The certification of knowledge built throughout life in Youth and Adult Education

The period of redemocratization in Brazil was marked by a series of events that reverberated in the following decades, especially in the 1990s. At the time, we were emerging from over twenty years of suppression of political freedoms, a consequence of a dictatorial regime, with an impact on the most diverse fields of social life, including education. One of the major milestones in the struggle for social rights was the enactment of the Federal Constitution of 1998, an event that stands out as one of the main achievements of the period of democratic opening. The text of the constitution defined, among other things, education as a universal right of all citizens, with the State being responsible for providing it. The provisions regarding education also stated that it fell to the Union to define the guidelines and bases of national education, established in the Law of Directives and Bases of National Education (LDB), Law 9,394/1996. As for the education of young people and adults, although supplementary courses and examinations had been mentioned since the LDB of 1971, it was in the LDB of 1996 that the term Youth and Adult Education (YAE) first appeared.

Although this does not mean the full realization of the right to education for young people and adults, who, for different reasons, could not carry out their studies in basic education at the regular age or who had to withdraw from it, the emergence of YAE in the text of the 1996 LDB represents the State’s recognition that a significant part of the population remained marginalized with regard to the right to education. With this emergence of YAE, its very conception as a specific modality of education constituted the recognition that it is necessary to develop an education that respects the specific characteristics of these subjects, which is reflected not only in a differentiated selection of knowledge, but also in the choice of methodological strategies that are appropriate for this audience. Thus, by ensuring “appropriate educational opportunities, considering the students’ characteristics, their interests, and living and working conditions, through courses and examinations” (BRASIL, 1996, Article 37, § 1), the LDB recognized that these subjects follow different life paths than subjects in regular education. Therefore, this is a sign that not only pedagogical plans that take these specific characteristics into consideration are necessary, but also the selection and organization of assessment mechanisms that can detect the knowledge built throughout their lives.

With regard to external assessments for this type of education, represented by what, until then, we knew as supplementary exams, it seems productive to focus on how knowledge has been represented. From this perspective, rather than envisioning a transposition of knowledge from curricular programs to assessments, it is understood that the knowledge included in the YAE curriculum should itself be conceived in light of the relationship it forms with the life stories of the subjects of this modality. After all, “the knowledge and skills acquired by students through informal means” should be gauged and recognized through examinations (BRASIL, 1996, Art. 38, § 2º). This means that, although the knowledge to be assessed (^{SANTOS, 2017}) forms strong relationships with disciplinary knowledge (^{GABRIEL & FERREIRA, 2012}), it constitutes something singular, an artifact sui generis, which should emerge from the relationship that is formed with the specific characteristics of this public, attentive to what was developed in terms of knowledge throughout their lives. Likewise, this knowledge is also considered to be submitted to the logic of the assessment instruments, meeting the diverse specific features that range from the format of the questions to the method of measuring performance, aspects that contribute to regulating what counts as knowledge.

In Brazil, until the early 2000s, supplementary exams played a central role in youth and adult certification processes. These exams were offered mainly by the state education secretariats and sought to assess the knowledge developed throughout their life stories that had equivalence with the knowledge that has historically produced the curricula of the elementary and secondary levels of basic education. Created by the federal government in 2002, the National Examination for the Certification of Youth and Adult Skills (Encceja) (BRASIL, 2002) became an “assessment instrument for evaluating the competences and skills of young people and adults at the elementary and high school levels” (BRASIL. MEC, 2002). One of its goals is the ideal of “structuring an assessment intended for young people and adults to help education secretariats to gauge the recognition of the participants’ knowledge and skills”, making it an alternative to the supplementary examinations developed and applied by the State Education Secretariat. It should be pointed out that authors such as Catelli Jr., Gisi and Serrão (2013) help us to think that the process of implementing this educational policy occurred in a scenario of disputes, where multiple understandings concerning the paths of youth and adult education remained in vogue in the country, as well as the meanings, functions and reach of a school certification exam in this specific modality. According to the authors, it is important to understand that the Encceja is produced in a movement in which discourses that involve the quality of the educational process circulate. Therefore, the “construction of the proposal and justifications for this policy were supported by its function as part of the effort to conduct assessments to improve basic education” (^{CATELLI JR., GISI & SERRÃO, 2013}, p.740).

