1 INTRODUCTION

Forms of producing and sharing knowledge in the context of digital culture are experiencing deep transformations provoked by media and their technologies, which in turn also transform our perceptions, knowledge, values, cultures and forms of teaching and learning. To reflect on the presence of contemporary culture in schools — and the reorganization of knowledge that is at times instantaneous and discontinuous in these social space — leads us to consider the curricular insertion of media and technologies, mobile devices and their applications and many other artefacts that promote changes in forms and contents, pedagogical relations and in the forms of teaching and learning at all levels of schooling.

More than being simply instruments and environments, media today shape the very connective fabric in which we weave our relations and interactions, as Rivoltella highlights (2017), referring to media-morphosis (^{FIDLER, 1997}) to relate the conceptualization of the media, their key themes and ideas of technology. Thus, we understand the digital media, not only (or no longer?) as tools or environments of scientific, cultural and educational processes, but as fundamental social spaces, that is, as dimensions that pertain to the life of people, as ^{Floridi (2014}) emphasizes, speaking provocatively of the fact that the media today is onlife.

By reflecting on the technological environment and the didactic and cultural needs of schools and their interfaces, we understand the curriculum in a number of ways: as a social and cultural artefact, which means contextualizing its historic and social determinations and their implications in power relations (^{SILVA, 1996}); as cultural practice, which means understanding curriculum also as a production of senses and meanings (^{FANTIN, 2012}); as an object of design, in the sense of the theoretical work of Diana ^{Laurillard (2012}); and from the perspective of a didactic philosophy that is based on the complementarity between macro- and micro-learning (^{RIVOLTELLA & ROSSI, 2019}). A curriculum understood in its multiplicity and singularity/particularity can act as a central axis of the various dynamics in the communicative, pedagogical and cultural ecosystem that are schools. To understand the perspective of a curriculum as a short period of time and as an opportunity to reconsider the contents using a logic of reduction, as does the Situated Learning Episodes methodology (^{RIVOLTELLA, 2013}) can be a starting point and place to open a dialog with the new, a device for the production of knowledge, relations, identities and other forms of belonging in schools and cultures.

2 CURRICULUM AND DIGITAL CULTURE: CONTEXTS, METAPHORS AND CHALLENGES

The classic theories of curriculum can be understood through some phases that reveal tensions and contradictions between different centralities and protagonisms that question and challenge and that are modified according to the historic moment: centralities in students/ learning, in didactics/teaching, and in school/formative path. Each choice always produces questionings, affirms ^{Rivoltella (2018}), who currently observes a return of the centrality of curriculum based on a logic of competencies and a need to certify them, a verticalization of teaching and other factors that relocate the curriculum at the center of schools and educational paths. For Rivoltella, the temporal organization of the path in a given direction, now responds substantially to two needs. One is didactic and related to the idea of “declination” and development, in the sense of “embodying” competencies and indications of Ministries of Education. The second is cultural, and is characterized by the rapid and exponential growth of knowledge. From this emerges the need to be guided by this knowledge, since for Rivoltella the school curriculum develops a cultural function to favor “order amid chaos” among students, as we will see.

These cases can also be understood considering the ambiguity of a social reality that in a short space of time in Brazil went from effervescent occupations of schools to the dark times of losses of rights in various senses, as we are now experiencing. (We are not considering the current context of the pandemic and its political, economic, social and cultural implications). This is a situation of shadows, of many questions and few answers.

A brief retrospective about movements in curriculums in different socio-cultural contexts leads us to challenge the idea of a common base for national education. We can identify movements contrary to this implementation and resistances to National Education Plans and their (unified) systems of education, reforms and counter-reforms, and opposed to the authoritarian character of recent presidential edicts and misleading propaganda. It is particularly concerning that a long history of discussions has recently been ignored, while disguising certain educational itineraries. This reveals a trend to degradation and increased precarity of teaching, as well as a silence towards so many other aspects that refuse to go away. This reminds us of Sibilia’s disturbing questioning; “as we slide quickly aboard this twenty-first century, which has brought us so many surprises, showing off its technological fetishes and its globalized lifestyle, is it possible that the school has become obsolete?” (2012, p.9). We must recognize that the school device must be radically transformed, reinvented, or who knows, deconstructed beyond “networks or walls”.

