Introduction

(...) words produce meaning, create realities and, at times, function as powerful mechanisms of subjectivation. I believe in the power of words, in the strength of words, I believe that we do things with words and, also, that words do things with us. (BONDÍA, 2002, p. 19-20).

The choice of this epigraph is justified by the power it gives to words. Such power can only be recognized if we also recognize that words can only assume the condition of “subjectivation mechanisms” when articulated to objectification processes. In this sense, we are interested in underlining and betting on the unavoidable link between objectification and subjectivation in order to think about the world we inhabit. In the specific case of this text, our interests are focused on the exploration of processes of objectification of subjects and knowledge that participate in the production and establishment of the meaning of teaching, assuming that its process of signification mobilizes movements of subjectivation and objectification, producing effects for thinking. the educational field. We operate with the understanding that the teaching signifier tends to assume the discursive function of the nodal point (^{LACLAU, 2005}, 2011) of any discourse on education.

It must be considered, however, that much has already been said, and continues to be said, about teaching in educational research. What justifies, then, another article in the field to explore a subject that has already been studied so much? We outline an answer to this question from two perspectives. The first concerns the recognition that the perspective set to see (^{SARLO, 2007}) configures what is being seen. In other words, we intend to see teaching with a lens produced within the ontological turn, which allows the construction of a framework of intelligibility through which the processes of definition/identification occur in the midst of struggles for meaning, reaffirming the understanding of language as an instituting of all social order. The second perspective is linked to the current context of resurgence of conservatism and reactionarism which, articulated with the demands of neoliberalism, have produced attacks on public schools and teaching through investments in projects, institutionalized or not, but which already produce effects on those that takes place in schools, such as the National Curricular Common Base (NCCB), the High School Reform, the BNC-Training, the School Without Party, the Hommeschooling (Home Education) and the civic-military schools.

Thus, we chose to structure the text in two parts. In the first one, we present our theoretical-political perspective, seeking to underline the contributions that it can offer to give meaning to teaching based on an understanding of professionalism that incorporates a relationship with the knowledge taught, without falling into voluntarism or victimization. In the second, we present the texts that make up the Dossier Subject and Knowledge: articulations in contexts of teacher training and performance, through the conceptual exploration of the axes - universal/particular, subjectivity/objectivity, theory/practice, teaching/learning, science/pedagogy, school/university - mobilized in the struggles for the meaning of teaching.

The political game and the definition of “teaching”

It is politics that positively enables, gives course and life to society. (^{IPAR, 2016}, p.16).

(...) the theory that it is possible to elaborate about politics will always be marked by contingency, by historicity, by the multiple ways through which everything that is could be (have been) different, and be so at a given moment. (^{BURITY, 2008}, p. 36).

The production and enunciation of this subtitle highlights the link between this text and the assumption - understood as political bets, and not as essentially true sentences - that defining/naming/classifying is a political act in the midst of games circumscribed in certain discursive contexts. These present specific configurations, crossed by power relations, which compete to tension the field of possibilities in which and from which something can, or cannot, be said about something. This understanding is authorized by the post-foundational epistemic posture assumed as a contingent foundation from which we will produce our arguments.

In this sense, the epigraphs chosen as motivating devices for the beginning of this section, as well as its own title, help to explain something that is very expensive to the post-foundational posture: the political dimension. Before, however, exploring more carefully the points that interest this approach, it is worth clarifying that post-foundationalism does not present itself as something fully closed or consensually instituted¹, but that, in addition to the internal tensions to this epistemic posture, there are convergences that will be explained here and that will serve as a basis for the proposition of the statements that we will make throughout this text, evidencing, therefore, that this prefix, “post”, does not indicate exploding structures, but questioning its status, its transcendence, its timeless, inhuman, apolitical character, that is, its ontological status.