Unequivocally, such a policy can be identified as part of a movement of constituting a national “system” for assessment, since statements were made that helped to constitute the Encceja as a discursive practice in other policies produced during the same period (^{SANTOS, 2017}). After all, it was also in the 1990s, in the wake of the publication of the LDB (BRASIL, 1996), that a process of curricular reform began, culminating in the publication of a large set of documents intended to guide the curricula of basic education institutions. The most expressive document is the National Curriculum Parameters (PCN) (BRASIL, 1997), which has become a benchmark for the production of curricula by states and municipalities. What seems important to stress is the emergence and circulation of statements, such as competences and skills, the notions of contextualization and problematization, as well as the focus on interdisciplinary perspectives when addressing school knowledge. Such statements, not coincidentally, have also emerged within the scope of the discursive practices that underlie the assessment policies enacted at the same time, such as the Basic Education Assessment System (Saeb), created in 1995, and the National High School Exam (Enem), created in 1998. This is not to say that the field of Curriculum or Assessment is the locus of origin of these statements in question. However, it is necessary to think about the emergence of these different discursive practices as a reflection of their belonging to a system of reasoning that at the time was helping to guide domestically and internationally formulated policies.

This system of reasoning constitutes a specific way of viewing the relationship between Curriculum and Assessment and, as a result, how we conceive the notion of knowledge that underlies these two fields. To think about this particular way of conceiving knowledge, we approached the notion of alchemy of school subjects (^{POPKEWITZ, 2001}), recognizing in it a powerful metaphor to understand how school knowledge, in our case, knowledge specifically related to the school subject of science, is produced and represented in the instruments that make up assessments such as the Encceja. To Thomas ^{Popkewitz (2001}), the alchemy of school subjects is a process by which reference knowledge, the disciplinary fields of certain areas of knowledge, is transformed into typically school subjects. From this perspective, alchemy constitutes a mixture of regulatory and instructional practices involving three levels of procedures: the first level is related to the contents and the fragmentation process that values ​​certain information; the second is the emphasis on certain textual resources; and, finally, the third level involves linking knowledge with subjectivities through tests, examinations and the whole process related to preparing for them (POPKEWITZ, 2001).

In this process, contingencies and complexities of everyday life are reconsidered as logical rather than temporal structures and as bases from which learning occurs, in a movement in which this knowledge gains a status of stability. By transforming scientific knowledge into conceptual categories that adapt pedagogical knowledge to school issues, power effects are produced that “mark[s] the boundaries of approved knowledge and, at the same time, exclude[s] any knowledge that has not obtained official sanction” (^{POPKEWITZ, 2001}, p. 114). In a recent production, ^{Marsico and Ferreira (2020}) highlighted how the life experience of young and adult students, especially those from the world of work, cross curricular production for the modality. This occurs in a movement that focuses on building a citizen and autonomous action of the subjects in society, producing tools for the transformation of the social condition itself. Thus, mobilizing the notion of alchemy of school subjects to investigate the knowledge that is assessed “is to highlight how, through external assessments, we project not only a performance standard to be demonstrated by those who take part in these policies is projected, but also a standard of what the subjects of youth and adult education must or should be and what should be taught/learned in formal schooling processes” (^{SANTOS, 2021}, p. 3572-3573).

Here, we investigate knowledge in a context of cultural and linguistic turn, assuming that reality is not something given, which can be represented by language, but something that is situated in “a privileged position in the construction and circulation of meaning” that we give to things in the world (^{HALL, 1997}, p. 28, emphasis in the original). Far from meaning giving up the materiality of things in the world, taking such a stance is to recognize that it is in the relationship between language and materiality that we build what we know as (and call) reality (HALL, 1997). In this context, we are interested in thinking about the centrality of language in accessing knowledge as an experience, or even how the life experience of young and adult subjects can be perceived as knowledge - knowledge that needs to be assessed.