After all, those who work with education also work with hope, as Paulo ^{Freire (2016}) would say, therefore, care must be taken to not fall into fatalism or to lose hope, because “it is always possible to create something beyond simple resistance to official proposals”, recalls ^{Alves (2017}, p.5). It is pertinent to recognize that Franco ^{Basaglia’s (1979}) lectures in Brazil in the 1970s about the need to deinstitutionalize psychiatry also apply to schools. The true problem is always a problem of power, he affirmed, and that to imagine a new psychiatry (in this case: a new school) is to think beyond power relations. If curriculum is more than a vehicle to transmit something, but a political arena and grounds on which culture is created and produced, “the existing materials function as raw material for creation, recreation and above all, contestation and transgression”, affirm ^{Moreira and Silva (1995}, p.28).

From this perspective, the idea of curricular organization understood as an accumulation of disciplines that have little to say about life must be criticized, as should the precariousness of school infrastructure and education, and school aesthetics and architecture of dubious taste that also contribute to school failure. This criticism can also reconsider curriculum models and their metaphors, to think of other and new responses and opportunities to consider old questions: How can cultural authority for curriculum be constructed when it is considered difficult to declare a law or knowledge that is valid for all? What are the main challenges of the curriculum today?

In this respect, Dussel offers an interesting reflection on the modern curriculum, understood as a “public document that expresses a synthesis of a cultural proposal, formulated in educational terms, about how and who defines cultural authority in a given society” (²⁰¹⁴, p.1). Dussel brings to the curriculum debate some changes and polemics raised by techno-culture and digital culture, questioning the centrality of the curricular text and proposing other criteria for organization and hierarchization of knowledge, as well as other operations based on “consumer taste” and emotional responses. We will now bring to this discussion some of ^{Dussel’s ideas (2013} and ²⁰¹⁴).

The curriculum that has emerged in modernity has expressed a certain will to give order to and unify teaching. It supposes an organization in two dimensions: discipline (in the sense of structural coherence) and order (in the sense of internal sequence). It promises to embrace knowledge through a sequential logic and has generated demands to “follow the curriculum” and complement it. This imposes a certain control of teaching practices, which are increasingly centralized and homogenized with little room for negotiation. Although the existence of a concrete object that can transport, be read in different situations and act as a reference and memory to give order to practices has been vital, this form of thinking of curriculum is in crisis, and the crisis is not only theoretical, as ^{Dussel (2013}) maintains.

The crisis of curricular studies not only involves the decline of certain intellectual traditions within the field, because the questionings take new forms and expand along with techno-cultural and political changes, challenging the centrality and hierarchization of knowledge of the modern curriculum. Thus, the contestation and criticism go beyond questions internal to the curriculum and relate to a broader movement of the knowledge-power reaction that Dussel addresses based on some metaphors.

Among models and metaphors for thinking of curriculum and its technological contexts, ^{Dussel (2013}) mentions the curriculum as an atlas, collection, or tree of knowledge; as a map; a monument; library and archive, which are also icons of knowledge in modernity. In the organization of knowledge based on accumulation, tradition and authority, the vision of a territory seen from the outside is the basis of notions that we now identify in curricular parameters, levels of learning, basic contents and others that involve a minimum and common body of knowledge for all. And for Dussel, these images of centralized knowledge conflict with images of contemporary curriculum projects based on the arts and literature that can support the design of a social theory that the author seeks to rearticulate. With a post-critical perspective on reflection and curricular action, Dussel’s aim is to reconduct certain problems to think of the contemporary curriculum.