Post-foundationalism operates with criticism of a particular meaning of the signifier “foundation” hegemonized in the field of social sciences until recently, destabilizing certainties, bringing insecurity and generating anguish (^{MENDONÇA; DE FREITAS LINHARES; BARROS, 2016}). Being post-foundational does not mean being anti-foundational, but arguing in favor of the ontological weakening of the ultimate and absolute foundation responsible for the meaning of the Social. These authors (2016, p. 180) name post-foundationalism as “the ontological current that defends the existence of partial foundations (ontic), while seeing the impossibility of establishing an ultimate foundation (ontological level)”. In this perspective, therefore, there is an unreachable distance between ontic² and ontological, and it is in this distance, in this abyss, that the political is situated, occupying a discursive function in the construction of readings of and in the social.

Operating with this definition, in this text, it is about understanding that there is no “teaching” determined by an ultimate foundation that constitutes it, since it is in the political game that its meanings are disputed and fixed. Therefore, saying what “teaching” is and what is not does not imply mobilizing the idea of a transcendental foundation. As ^{Burity (2008}) warns, it is more appropriate to talk about understanding what has been defined as “teaching”, shifting the role of empirical reference from the real to the dispute field of the reality that is being defined. It is in this way, therefore, that we understand the texts that set the Dossier in question and that will be presented in the other section.

Valuing the political dimension, as the excerpts brought by ^{Burity (2008}) and ^{Ipar (2016}) do, means, on the one hand, letting the marks made by contingencies in the sedimentation processes (always marked by historicity) be seen, reaffirming the strength of the contingency translated into the presence of the opening of the social in every process of meaning, and, on the other hand, betting on the inevitability of any closure/objectification so that the political struggle between different society projects can take place.

The post-foundational approach, by differentiating the signifiers “policy” and “political” as distinct discursive functions, offers powerful reading keys to work with the aporia of impossibility and inevitability that characterizes every process of signification. It is not by chance that, for ^{Mouffe (2005}), the political is the place of the possibility of subversion, it is the explanation of the precariousness of the closure of meanings, “it is what calls into question a constituted order, demonstrating its contingency” (^{MENDONÇA, 2012}, p. 13). Finally, the political is the conflict that at the same time constitutes and jeopardizes the instituted, it is the ontological dimension that constitutes the social (^{LACLAU, 2005}, p. 94), while politics is the attempt to control the political, to establish an order, it is the hegemonization, the sedimentation, the closure of meaning, it is the ontic dimension.

Conceiving politics in this way does not mean taking it as a counterpoint to the political, playing a villainous role by fixing meanings that stanch, even provisionally, the flow of processes of signification. On the contrary. In agreement with ^{Ipar (2016}), the closure of meaning (politics) is understood here as the condition that enables the struggle for the proposition and establishment of new meanings. It is politics, therefore, that occupies, at the same time, the position against which one wants to fight, and the position which one wants to occupy in the (precarious) outcome of the struggle.

The valorization of the political in the post-foundational approach has to do with the distance from the great Enlightenment metanarratives, their promises and their transcendental essentialisms, especially in relation to reason and the subject (^{HENNING; CHASSOT, 2009}; ^{VEIGA-NETO, 1998}). Thus, by betting on the primacy of the political in the constitution of the foundations, such an approach “allows us to rethink the starting points of our thinking” (^{RETAMOZO, 2011}, p. 83). This same line of argument is found, in Derrida’s deconstructionist theory, in a critique of the metaphysics of presence, which would be the impossibility of an ultimate foundation that determines a being, but which, due to this condition, admits the presence of partial foundations. In other words, it is a matter of operating on contingent grounds and of abandoning essences, immobile centers of reference.

In this way, we have worked with the interpretation that the post-foundational approach legitimizes and authorizes investment both in destabilization and in the contingent production of new meanings for signifiers that participate in the chain of equivalence of the social order chosen/configured for analysis. After all, acting politically means making decisions in the midst of an infinity of possibilities opened up by the reactivation of the articulatory moment (crisis, displacement of the structure), in terms of identification with the processes of meaning in dispute. It is in this process of identification/objectification that political subjectivities are created and formed (HOWARTH, 2000).