By mobilizing the notion of experience, in dialogue with Jorge ^{Larrosa (2011}), we assume the subjects are territory, surfaces of sensitivity, in which something happens and transforms them, leaving marks, producing knowledge. It is from this knowledge produced by experience that we relate to (and produce in the relationship with language) what we call reality. After all, experience, by its nature of irruption, novelty and unpredictability, places us in another place, which requires new perspectives and does not allow us to continue in the same way as before, transforming how we think and relate to the world (^{BÁRCENA, 2002}). This process of knowledge production is thus understood as a creation, an experience that produces a unique and singular response to the event of its own life trajectory.

In relation to disciplinary knowledge (^{GABRIEL & FERREIRA, 2012}), we perceived an ambiguity that simultaneously characterizes such knowledge as powerful for adult schooling and, at the same time, represents the absence of schooling at an age considered appropriate in legal documents on basic education. After all, in YAE, the experiences that these adult students carry with them concerns the relationships produced within the adult world and which are traditionally projected as a future place in the training of regular education students (^{MARSICO, 2018}). The exercise here is to reflect on how the knowledge to be assessed in the certification of youth and adults is conceived as such.

This analytical undertaking is performed both through our actions as teachers involved in YAE and our interests in analyzing policies as sources for the writing of history that enables us to understand the formation of curricular artifacts. It is also based on our professional and academic experience in the area of teaching and teacher training in the biological sciences that we chose to focus on knowledge of science in this text, in addition to recognizing that scientific fields have often been the target of Curriculum and Assessment policies. This study was carried out from a perspective that the Study Group on the History of the Curriculum (NEC/UFRJ) views as a discursive approach to the History of the Curriculum (^{FERREIRA & SANTOS, 2017}), a perspective that is identified with the History of the Present. This perspective values the analysis of social epistemological changes that produce the principles that govern what the subjects of education are (or should be), while also identifying the subjects who lie outside of what was conceived of as the rule or norm (^{POPKEWITZ, 2008}).

Thus, the use of sources such as documents supporting the Encceja produced in different historical moments or the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC) (BRASIL, 2018) is not intended to produce a factual or archival history, but rather to produce a record that explores “the distinctions, differentiations and divisions through which the objects of schooling are produced, ordered and classified” (^{POPKEWITZ, 2008}, p. 7). We will address these aspects in the following section from a perspective that understands the documentary sources as surfaces that allow us to capture the irruption of specific statements on the knowledge to be evaluated (^{SANTOS, 2017}) in Youth and Adult Education. However, it also allows us to pursue them in the discursive articulation they establish with other statements, even though they do not always originate in the context of assessment or YAE, coming to constitute what, in the final analysis, counts as knowledge.

Knowledge of Sciences in the Encceja and the knowledge of young people and adults. On what do we agree?

As highlighted earlier, even though the Encceja was created in the early 2000s, it represents a broader movement associated with the idea of ​​reform that has marked several fields, especially education. It should also be noted that this reform movement is based on a rationality of managerial administration, which shifts from a perspective that favors the development, control, evaluation and improvement of results, to one in which results assume a certain centrality. From this perspective, investments are made in assessment, leaving in the background direct investments in educational services, with special emphasis on those aimed at the YAE audience, which are historically insufficient (^{CATELLI JR.; GISI & SERRAO, 2013}). It is in this scenario that notions such as competences and skills began to circulate, in a movement that re-updates the centrality that educational objectives have historically constituted in pedagogical thinking since at least the 1960s and 1970s. This contemporary association between perspectives that sometimes approach a Tylerian rationality, and sometimes emphasize the centrality of planning, as proposed by Benjamin Bloom and other authors who operate in a logic that conceives behaviors as hierarchically organized, has paved the way for how we view the relationship between curriculum and assessment.