The changes that we have lived through most recently relate to new organizations of culture and politics understood as inheritances, which have been in a process of substitution since the 1960s, and their technocultural changes propitiate other forms of transmitting and hierarchizing knowledge. The internet, new digital media and their mobile devices have inspired new multi-literate practices of citizenship, and the idea of a common culture that organizes the school curriculum is modifying the hierarchy of knowledge proposed by school culture. Thus, the new digital culture media have been “disorganizing” this situation, and the public culture has been migrating to the networks. Of course, digital exclusions and social and territorial abysses still persist, as ^{Ito and his colleagues affirm (2010}). For various authors (^{JENKINS, 2009}, ^{PRETTO, 2017}) the passage from the idea of film and television audiences to that of “publics in network” propitiates “active participation” in social networks distributed in the production and circulation of culture and knowledge that definitively modify their relations with each other and with knowledge. And these aspects are not always considered in curriculum.

In this sense, we can ask what are the nuances of the relationship between media, school and curriculum given the generalized presence of the media in the contemporary world, which at times leads us to true impasses in light of transformations in countless key-concepts used to understand the current moment in education, schools, curriculums and teacher education. Allied to this, ^{Pretto (2004}, ²⁰¹⁷) reminds us that the intensification of the digital culture and the concentration of large communication companies have been accompanied by counter-hegemonic movements that articulate possibilities to highlight local values based on the idea of multiple cultures and networks. For Pretto, the online perspective is a maximum expression of the idea of the world being transmitted to the world, assembling and disassembling, constructing and deconstructing discourses, ethical and aesthetic practices and perceptions.

In this context, as obvious as it may appear, it is important to remember that the high speed and acceleration that promote a wide variety of physical mobilities and movements - of information and images - substantially alter our space-time perception, combined with the fact that we live practically connected in real time with nearly everything. And this model that came from communication, based on a logic of broadcasting or of centralized production and mass distribution, has encouraged symbolic production, generating byproducts in other fields of knowledge, above all in culture and education, also contributing to a productivist vision of education and school, as ^{Pretto (2004}) emphasizes. Meanwhile, this vertical and generalizing logic that treats contents as products distributed on a large scale, in person, at a distance or online, still appears to be present in the curriculum, according to Pretto.

Pretto has been denouncing the absence of the field of culture in curriculum proposals for quite some time. He affirms that, in the dynamic of relations “it is culture that gives life to our life” (²⁰⁰⁴, p.10). That is, it is through the interaction and conviviality among cultures, with their ambiguities and the potentialities that emerge from this coexistence, that we can enrich educational processes based on horizontality.

Thus, reconsidering the relationship between media and curriculum, we include consideration of the digital culture and its crossings of knowledge and practices in which the “domestic” and the “popular” appear as ambivalent aesthetic and political genres. This process also involves the ruptures and shortening of distances promoted by the digital technologies on one hand and the projection of intimate contents as promises of accessibility, immediacy and horizontality on the other, which lead us to the idea of politics with mediations or representations (^{LATOUR, 2012}). This movement that includes celebrities emerging from reality-shows and the new “enthronement of the self” is not foreign to some movements of curriculum and pedagogy, which place the “expressivity of the self” at the center and convert it into that through which we measure the whole, as ^{Sibilia affirmed (2008}), flooding classrooms with confessional affects, for example through increasingly more personalized portfolios, or through writings or audiovisual productions about subjectivity, recalls ^{Dussel (2013}, p.23). This is not to mention the memes, viral videos and other artefacts that appear to now make the new curriculum of mass culture into networks.