We reiterate that, in our studies, we intend to enter the dispute for a sense of “teaching” that disengages from the aforementioned educational projects, which place it in a position of subalternity, invest in a technicist position, reaffirming it as a craft without knowledge, as a “minor place”, of less prestige when compared to other positions that are equally related to knowledge. Entering this dispute, however, takes place on unsecured field. As ^{Mendonça (2014}) warns, the post-foundational approach does not authorize normative efforts that seek to establish future scenarios of emancipation. It is an epistemic posture in which uncertainty, partiality, particularity, infinity and precariousness replace certainty, totalization, universalization, finitude and security, typical of forms of production of hegemonized readings of the world in deterministic postures.

In what sense(s) of teaching should you invest in the current political-epistemological context? Far from intending to offer finished answers to this type of questioning, we are particularly interested in proposing a theoretical approach that allows us to understand teaching simultaneously as a position of subject and political subjectivity. As a “subject position” it is about perceiving the degree curriculum and professional teaching practices as producers of social actors, and as such corresponding to a provisional stability of meanings around what is hegemonically defined as teaching and what is instituted as an object of professional socialization. In the second case, we refer to the “political subjectivity” of the subject-teacher in the midst of the hegemonic fixation and unfixation movements that constitute the process of becoming a teacher.

Aporias of the educational field and its effects on the signifier “teaching”

Usually understood through negative predicates, such as lack of security, firmness or certainty in the actions of acting or speaking, the word hesitation, in its etymological root, refers to a state of impasse or irresolution, a kind of (non)place in between, in-between two, or simply in-between. (^{PEREIRA; TORELLY, 2020}, p. 754 authors’ highlight).

The way the authors mentioned in the epigraph understand the word “hesitation” helps us to reaffirm the power of the in-between, in order to position ourselves against the binary and dichotomous perspectives that, in our understanding, have been predominant in the debates in the educational field. Investing in the in-between is about breaking with unproductive paradoxes in which one of the terms of the privileged interface is seen as a standard/reference and the other as a deviation/error, and betting on ethical and creative solutions to classic impasses in education research, expressed here through the universal/particular, subjectivity/objectivity, theory/practice, teaching/learning, science/pedagogy and school/university axes.

We begin by exploring the universal/particular axis, understood by us as a tension inherent to the processes of signification. Investing politically in closing the meaning of a term to make the dispute possible means seeking to universalize a particular meaning of that term, that is, to occupy the place of the universal in order to produce other hegemonies and antagonisms. Bringing this tension to light implies facing a way of thinking about rationality that finds its apogee in Western modernity. Based on a pattern of objectivity that mobilizes and updates notions of neutrality, absolute truth, reaffirming the distinction between subject and object in the production of scientific knowledge, this vision of rationality produces political effects that sustain utopias based on a blind faith in a particular understanding of reason, investing in the idea of a certain and promising future.

In our reading, it is not a question of giving up utopias, but of recognizing it as “projects for a less unfair, less racist, less unequal, less violent world” (^{PACIEVITCH, 2021}, p. 65), as an ethical stance, and not as self-fulfilling promises. This necessarily implies opening the future to the indeterminate, assuming, a priori, the risks that arise from this posture.

Such understanding causes tensions in the debates in the educational field, since there are many statements, in this discursive context, which purposes are to invest in “counter-hegemonic” perspectives with predetermined contents. The epistemic stance privileged here authorizes another interpretation that does not corroborate a notion of hegemony as something necessarily bad, to be fought, but as a place of power that the most varied interest groups seek to occupy, whether to execute exclusionary projects of society, or to expand the mechanisms of democratization of society. This reading implies recognizing, like ^{Laclau (2011}, p. 50) does, hegemony as a “power struggle”. As such, it is a process with no content of its own.