This whole set of discourses creates the conditions that enable the circulation of a series of statements related to assessment and curriculum that regulate what counts as knowledge for assessment. However, that is not all. Such statements that function as discursive rules ultimately also end up regulating what teachers should teach, that is, what should be learned by students throughout their trajectories in the field of basic education. In this respect, curriculum and assessment have seen their limits erased by educational policies as a relationship is produced between them in which one ends up being embodied in the other, in an endless movement of meaning between this pair of elements, with effects on teaching actions and the consequent need to assess them. In this respect, we feel it is important to highlight how the matrices of skills and competences of these assessment actions operate, projecting certain ways of being and behaving. These projections are configured as performances to be demonstrated by students and, from this perspective, “can be understood as expectations of behavior and achievements, projections of subjectivities to be represented, statements about the types of subjects that are expected by and in this society” (^{SANTOS, 2021}, p. 3574).

Although the Encceja was not designed specifically for young people and adults in schooling, we understand that, in seeking to certify knowledge built from non-school experiences in a perspective that somehow uses school knowledge as a reference, a projection of subjectivity is made for those who seek this assessment. This is what we seek to show in the following example. Ordinance Number 2270, which instituted the Encceja (BRASIL, 2002, p. 2), for example, states that the exam:

will evaluate competences and skills developed by young people and adults in the school process or in the training processes that develop in family life, in human coexistence, at work, in social movements and civil society organizations and in cultural manifestations, based on the Matrix of Competences and Skills constructed especially for this Exam.

What we emphasize here, therefore, is that, in the exam, not only the projection of the learning that should have been achieved throughout life trajectories is assessed. It is also expected that it will be demonstrated, considering what is configured in a matrix of competences and skills to help shape the assessments to be completed by those taking this exam.

With specific regard to knowledge of science (the set of knowledge that should be developed by students of regular age and enrolled in elementary school and demonstrated by young and adult participants through test questions prepared based on the Matrix of Competences and Skills²), we highlight how it is configured in this document, mixed with the statements of the aforementioned reforms that took place in the 1990s. More than mere disciplinary knowledge, it is associated with some specific notions that particularly focus on strengthening the knowledge deemed important in the teaching of science in schools. It is also associated with processes intrinsic to schooling and aspects related to the life of young people and adults, the subject of this assessment.

First, we highlight the permanence of meanings aimed at the development of competences and skills that are related to the “ways of functioning” of the school. In the school environment, we are embedded in a system of reasoning that organizes and regulates learning, teaching us to “learn to know” and subjectivizing us as students and teachers. At school we are invited to:

Likewise, we perceived that in discursive terms aspects are valued that involve the processes of selection, organization and transformation of knowledge of the natural sciences. It is common, in this disciplinary field, to hegemonize these assumptions in the writing of competences such as:

C1 - Understanding science as a human and historical activity associated with aspects of a social, economic, political and cultural nature.

[...]

C6 - Applying knowledge of science and technology and scientific research procedures in different contexts.

Thus, we understand that knowledge of the natural sciences, understood as arising from a specific methodology that confers legitimacy on scientific production, is also recognized as “necessary” for young people and adults who wish for elementary education certification. The use of verbs such as examine, relate, diagnose, investigate, represent, compare, and establish, which are common in scientific practices and school activities in science, certainly testifies to the appreciation of the scientific and educational purposes of this field of ​​knowledge. What we reflect on here is not the validity or importance of such knowledge, but the fact that the language used to access it is sometimes removed from the languages ​​used by the young people and adults who take the Encceja. Since they are far from school culture and, therefore, from the school subject of science, these are codes that do not permeate their daily lives and may be difficult to articulate during the assessment.

Analyzing the skills listed in the Matrix of Competences and Skills, we realized how some themes dear to science teaching are articulated with these subjects, projected by policy. For example, dialogues focusing on the health of young people and adults have come more to the forefront. Therefore, health and individual and collective care seem to be concerns regarding YAE. Statements regarding developing personal habits, associating health with human development, and the preventing infectious diseases are highlighted as urgent demands. These, in turn, “select” subjects who are attentive to these issues and/or have a theoretical framework or everyday experiences and cultural practices that make it possible to identify and understand them. As an example, we highlight the following skills:

S5 - Associating the solution to problems of communication, transport, health (such as epidemics) or others with corresponding scientific and technological development;

S11 - Identifying variations in indicators of health and human development from data presented in graphs, tables or texts;

S16 - Associating problems of health regarding symptoms, simple diagnostic tests or possible consequences of self-medication;

S17 - Relating health to eating habits, physical activity and the use of medicines and other drugs, considering different moments in the human life cycle;

S18 - Analyzing birth control methods, recognizing the importance of some of them in the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases.