We can ask what is the place of these media practices in curriculum, because we know that “the digital media establish certain cultural forms and operations with culture and knowledge that are not neutral, but that give shape to participation”(^{DUSSEL, 2013},p.23) and at times, certain voices that are expressed marginalize other forms of contents of expression. Thus, to think of technologies in the curriculum also implies thinking of their uses and presences in at least two senses: considering their pedagogical, scholastic and academic uses and considering their broader use in learning mediated by schools and by culture in general. In fact, these perspectives do not always coincide, because what we understand should be taught in schools is changing considerably with the new cultural practices propitiated by digital technologies. That is, we now work with cultural knowledge and practices that until recently did not exist and whose value has not been recognized, yet that now redefine what is demanded of schools or what they must teach. For this reason, it is necessary to distinguish the presence of technology in school from a “strictly pedagogical” use associated to curriculum that could exclude new forms of knowledge that are not contemplated but that would be very important for students to learn. Although it is difficult to address these questions that are at times quite broad, we must ask ourselves if this is up to schools or if students learn outside of schools and or through other mediations.

In an attempt to reorganize a curriculum inherited from modernity in these new conditions, some studies have become radicalized in certain orientations in an effort to relocate curriculum considering contemporary challenges. Network actor theory, disruptive practices, and transversal readings that consider the space-time of objects, imagining connections between “different” elements, can offer paths to the production of new meanings, as ^{Dussel affirms (2013}, p. 26).

This reflection inspires many questions: what curriculum proposal can reveal the large corporations that organize the world, their privileged cultural forms, their business models, their languages and aesthetics; and what are the opportunities for schools to promote work that addresses being in networks as a critical reflection on the world in which we live? What form will curriculums have now that they incorporate digital media and their trends towards a “regime of opinion”, immediacy, emotionality, and culture, according “to the measure of the individual”. And how can curriculums address other questions that are challenging education, far beyond the uses of smartphones in classrooms, such as fake news, control data, freedom and vigilance on networks, development of artificial intelligence, the redefinition of what divides organic and artificial, educational and social robotics, augmented reality, and images without referents (^{RIVOLTELLA & ROSSI, 2019}).

These questions call for complex dialogs with history and politics that lead Dussel to ask, what would an “anti-curriculum” be like: “Can a curriculum represent heterogeneity, discontinuity and multiplicity and still be legible and guide practices? And by making it multiple, rhizomatic and plural, would it confront contemporary problems and challenges?” (2013, p.30). These questions do not find easy responses, but for Dussel, the fact that they are raised indicates a different relationship with the digital culture is now present in many schools.

From this perspective, curriculum theory could highlight other forms of text and curriculum organization inspired by artistic experiences and other aesthetics that produce practices of reading, production and socialization that are more complex and less automatized, without giving up intelligibility. These include simplex curricular forms (^{BERTHOZ, 2009}) that contemplate an opening to the common and to elements of the tradition of the modern curriculum that are valid and that should not be ignored. This curricular theory must search for new maps that transport knowledge to new territories, while not renouncing the “anti-monuments” that suggest inclusions and exclusions of the anti-canon of fluidity, as Dussel affirms. “In the post-critical moment, it is not a question of suspending the radical gesture, but of discussing where and with whom the next steps will be taken”, he adds (2013, p. 32).

In this context, new inspirations must be accompanied by a revival of certain processes and practices of cultural immersion that are opportunities to understand access to information and to spaces of culture propitiated by the access to knowledge in its various forms and mobilities beyond the classroom: this includes trips, visits, films, libraries, newspapers, magazines, etc. It seems obvious to reaffirm that this is part of education, but as ^{Pretto says (2004}), most of the curriculum reforms still demonstrate a mistaken understanding of this process, because they begin with the presumption that knowledge continues to be “organized in boxes” and that transversal axels alone integrate these forms of knowledge, which in turn, remain separated in their own domains, although there is a line that integrates them. Pretto affirms that this tenuous line “cannot bear the entire weight of this outdated structure, which was completely assembled from the idea of those small boxes: with separated contents and knowledge. And life, as always, remains on the outside, and is presented, at most, to exemplify these processes”, he highlights. (idem, p.13).

