86, our translation), promotes the proximity of a training concept that tends to be pragmatic, reducing the theoretical training space to the impairment of a practice that is similar to training and that, in essence, is based on neo-techniques (FREITAS, 2018), as highlighted for more than two decades by a series of studies.

Technicism has marked curriculum policies since the second half of the last century and, based on the assumption of scientific neutrality and inspired by the principles of rationality, efficiency, and productivity upholds the reorganization of the educational process to make it objective and operational. Thus, “in technicist pedagogy […] it is the process that defines what teachers and students should do, and also when and how they will do it” (SAVIANI, 1986 apudFREITAS, 2018, p. 2, our translation). To this definition, elements of the most recent context that configure the so-called neo-technical are added,

[...] now presented in the form of the theory of “accountability” and/or “meritocracy”, which proposes the same technical rationality as before in the form of learning “standards” measured in standardized tests, with an emphasis on the school's workforce management processes (process control, bonuses and punishments), anchored on the same conceptions from behaviorist psychology, econometrics, information and systems sciences, elevated to the condition of pillars of contemporary education (FREITAS, 2018, p. 2, our translation).

In this way, the signifier competencies have taken the place of a universal one, and, in this sense, “a specific signifier that takes the place of the universal one in a given discursive context means the consolidation of a hegemony process” (GABRIEL, 2015, p. 38, our translation). Once established as being universal in a set of curricular policies, in a discourse that hides dissonances and discrepancies as a way of establishing provisional consensus, it is relevant to highlight how these meanings fluctuate between BNCC and BNC-FP. We intend to examine the transformation of BNCC contents in teaching objects of degree courses, according to the BNC-FP determines.

The historian attitude from a technicist perspective

At different moments in the past of the History school discipline, we see clashes between those who defended the urgency of discussions around the formative objectives (teach History for what end and why teach History) on the one hand, and those who deviated from the focus on the question of ways of teaching (learning to teach history) on the other. When observing the curricular proposals for the discipline elaborated between the end of the 1980s and the BNCC (from 2018) (BRASIL, 2018a), we perceive the essential place that the how took over, subordinating the discussions around teaching for what end and why teach, incurring its total erasure. We consider the centrality of the how, strengthened in the association between the historian's teaching practice and the signifier historian attitude, to be a movement that indicates a process of neo-technical pedagogy hegemony in the History teaching and which implies consequences for teacher training.

The incorporation of the term historian attitude, in the BNCC narrative for the History component, led us to more closely examine which flows of meanings and which equivalences chains were being positioned in the narrative presented by the document in such a way as to provoke, on the one hand, the statement of a meaning of teaching guided by practice and, on the other hand, by a departure from the meaning arising from the knowledge produced by the scientific knowledge.

We observe that the emptying of the historian's conception of practice by distancing/hiding the references that establish the historical knowledge that supports it, and its consequent proximity to the neo-technical pedagogy that is “substantiated” in the concept of competencies and positioned as the pedagogical foundation of the document, indicate the establishment of flows of meanings that point to the fulfillment of the signifier historian attitude by the underpinnings of another project.

This transference process is implemented by hybridization movements - defined as “socio-cultural processes in which discrete structures or practices, which existed separately, combine to generate new structures, objects and practices” (GARCIA CANCLINI, 2015, p. XIX, our translation) - that, in the specific case of history teaching, occur through the proximity of the cognitive aspects related to the historian’s teaching practice associated with the concept of competencies, subordinating historical knowledge by the prevalence of young people's cognition and cognitive actions of the human brain in general. In our analysis, we identified that the process occurs precisely due to the overvaluation of the dimension of teaching practice by the narrative conveyed in the BNCC. Among the various excerpts in which we identified, we selected three that present some important elements for our analysis.

SOURCE: Prepared by the author.

BOX 3 IDENTIFICATION OF SEGMENTS WITH PROXIMITY AND HYPERVALUATION OF THE “LEARNING TO DO” DIMENSION. 

The narrative structure of the text establishes itself in the sequence that can be observed in the chain of sections 1, 2, and 3: first, a generic definition, without references, about what it is to make history; then, the instrumental one that, from the point of view of teaching History, and from the previous definition, can “facilitate the understanding” of elements, apparently related to the development of historical thought. Finally, relationships are established between what we could formalize as objectives of the History teaching but which, in this narrative, appear to be subordinated to a discursive web that exacerbates a certain way of carrying out “adequate” didactics. In this particular context, related to the articulation between sections 1, 2, and 3, the signifier historian attitude is inserted, whose definition is not systematized or substantiated, but presents itself as a conclusion which the reader must reach through the discursive chain established until that point. The qualification of the signifier is established by a discursive chain, which is noticeable in the excerpts that we selected and presented in box 4.

SOURCE: Table prepared by the GEPEH / UFMS team.

BOX 4 BNCC PREVAILING EXCERPTS, HIGH SCHOOL STAGE. 