Another possible analysis is to recognize an idea to be used in certain situations, strengthening a sense of applying knowledge and know-how, that will result in a useful feature of this knowledge of the natural sciences, as observed below:

S3 - Identifying, in various representations, sources and transformations of energy that occur in natural and technological processes;

S4 - Identifying processes and substances used in the production and conservation of food and other commonly used products, evaluating the benefits and risks involved;

S6 - Recognizing arguments for and against the use of certain technologies to satisfy human needs related to issues such as health, housing, transport and agriculture.

In the textual surfaces highlighted herein, the use of knowledge specific to the school subject of science, such as energy, use of substances and procedures for food production and the impact of technologies on daily life, appears to be clear. We consider it interesting to highlight the production of this relationship between this knowledge and the verbs related to the cognitive operations to be demonstrated, such as “identify” and “recognize”. In this construction, the association between knowledge and something to “do” in a given context usually materializes in the questions that make up the tests that candidates take. We also highlight how the knowledge that is assessed seems to preserve its link with a perspective of school knowledge or, in the terms proposed by ^{Gabriel and Ferreira (2012}), disciplinary knowledge, as shown in the texts regarding the skills highlighted, below:

S7 - Relating different living beings to the environment they inhabit, considering adaptive characteristics;

S9 - Relating energy transfer and matter cycle to different processes (feeding, photosynthesis, breathing and decomposition);

S26 - Relating different cyclic phenomena, such as day and night, seasons, climates, lunar phases, tides and eclipses to the movements of the Earth and moon.

Although we understand that scientific knowledge circulates beyond where it is produced, in other words, beyond the contexts of knowledge of reference, we understand that knowl3edge such as that relative to “adaptive characteristics”, “energy transfer” or “cyclical phenomena”, in addition to being very academic, constitute ways of speaking that are characteristic of a universe related to schooling. Therefore, they often lie far from the contexts of most young people and adults who take the exam in question. It is in this discursive context, in which knowledge of natural sciences is of a certain useful nature, that understanding that this knowledge is related to the domestic life of young people and adults, sometimes accessing the dimension of the experience of these subjects, is also highlighted. Furthermore, it is understood that designing skills that could help to improve it would establish an association with everyday consumer relationships. In this respect, the following skills may be highlighted:

S12 - Associating the quality of life in different age groups and different regions with social and environmental factors that contribute to it;

S20 - Interpreting information on labels, packaging, medicine information leaflets, prescriptions, household appliance manuals and simple equipment;

S21 - Assessing products for everyday use (cleaning, hygiene, food, medicines and others) for the same purpose, based on their properties;

S24 - Diagnosing everyday situations when energy or materials are wasted, proposing ways of minimizing these problems;

S28 - Relating different natural resources (living beings, materials or energy) to consumer goods used in everyday life.

^{Marsico (2018}, p. 85) points to work as an important category in the production of the curriculum in Youth and Adult Education, “both in statements that characterize a student as a worker, unlike students in regular school, and in statements that view this category as an axis of curricular organization”. We found that the documents pertaining to the Encceja curriculum do not stray from this discursive regularity and even point out knowledge of science as a factor that promotes improvements or articulations with work and the life of a worker, such as:

S13 - Relating the incidence of occupational, degenerative and infectious diseases to conditions that make their occurrence more likely;

S14 - Selecting alternative working conditions and/or safety standards in different contexts, valuing scientific knowledge and the physical and mental well-being of ourselves and those around us.