To raise other dimensions of life in this space, the author analyzes the perspective of an open and collaborative science based on possibilities inspired by hacker philosophy (^{HIMANEN, 2001}) as the “spiritual challenge of our time”. Pretto highlights that “another culture is established by emphasizing passion, solidarity and collaborative work as elements that are socially necessary to the construction of a sustainable world. Entertainment, work, culture, education, science, technologies, all fields can and must be immersed in this culture, where the pleasure of building is the theme that triggers the actions.” (2017, p. 39).

The challenge of thinking of other metaphors, to move from boxes to open works, as Pretto suggests, mentioning the parangolés of Oiticica, would involve the sense of participation that only exists when it is incorporated and integrated to the idea of multiplicity. By establishing various articulations with the new networks of connections that reveal what is common, as well as the differences, singularities, plurality and intensity of experiences and knowledge, new elements can be incorporated to all these educational, artistic, and cultural processes, redimensioning the negotiations that constantly take place. Thus, “the media comes to perform a fundamental role, directly interacting with daily school activity and mainly with the form of conceiving curriculum.” (^{PRETTO, 2004}, p. 25).

This leads us to the idea/metaphor of curriculum as a network or rhizome. With the internet, and the new digital media, the technocultural changes that promote other forms of production and sharing and other hierarchies of knowledge install new instrumental practices of citizenship and belonging in multiple languages and supports, and reorganize the idea of common culture that give structure to the school curriculum and the very place of knowledge articulated in networks. These articulations are part of the communicative, pedagogical and cultural ecosystems that are schools with their dialogs and negotiations between media, digital culture, daily school activity, knowledge and curriculum.

Allied to this metaphor is the idea of curriculum as a text that is made, remade and unmade in pedagogical practice and in multiple interactions between teachers and students in the classroom and outside it. It is a plural and open text that is collectively constructed, which shifts knowledge and reconfigures the relations, moments and times of learning. Thus, the authorial productions of teachers and students do not fail to exist, because the change of place of these roles and the impermanence of certain contents that can become others, do not necessarily lead to “the loss of human ability to build, preserve and care for a world that can survive us and continue to be a suitable place for life for those who come later”, as Hannah ^{Arendt affirmed (1997}).

In this context, it would be possible to reorganize a curricular project considering the technological surroundings in these new conditions, using disruptive and transversal practices that can express and question the rigidity of certain contents based on the movement and flow of ideas in space-time, expressing other forms of curricular text, with inspirations from philosophy, art, science and other aesthetic experiences. It seems that the idea of the “short curriculum” proposed by the Situated Learning Episodes methodology (RIVOLTELLA, 2103), heads in this direction. This is in continuity with Freinet’s idea of the curriculum as: an individual curriculum with a work plan created by the student, that is open to what the contemporary world proposes, always newly redefined, and collaboratively co-constructed among students. It includes practices of collective writing, moments of cultural exchanges and exchanges with the community in which the school is inserted.

3 EPISODES OF SITUATED LEARNING AND THE SHORT CURRICULUM

In the space-time of schools, strategies for significantly integrating the uses of technologies and their devices to the curriculum have sought to work with specific questions and competencies that demand from the didactics different approaches to teaching about new modalities of the teaching and learning process. Among these models, we highlight the concept Episodes of Situated Learning.

This is a didactic methodology based on three ideas. 1) The first is the opportunity to work with a didactics that is coherent with the attention spans of children and youth today, to organize classroom activities according to the indications of microlearning. This is a theory of learning that suggests the use of micro-contents and micro-activities so that the cognitive load proposed is coherent with students’ opportunities for learning. 2) The second is the important recognition that learning is always situated. This involves two concepts. Firstly, that any human learning, although abstract and conceptual, is always related to the role of the body, according to the perspective of Embodied Cognition (^{RIVOLTELLA; ROSSI, 2019}). Secondly, that in the didactics, the teaching is both more significant and effective the more it refers to contextualized and practical experiences. 3) The third concept involved is the cognitivist idea of significant learning (^{AUSUBEL, 1963}), which is contrary to mechanical learning, and concerns the critical appropriation of meanings.