In the post-foundational reading, hegemonization and universalization are equivalent. Thus, universal is a particular that, in the midst of articulation practices with other particulars, managed, contingently, to become hegemonized. Such hegemonization (occupation of the place of universal), as perennial as it seems to be, is always provisional, “given the uninterrupted character of political struggles for the production of other hegemonies”, after all, “what guarantees contingency, that is, the impossibility of of any definitive closure, are antagonisms, given that any identity is always threatened by something external to it”. (^{MARTINS, 2019}, p. 48).

In this sense, hegemonized, universalized understandings of teaching as a “job without knowledge”, “an exercise of instruction”, and of a teacher as “one who teaches a knowledge that is external to him”, “one who operates with missionary and vocational logic”, dispensing professionalization to act, are always subject to displacement. The theoretical perspective assumed here authorizes us to bet and invest in the production of antagonistic demands with a view to the production of other meanings of teaching, competitive in the dispute for the occupation of the place of the universal.

As for the subjectivity/objectivity axis, it has been the object of problematization from the ontological turn that marks the contemporary epistemological debates in the post-foundational aspect. What is at stake is the possibility of investing in other modes of objectification and subjectivation that do not feed into dichotomous epistemic perspectives that reproduce perceptions of the rational, autonomous and sovereign Cartesian subject on the one hand, and the understanding of the social reality to be known based on metaphysical foundations, on the other. Therefore, it is not a matter of denying the important role of objectification in the process of producing scientific knowledge. Nor does it minimize the subject’s participation in the production of readings of the world. In our studies, we are interested in exploring the onto-epistemological effects of these displacements in the production of meanings that are mobilized in the processes of signification of educational reality. After all, the definition of terms such as “teaching”, “knowledge”, “school”, “university”, “teacher education” that we are interested in defending, as previously argued, presupposes the recognition of both their ontic existence, that is, of its understanding as objectified social, as well as the subjective action of the antagonistic cut in terms of the interests that are at stake. This understanding is theoretically supported within the scope of Laclau’s Theory of Discourse, whose approach to the post-foundational political approach is explicitly assumed, as the following quote shows:

Discourse constitutes the primary territory for the construction of objectivity as such. By discourse, as I have tried to clarify several times, I do not mean something that is essentially relative to the areas of speech and writing, but any sets of elements in which relationships play a constitutive role. This means that the elements do not pre-exist the relational complex, but are constituted through it. Thus, relationship and objectivity are synonymous. (^{LACLAU, 2005}, p. 116, our highlight, our translation)

It is, therefore, a matter of shifting the discussion about subjectivity/objectivity to the field of ontology, emphasizing the mechanisms of the instituting differentiation of the world. It is important to emphasize that these two axes/tensions - universal/particular and objectivity/subjectivity - concern the more general epistemic posture that works as a backdrop against which other tensions can be faced. The exploration of the other tensions explained will depend on the epistemic posture assumed. In this text, we hope that this choice has already been clearly explained.

Recovering the discussion on the theory/practice tension is to enter one of the oldest and most conflicting territory in the educational field. It is not by chance that one of the most recurrently stated objectives, both in public policies aimed at teacher training and in academic essays that propose balances and perspectives on this theme, focuses on this tension with the aim of strengthening binary perspectives, or of overcome it. It crosses different dimensions and cuts of the political-theoretical debate on teacher training and/or professional performance, metamorphosing into other topics of discussion, such as: “quality of training”, “teaching knowledge”, “locus of training”, “learning”. These themes, although organically interconnected, will be explored below, separately, in order to articulate with the other axes/tensions previously mentioned according to the objective of this text.

With regard to the debate on quality, the tension between theory and practice appears to guide the very “training model” to be adopted by public policies and teaching practices. There are many criticisms of initial teacher training that highlight its eminently theoretical character to the detriment of a lack of practical dimension that would explain the poor quality of basic education in Brazil, especially in the early years of schooling (^{GATTI, 2013}, 2020), in particular, with the intensification of the universitarization process.