In the narrative, the signifiers that could be associated with what the document names as a historian attitude become elastic and widespread, which makes it possible to lose sight of the epistemological aspects that are inherent to it. Through the chain of equivalences, the signifier historian attitude, which, in the original, appears in quotation marks, perhaps trying to keep the signifier open in its meaning5, establishes a relationship with the academic production that today is called historical education, in the teaching of History field research (SILVA; MORAIS, 2017). In this discursive context and triggering elements of this chain, the document's narrative brings historical cognition closer to the so-called specific competencies for the teaching of History in High School, making it a hybrid that conveys, therefore, elements of disparate training and education projects.

For this hybridization process to occur, it was necessary to operate deletions in the set of documents produced to regulate curricular policies. Here we would like to refer specifically to the first version of the BNCC, presented to the public in 2016. At that time, the document presented a consolidated proposal based on the references produced by the GT-DiAD report mentioned above and structured the curriculum considering the rights of learning and development, established, in that context, as a pedagogical principle of BNCC. According to Bonini, Druck e Barra (2018):

When dealing with the right to learn and develop, we seek to consolidate the social dimension of education as we discuss the opportunities for the development of the student, ensuring the common training essential for the exercise of citizenship throughout life on a permanent basis. production of meanings, at the same time giving it the opportunity to constantly deepen the knowledge and acquired knowledge. It is also necessary to shelter, in this social dimension of education, the development of the educator based on an adequate human, scientific and cultural formation and the realization of decent working conditions. In consideration of learning expectations, as described in the National Curriculum Guidelines, in addition to the perspective of a set of obligations imputed only to students for the consolidation of tasks, purposes and school results in a context of permanent blaming them, their families and in its socio-cultural context, MEC (Ministry of Education and Culture), in 2012, takes on work on this document in a perspective of rights to learning and development. These rights, in turn, give rise to a debate about the conditions under which the Brazilian State has guaranteed, or not, conditions for the tasks, purposes and school results to be positively carried out in the students' daily lives in the school institution (BONINI; DRUCK; BARRA, 2018, p.19-20, our translation, our emphasis).

The recontextualization occurs in the gradual replacement of this signifier with that of competencies, whose synonym was the subject of later policies such as those in the Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais para o Ensino Médio (DCNEM) [National Curriculum Guidelines for Secondary Education], as can be seen in the following excerpt.

Art. 6 For the purpose of obtaining greater clarity of exposure, the following terms used in this Resolution are defined:

[...] VI - competences: mobilization of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values, to solve complex demands of everyday life, the full exercise of citizenship and the world of work. For the purposes of this Resolution, based on the caption of art. 35-A and in § 1 of art. 36 of the LDB, the expression “competences and abilities” should be considered as equivalent to the expression “rights and learning objectives” present in the National Education Plan Law (PNE) (BRASIL, 2018b, our translation, our emphasis).

In this context, the transforming signifier operation hybrids into a historian attitude, with its consequent proximity to the signifier competencies, brings up a recontextualization process that moves the history teaching away from both its formative, pedagogical, and educational function by exacerbating pragmatism, bringing it closer and closer to the dimension of practice, which we previously qualified in this article. The word “attitude” contains definitions that refer to action in close relationship with cognition and consciousness, as can be seen from two of the numerous definitions found: “behavior dictated by inner disposition; a way of acting concerning the person, object, situation, etc., manner, conduct; [...] position taken, orientation, way or norm of proceeding” (HOUAISS, 2021). Consequently, this signifier becomes a potential linguistic locus for the possible deletions and fillings required in the narrative of the current curriculum.

It is precisely the fulfillment of the signifier historian attitude in a technicist perspective that makes it possible to build a consensus, reconciling the demands for the innovation of History teaching faced with the permanence of a traditional perspective, the negative Other that establishes the chain of equivalences that underlies the positioning undertaken.

Although, when analyzing the list of contents presented in the BNCC, we can perceive the urgency of precisely this conception of traditional history, it should be noted that this element, far from being a mark of contradiction, is key to perceive in what way the historian attitude meanings and, consequently, of historical school knowledge are being filled by the BNCC in the neo-technical bias that engenders it, aiming at the establishment of a consensus around the project that tries to hegemonize it. Here, we can cite as an example the standardization of didactic materials to be offered by companies to the public educational system from the north to the south of the country, since, in the regional reference curricula, the content listing remained practically the same. In this regard, consult the presentations of curricula from all over the country held in the debate cycle “BNCC of History in the states: the future of the present” (CICLO…, 2020).

The narrative conveyed in the BNCC puts the teaching of History at the service of hegemony processes with guiding principles from projects that champion the emptying of the dimension of academic historical knowledge, which, to the impairment of training and the primacy of learning to do, becomes secondary, converting the identity of the history teacher (intellectual, who dominates the fundamentals of Historical Science and those of Education) in a teacher who teaches History (technician, who practices ways in which he will teach the contents/objects of knowledge without necessarily mastering the foundations of the reference sciences). These would be some of the meanings that would be floating within the BNCC narrative and which are being incorporated as foundations in the training of history teachers at BNC-FP.