The Episodes of Situated Learning methodology is also a proposal to integrate mobile devices to didactics, and involves “an informal learning process related to the phenomena that permeate the current media cultures, their fragmentations and recombinations of textual and transmidiatic recombinations” (^{RIVOLTELLA, 2013}, p.51-52). It is based on 4 key ideas: teaching as design, learning by doing, flipped teaching, and neurodidactics, which we will now summarize (^{RIVOLTELLA, 2015}, p.14-17).

1. Teaching as design involves the dimensions of organizational planning, of aesthetics of form or style and the contents of culture. It understands that teachers are architects of education (^{LAURILLARD, 2012}); and that teaching involves working with multiliteracies in the sociocultural life of students (^{COPE & KALANTZIS, 2000}). Didactics is understood as a montage of cultural objects based on the dialectic between assembly and disassembly (FRANCASTEL op. cit. ^{RIVOLTELLA, 2015}, p.15);

2. Learning by doing involves two perspectives: 1) using workshops as a didactic device and method with its analogical and active mediators (^{DAMIANO, 2013}) beyond space or a classroom, according to the principles of the active school; 2) the understanding of thoughts as habits of action, according to Piaget’s genetic epistemology (In ^{RIVOLTELLA, 2015}, p.15), that is, the understanding that the function of thinking is to produce actions;

3. Flipped teaching: this is an inversion of the logic of traditional teaching didactics (an expositive class with tasks for the student to do at home). The first step is to ask students to find information about a subject outside the classroom and then discuss it in the classroom and share their understandings and doubts through activities that involve the application of this knowledge. The idea of the flipped lesson, introduced by ^{Mazur (2007}) in the methodology of eLearning thirty years ago, in reality had already been worked with and or anticipated in the ideas of Freinet and his a posteriori lesson (^{FREINET & SALENGROS, 1960}). He worked with the hypothesis that what teachers say is much more effective if students had first worked with the contents and problems that the teacher will later highlight. Today, this practice of teaching is promoted in various countries by various authors.

4. The intersection between neurosciences and didactics involves 3 concepts. 1) The paradigm of simplexity (^{BERTHOZ, 2009}), which concerns how living organisms confront complexity and develop intermediary devices that instead of simplifying things can reduce complexity by mediating the selection and search for information. This makes the Situated Learning Episode methodology a simplex device. 2) The body-mind-brain system supports the base of learning and re-dimensions its fundamental modalities. 3) The idea of the “mirror circuit” and the resignification of the role of repetition, imitation, and experience in learning processes.

The Episodes of Situated Learning methodology is based on a structure that foresees three moments in each class: 1) the prior moment: this involves a situation-stimulus that calls for students to undertake an individual preparatory activity that ends in the classroom, with a conceptual framework made by the teacher. 2) The operative moment: after developing the conceptual framework, the teacher proposes a micro-activity for production in group, in which students must resolve a problem or produce some content about the situation-stimulus. This moment will be concluded with a presentation and discussion of the work of the groups. 3) A re-structuring moment: this involves a debriefing about what took place in the previous moments, with a return to the processes activated and concepts that emerged to reflect on aspects to be highlighted and or to correct errors, mistakes and false beliefs produced in that process (^{RIVOLTELLA, 2013}).

In this proposal, Rivoltella affirms that the school curriculum has the cultural function of helping students give order to chaos, as inspired by the philosophy of ^{Deleuze and Guattari (1991}).

Philosophy, like science and art, designs a plan, establishes concepts and populates the plane with characters (^{DELEUZE;GUATTARI 1991}). Rivoltella clarifies that this also takes place with didactics when organizing a curriculum:

Plan: this is the context, the background, a framework, that concerns culture, the surroundings. A plan is designed in the curriculum to construct an integrative foundation, to identify the macro construct/thought of the disciplinary reality that will be worked with. The plan frames the didactics, it is the space in which concepts are situated and gain meaning.