It is important to emphasize that the discourses that permeate knowledge of the natural sciences in the Encceja also lead us to understand the role of young people and adults as belonging to the collective. The sense of collective is associated with the notions of solidarity, conservation, sustainable development and attention to everyday situations, as highlighted in the following skills:

S19 - Selecting proposals for the physical and mental health of individuals or the community, at different ages and under different cultural or socio-environmental conditions;

S29 - Understanding the meaning and importance of water and its cycle in relation to socio-environmental conditions;

S30 - Analyzing proposals for the use of materials and energy resources with a view to sustainable development, considering regional characteristics and availability (of subsoil, vegetation, rivers, winds, oceans, etc.).

The statements analyzed here allow us to verify that the Encceja has gradually produced meanings, if not about what YAE is, about the type of subject that the young people and adults who seeks certification through this exam should be. From an onto-epistemological perspective (^{SANTOS, 2017}), we assume that the notions of skills and competences, as well as other principles whose irruption point was in the curriculum reform of the 1990s, begin to regulate what is conceived as knowledge and, therefore, to say, in some way, who we are or who we should be. In this movement, specific knowledge in the field of natural sciences produces meanings that provide a better understanding of these subjects and what they ought to achieve.

Paving the way to questioning curricula and assessment policies

The analysis of the data presented here allows us to highlight the way in which evaluation policies have signified what counts as knowledge for assessment and, consequently, how knowledge should be taught and learned in basic education institutions. This regulation expands beyond the borders of these institutions as an almost inextricable association is produced between assessment policies and curriculum policies. This impacts certification policies and access to professional and higher education courses, that is, reaching and beginning to regulate even subjects that lie outside schooling processes.

These reflections allow us to problematize contemporary curricular production, as is the case of the BNCC (BRASIL, 2018), with texts that appear to be based on a certain notion of students that is constituted as a norm, that is, individuals at an age considered adequate for the regular mode of basic education provision. Although these contemporary curricular documents mention the variety of modalities of basic education, including, for example, YAE, indigenous education and quilombola education (education in communities descended from fugitive slaves), we highlight the way in which power operates, with emphasis on how the statements have come to regulate what counts as knowledge, accentuated by the fact that, unlike the PCN (1997), the BNCC (2018) constitutes a mandatory standardization that results in curricula that must be produced based on its guidelines. If the objective of the Encceja is to identify and measure a certain latent trait (or a set of traits) developed throughout the trajectories of these young people and adults who take this annual exam to gain certification, the development of assessment instruments must consider the dimension of experience. Without this, knowledge is not built and cannot be accessed. It is therefore important not only to reflect on how contemporary curriculum policies will be signified for YAE education, but assessment policies also must be urgently rethought in order to connect more strongly with the characteristics of its audience.

From this perspective, based on the analysis of the texts that make up the Encceja Matrix of Competences and Skills, we can highlight that the specific features of the YAE public appear not to be central in the concept of what is viewed as knowledge for assessment. This is because knowledge related to disciplinary fields and to the schooling process is hegemonized, and this approach is required when setting the questions for the assessment instruments. The emphasis on knowledge, and we understand here that this was the option of the policymakers in question, ends up making the contextual dimension of experience secondary. In this respect, what we seek to point out here is how curricular texts and those that support evaluation policies such as that of the Encceja can end up distancing these actions from certain social groups, making it difficult to access guaranteed rights, as is the case of the certification sought by individuals who acquire knowledge throughout their schooling processes.

Finally, we emphasize that the complete fulfillment of the right to education and, in the present case, one of the principles of recognizing the knowledge built by young and adult subjects throughout their life histories, must be the recognition of the characteristics of the YAE public. This means that the curricula must be thought of with the experiences of these subjects in mind. It also means assuming that even if knowledge is thought of in relation to what was built in formal schooling processes within the scope of school subjects, such as science, it needs to be conceived from a perspective that does not use school as the only reference. It should also include family life, human coexistence, work, social movements and civil society organizations and the cultural manifestations in which these subjects participate. Far from denying the role of the school, this perspective opens up the possibility of welcoming the learning of these subjects in their entirety, beyond the ways that we teachers in elementary schools are used to doing.