Final considerations

The transforming signifier operation hybrids into a historian attitude, with its consequent proximity to the signifier competencies, in attempts to set certain meanings that give teaching a practical and technical character, brings up a process of recontextualization that removes the teaching of History both from its formative as well as pedagogical and educative function when exacerbating pragmatism, as we have pointed out. Thus, be it in the narrative conveyed by BNCC, or in that of BNC-FP, the teaching of history is put at the service of processes of hegemony with discordant meanings to those in projects that defend a society with democratic bases, that value dialogue and that see teaching established in a dialectical and dialogical perspective.

It is important to highlight that the identification of hybrids in the BNCC and BNC-FP is accompanied by ambivalences that produce the necessary negotiations to guarantee their legitimacy, at the same time that they generate escape zones from this dominance (LOPES, 2005, p. 60). It is also clear that,

[...] in the political arenas, the varied meanings for the teacher education curriculum are disputed based on actions whose power is characterized as oblique (Canclini, 1998), in addition to the verticalisms “top down” or “bottom-up,” which is also common in some analyzes of policy production (DIAS; LOPES, 2009, p. 83).

Thus, the analysis presented in this text aims to provoke reflections around characteristics that we observe from a certain point. Therefore, in highlighting them, we are aware of the provisionality and the singularity of the considerations made as part of the effort to narrow down dialogues between the fields of History and Education, seeking to escape the traps of essentialisms and the institution of unique and absolute truth. Taking these premises as a basis and as a conclusion, we would like to address a fundamental issue that comes up with the processes of hegemony that we have analyzed and that, in our view, aim to subordinate the political and theoretical dimension of history teaching. But not only that.

Since the meanings of teaching History are displaced and subordinated to neo-techniques, would we not also be facing the possibility of affirming a certain legitimizing function that historiographic production would be assuming in the discourse conveyed by current curricular policies? This last question arises from the idea that “thinking about a theory of history is an inseparable part of research, and reflection around the teaching of history” (GUIMARÃES, 2009, p. 39, our translation), placing history and its teaching “in the Bildung dimension, that is, as an articulation between knowledge, transmission, and presentation in a certain form” (GUIMARÃES, 2009, p. 48, our translation).

If this premise is true, addressing the training of history teachers, from the critical-reflexive intellectual perspective, will inexorably require overcoming an ingrained view among historians that the teaching of history is restricted to practice and limited to the role of knowledge transmitter produced by recognized intellectuals (knowledge itself on the one hand; knowledge to do something, on the other) (MACEDO, 2016), a view that has subordinated and, in many cases, purged the educational function of the school and the role of reference knowledge in teacher education.

Or even, reflecting on the technical rationality that has prevailed in the formulation of undergraduate courses, which disqualifies teacher training in favor of that of a bachelor's degree, and which conceives learning as accumulating information, may be presenting itself as an urgent necessity, due to control mechanisms foreseen in these policies, such as large-scale assessments, which, ultimately, may be aimed at controlling the very production of knowledge within higher education institutions.

Based on this state of affairs, it would be worth asking: what historical knowledge and what historian are being projected in a curriculum whose technique assumes centrality? As a result, what controls on historical knowledge production are being erected within these curricular policies?

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1Translated by Deirdre Jane Donovan Giraldo. E-mail: deegiraldo@gmail.com

2The work presented in this article is part of the set of studies on the BNCC and the first forays into the analysis of the BNC-FP carried out by the Study and Research Group on Teaching History and Language Practices - Curriculum, History and Culture team (GEPEH/UFMS), which make up the research project “History curriculum and teaching: meanings and past time, race, ethnicity and diversity in curricular proposals”.

3The Interdisciplinary and Popular Participation Working Group on Rights to Learning and Development (GT-DiAD) prepared the reference document for the elaboration of the Base Nacional Comum Curricular [National Common Curriculum Base] from the Rights to Learning and Development.

4“A social demand is characterized by Laclau (2005) as being requests and expectations of subjects and social groups that once not met, can become demands in defense of which various groups, set up as collective desires, join in a political struggle. Once the demands at stake in politics are defined, the groups around these demands are defined. Therefore, there are no political identities established prior to the articulation process” (DIAS; LOPES, 2009, p. 85).

5Here we can relate the discursive strategy of using quotation marks to the insertion of the question in the debate about the use of documents in the classroom to teach history from the perspective of the historian's doing. In this debate, it is emphasized that it is not intended to form mini-historians, but to make it possible to develop reflections on the principles of historiographical production, a strategy considered didactic for critical training. The use of quotation marks may be exacerbating this relative character highlighted in this discussion.

Received: October 04, 2020; Accepted: March 27, 2021

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