Concepts: these are the epistemological knots of a field of experience that support a discipline, that are solid and productive to thematically revive that which is most important. In the didactic activity, the concepts are the contents about which the teacher works with the students. These contents are articulated with the didactic plan, in the dialectical relationship between the background and the foreground.

Character: that which is derived from the concept, which allows “creating” and giving body to the concept, which articulates the existential traits in which the thinking can be developed. A teacher always uses a narrative to mediate concepts: character is part of this narrative, it assists the introduction of examples, and materializes ideas to contextualize thinking.

These aspects can be articulated with the Episodes of Situated Learning methodology, which allows examining the plane/locating the context, establishing concepts in the discipline and in the field of experience, and producing and transporting characters to all of this. In these three moments the space for organization of the short curriculum can be individualized, that is, there is a necessary rearticulation between teachers and students of the contents that are worked with in schools. Schools need this rearticulation for two main reasons:

1. Because of the obsession with the idea that “we need more time to develop classroom activities”, any active didactic gains meaning and depth. Along with “but it’s a waste of time” we have the argument that it is important to “do less in the same amount of time”, and thus it seems to be inevitable that curriculums quantitatively reduce the subjects, constructs and knowledge. To produce significant learnings - as ^Ausubel(1963) and ^{Bruner (2000}) suggest - it is necessary to reduce the amount of contents/subjects worked with.

2. In addition, the dynamic nature of knowledge in contemporary society must be considered. This is a rapid dynamic, which changes subjects and ideas with great speed and that produces an enormous amount of information. For example, in the 1990s, authors such as Jorge Amado were contemporaneous, while Amado is now one of the most important writers of the past century. This is to say that as time passes the contents that schools must work with increases. This is true for any discipline.

Thus, if the amount of information is always increasing, it is necessary to choose what content to work with. ^{Gardner (1991}) suggests two criteria for making these choices: the content should serve as an example (when addressing a theme, does it address others); it should be transferable (when working with form and content, does it apply to other realms and experiences). The exemplary content is representative of a vast set of contents that can refer to it, and the transference is not only of contents but above all of postures, capacities, skills and competencies (for example: the transfer of knowledge trains logical (philosophical) thinking, develops intellectual capacity (neuroscience), and competencies (didactic logic).

The Episodes of Situated Learning methodology is located within this logic. When a teacher works with Situated Learning Episodes in the classroom, the perspective is that of slow education (^{FRANCESCH, 2009}): students must be guaranteed the time to face problems, to try to develop their own solutions. Time must be given to groups to work and discuss, and time must be provided to the metacognitive moment of debriefing. Speed and rushing because we have many things to do threaten the production of knowledge and development of competencies. One of the consequences is a certain decrease in the amount of content worked with: but to work in depth and thus have the entire class conduct significant learning has a price, that is “doing less”. Here the Situation Learning methodology breaks with the school device: the school becomes a “student’s school”, a space to construct meanings, a democratic place in which everyone should have the same opportunity to realize their own potential.

4 NARRATIVES ABOUT EPISODES OF SITUATED LEARNING IN TEACHER EDUCATION

In the context of a study that called for an approximation to the Episodes of Situated Learning methodology at different levels of education, the methodology was used in a course in a Graduate School of Education based on a few opportunities it provides. They include the opportunities: to deal with continuities and ruptures in the daily experiences inside and outside school and the need to consider other contexts of learning in cultural formation; to work with competencies in the realms of practices of reading, writing, creation and problem solving, looking at oneself and the other; to challenge the role of the image, of corporality, of doing-reflecting, the motivations of teachers and students in their educational processes; and to resignify the use of mobile devices in audiovisual and media production, their languages and interactions in networks.