The BNC-Training even emerges as a response to this type of demand, consisting of a proposal for teacher training marked by a significant increase in the workload of practical activities, “by the affirmation of an idea of applying a know-how” (^{SANTOS; ANDRADE, 2021}, p.148, authors’ emphasis). More than that. As the authors state, it is a proposal for training the undergraduate degrees that empties the epistemological and political character of teacher training, “guided by the movement of workers in education as a space for reflection on doing in a critical perspective” (id).

We defend that neither the model based on the theoretical logic, nor the one based on the practical logic, can handle the complexity of the teaching professionalization process. Thus, what is at stake is the possibility of building training paths in which these two logics can present itself intertwined throughout the entire professional development process, which, incidentally, does not end with the conclusion of the degree. The epistemic places from which we are enunciating offer us clues to understand the tension between theory and practice as a false dilemma, after all, all practice is theoretically informed, even if not assumed or perceived, and all theory does not cease to be a practice of production of meaning about the world that does not disregard the experiences and material conditions that allowed it to emerge as such. This position refers to the problematization of other dimensions of teacher education, generally functioning in a dichotomous and hierarchical manner. Among them, we highlight the issue of professional knowledge, training locus and teaching practices that are directly linked to the teaching-learning process.

The disputes over the quality of teacher training are marked by quarrels around the specificity of the knowledge produced and socialized by basic education teachers. For advocates of the predominance of theoretical training, this specificity tends not to be recognized, reaffirming the importance of ‘mastery’, on the part of basic education teachers, of disciplinary knowledge, of science produced in different areas of knowledge. From this perspective, the teaching action tends to be reduced to the transmission of disciplinary contents in accordance to the science of reference. This perception makes it difficult to understand the uniqueness of undergraduate courses in relation to bachelors in university culture. On the contrary, those who are critical of theoreticalism in the approach to teacher training tend to deny the place of theoretical knowledge, emphasizing the power of practice in the process of teacher training.

This tension unfolds in different others, producing effects on the understanding of the degree curriculum, university culture and school culture. These developments are manifested in an articulated way through the production of chains of equivalences that antagonize each other in the discourses that cross political and academic debates on the issue of teacher education. One of these chains results from articulatory practices that place as equivalent signifiers such as “disciplinary knowledge”, “theory”, “science”, “university”, expelling signifiers associated with the practical dimension. The other chain refers to the articulations between signifiers such as “pedagogical knowledge”, “teaching practice”, “school culture”, producing the previously mentioned chain as its constitutive exterior.

It is important to note that these chains are updated on different scales, as it reveals the internal tensions within the university culture itself and those that mark the articulation between university culture and school culture. Indeed, it is updated within the scope of university culture, feeding disputes between the academic units responsible for the different degrees and the Faculties of Education, perceived as a place for the exercise of practice as a complementary function and, therefore, associated with a place of epistemological emptiness. In a similar way, this dichotomous and hierarchical vision informs and guides curriculum norms and policies that seek to make university and school cultures dialogue. In these policies, the movement tends to be the “displaced” from the university to the schools, in order to “illuminate” it. As we have been defending throughout this presentation text, our purpose with the organization of this dossier was to bring together studies and research that seek other theoretical/methodological solutions that distance itself from these binarisms. To seek other ways of thinking about teaching curriculum, as well as the articulation between university and school, based on the idea of producing a “third space” (^{ZEICHNER, 2010}) or “common home” (^{NÓVOA, 2017}), understood as a new institutional arrangement is one of these paths that has been explored (^{GABRIEL, 2019}; GABRIEL; LEHER, 2019).

In this same line of argument, the debate on the teaching-learning process is inscribed, and intrinsically associated with the issue of teacher training. In this same line of argument, the debate on the teaching-learning process is inscribed, which is intrinsically associated with the issue of teacher training. The theory/practice tension unfolds in another relationship that, not infrequently, is placed in the debate in an antagonistic way: teaching and learning. Traditionally, teaching was perceived as a teacher’s responsibility and learning as a student’s responsibility. From this perspective, it is up to the teacher to teach and the student to learn, without being able to perceive the relationships and influences of teaching in the possibilities of learning, and from this, in the ways of teaching. There is a relationship of absolute distance between subject and knowledge marked by relations of transmission and consumption. In other words, the subjects, teachers and students, are already formed, and the knowledge objectified, preventing objectification and subjectivation processes from the relationship between them and them with knowledge.

If this understanding has been losing strength, we have seen, however, the emergence of readings on the didactic triangle that need to be equally problematized. These analyzes seek to establish direct and unequivocal cause-and-effect relationships between teaching and learning, so that learning is always perceived as an immediate result of teaching. This logic, which inspires teacher accountability policies structured from large-scale evaluation policies and removes from students any possibility of agency in relation to their learning, tends to reinforce the arguments that support demands for “more practice” in teacher training, since learning failures are perceived as teaching errors. From this perspective, knowledge also appears to be objectified and students and teachers tend to be objectified/subjectified as good or bad based on the results obtained.

The two forms presented are based on mechanistic/technicist perspectives of teaching and on possessive metaphors of learning that tend to prevent subjectivation processes from being related to learning processes and that the objectification of knowledge only makes sense when subjectivated. Regarding teaching, its re-update “the idea that teaching is, and to some extent should be, a matter of control, so that the best and most effective teachers are those capable of guiding the entire educational process towards the production of pre-specified learning processes results” (^{BIESTA, 2021}, p. 24, author’s highlight). We bet, however, on a dialogue with the same author, that teaching can come to be understood as intrusion, as bringing something new, producing an interruption of some kind or, as ^{Albuquerque Junior (2016}) argues, leaving marks.

For the discussion on learning, we have explored (^{GABRIEL, 2023} (in press); ^{MARTINS; BARBOSA; GABRIEL, 2020}; MARTINS, 2020, 2023 (in press)) the power of categories such as “heritage” (^{DERRIDA, ROUDINESCO, 2004}), “narrative refiguration” (RICOEUR, 1997), “translation” (RICOEUR, 2011; ^{BHABHA, 1998}; DERRIDA, 2006, 2017) and “response” (^{BIESTA, 2017}), which have helped us to disrupt with the idea that learning is reduced to the acquisition and accumulation of knowledge.

The Dossier Subject and knowledge: articulations between subject and knowledge in contexts of teacher training and performance thus brings together a set of texts that, through epistemic postures, theoretical interlocutions, different approaches and cuts, operate with one or more of the axes and/or its previously explained developments, problematizing and opening clues to other readings that focus on the multiple discursive articulations in dispute in the process of meaning of the subject positioned and affirmed as a teacher, of the knowledge with which they relate, as well as the training contexts involved in this process.

Talita Vidal Pereira and Matheus Saldanha do Amaral Reis, in the text Democratic limits of a project of formation common to all, dialogue with the contributions of Derridian deconstructivism questioning the democratic claims of discourses that project the formation of common identities filled by knowledge meant as universal. The text Currículo, Gobierno y Sociedad: la educación media y la formación de sujetos sociales en Colombia (1956 - 2015), by Luís F. Vásquez Zora, makes an intriguing argument about the curriculum of high school in Colombia based on the critical analysis of curricular documents that work as stabilization devices for a sophisticated technology of knowledge.

Daniel Pinha Silva and Marcia de Almeida Gonçalves question the premise that there is a universal human subject, therefore exempt from any marker of race, class, gender and sexual orientation, in the text But, after all, who is this subject? Ethical-political dilemmas, conceptions of democracy and the subjects of learning in the NCCB of High School. Clívio Pimentel Júnior, author of the text Subject/knowledge relationship in science education curriculum policies in recent times: post-structural contributions to the debate, offers consistent arguments to support the production of narratives open to difference in the midst of the processes of meaning of what come to be considered a “scientifically educated” subject.

In defending the relationship between knowledge and experience, André Vitor Fernandes dos Santos, Juliana Marsico and Cecília Santos de Oliveira, in a text entitled Certification of Youth and Adults, experience and knowledge in Science: notes for the fields of Curriculum and Assessment, problematize the emphasis given to disciplinary knowledge in the document National Examination for the Certification of Youth and Adult Skills (NECYAS) to the detriment of the contextual dimension of the experience, updating the critique of the unfolding of the universal/particular tension. In On the ethical responsibility of responding to what the school is for, Maria Santos and Elizabeth Macedo work on the aporia of impossibility and inevitability that crosses the processes of meaning. From conversations with teachers and administrative agents of the municipal education network in the city of Niterói, provoked by the question “what is the school for?”, they argue that the school only exists because it integrates the whole lived experience with the world and with us and, therefore, cannot be defined a priori or by a use. Sirley Lizott Tedeschi and Ruth Pavan, in the text Teacher insurgencies in the curriculum and the production of thinking about difference, supported by empirical studies, show that the reflections/actions produced by teachers in the pedagogical practice contribute to the production of a knowledge in the school curriculum beyond the cloister of representation, thus giving rise to a thought of difference in the curriculum.

In Bordering senses and sensations: an education in displacements, Marcus Pereira Novaes and Antonio Carlos Rodrigues de Amorim explore two movies as intercessors for the analytical and creative work that inspires displacements in the relations between subjects and knowledge in education, aiming to point out cracks in a modern constitution confined in a structure of formation of a subject linked to knowledge authorized to say it as truth. The thought of difference is thus mobilized to implode with some hegemonized views in the educational field.

In Articulations between established and outsiders in the context of a teaching learning community, Fernanda Lahtermaher and Giseli Barreto da Cruz aim to understand who the subjects are in the relationship with professional teaching knowledge in a situation of induction that forms practices. In this sense, they argue that the teaching learning community reveals itself as a strategy for the formation of subjects, in which teaching learning causes groups of teachers to move towards insurgent proposals for professional action.

Roberto Rafael Dias da Silva, author of the text Schooling, adolescence and the ubiquity of entertainment: curricular practices for high school in Brazil, based on the theoretical contributions of contemporary social theories that focus on the subject category, problematizes emerging pedagogies, specifically in High School, underlining two guiding rationalities that govern them: sometimes one linked to the management of learning in the direction of performance in standardized tests, sometimes another tuned with creative, interactive and fun strategies, focusing on the ubiquity of entertainment. The text The knowledge and subjects of Environmental Education: historicizing formative experiences in the Itatiaia National Park (1937-2020), by Kemily Toledo-Quiroga and Marcia Serra Ferreira, operates with a post-structuralist approach to the history of the curriculum, bringing to reflection an empirical study in which it is possible to perceive the displacements of the defining boundary of what is being named knowledge, school subject and training contexts. Janete Magalhães Carvalho, Sandra Kretli da Silva and Tânia Mara Zanotti Guerra Frizzera Delboni, in dialogue with post-humanism, understood as a way of thinking about what is possible in teaching from the perspective of a non-anthropocene world, offer us an instigating analysis in the text Teaching through crystalline narrations transversalizing as subjects of knowledge: man, nature and technology, questioning the boundaries between man, nature and technology in the processes of knowledge production. In Reflective Learning Diaries as Decolonial Pedagogical Practices, Juliana Crespo Lopes and Jana Stará explore the potential of the reflective learning diary as an assessment tool for university professors to rethink practices and attitudes that may to endorse structures of power, to discover more about their students and to offer formative opportunities and to mobilize scientific literature beyond the epistemic condition of coloniality imposed by modern Western reason.

We understand that this set of texts presents a rich palette of possibilities for thinking about teacher training in our present. Far from intending, with the elaboration of this dossier, to offer the most complete or exact view of this theme, our option was to bet on openness, on incompleteness, in short, on the force of contingency that guides our theoretical and political choices. Now, we can only wait for these texts to continue to echo when they encounter the world of readers, producing other narrative refigurations about teacher education.