The methodology also allows challenging the short period of time, the different rhythms of each one and the negotiations involved in group work, the time needed for reflection and meaning, for interpretive reproductions, as well as the time each individual needs for learning, which is not always in synch with the times and demands of the institution. Thus, the approximation to this methodology can construct clues that can help overcome the lack of attention given to certain didactic processes and to the utilitarian approach to knowledge presented in teacher education to construct a different kind of relationship with the time of learning in a society that is increasingly accelerated. It can allow paying greater attention to details and to the intentionalities of different gestures in pedagogical relations (^{RIVOLTELLA, 2013}; 2020).

The disruptive practices Episodes of Simulated Learning strengthen the concept of agency of students and the construction of knowledge, as well as the reflection on the contents addressed, on media and devices in classrooms, and on the mediations in the communicative, pedagogical and cultural ecosystems that are schools. (^{FANTIN, 2018}). And since university classes usually involve discussions of texts and seminars, this proposal sought to experiment with the a multi-modal didactic, inspired by studies in didactic intervention in intermediary and high schools in various sociocultural contexts (FANTIN, 2015, 2016).

Combined with this, opportunities for innovative practices created by the use of technologies in the media-education perspective can offer undergraduate students valuable opportunities to construct improved, interactive and collaborative learning environments that are engaging and more inclusionary. For ^{Sankey, Birch and Gardiner (2010}), the main motivation that multimodal didactics offers by incorporating educational technologies in the curriculum is the desire to improve the involvement and learning of students. After all, among the many issues raised in the first section of this text, the use of multi-media in teaching offers opportunities to present the multiple representations of content (text, video, audio, images, and interactive elements) and to significantly contemplate students’ different styles of learning, without forgetting the dimension of pleasure in the realization of activities.

We will now present a brief synthesis of the proposals developed and some consequences of the Episodes of Simulated Learning methodology to situate and give visibility to some processes of reflection triggered among students.

At the initial moment of the encounters, we always sought to begin with what the group already knew and then raise questions and problematize them to give foundation to the discussion, which was not always limited to the text indicated for prior reading. Some strategies for this moment involved brainstorming, video-stimulus about the theme, work with texts, images, music, performances, and fragments of interviews about the subject, and a brief presentation locating the content by using other authors and approaches.

In the next operative moment, activities in groups or in pairs were proposed to treat the issues discussed, developed and suggested in greater depth, to intensify the discussion and or operate certain concepts addressed in the texts based on the experience of each participant, now shared with the group. This involves activities such as: presentation of case studies that reveal situations related to the subject; resolutions of situations-problems based on questions raised; production of multimodal materials or texts, written and or audiovisual using various languages, supports and artefacts about a theme proposed or discussed. The questions discussed and productions realized were then socialized with the larger group.

In a final re-structuring moment, a debriefing was conducted to reveal what we had done and learned based on the involvement of each person in the dynamic proposed, to review the concepts operated in the activities and provoke the doubts and questionings that arose in the discussions. This was a moment for reviewing and evaluating the process, the learnings and appropriations, knowledges and non-knowledges, the forms of participation and the new suggestions. In addition to rounds of conversation, in this reflection about the learning path constructed in the classroom, at times we used other strategies for evaluation such as metaphors.

To reflect on the multimodal didactic applied in a formative context based on the Episodes of Situated Learning methodology, we present the voices of students that address these experiences to reveal narratives that approximate a disruptive practice in the teaching-learning-communicating process. The statements below were shared at the end of each encounter, and provide a better idea of how these processes were significant to the group:

-I liked the dynamic, the class was hypertextual, it addressed concepts in a dynamic and understandable manner and was open to other perspectives (AB);

- Today’s class involved production and different forms of appropriation (video, reflection on texts, dynamics for exchanges and to produce, experience. The focus on experience and on the case study allowed glimpsing things that I had never thought of (W);

- I like this methodology, it works with the individual and the collective, there was a good closing (G);

- The dynamic was interesting, but I was a bit concerned with going more deeply into the questions of the text that I felt a need to discuss more (AP);

- The concept of media-education in the classroom was presented, applied in practice and we experienced this (J);

- I read, take notes, reflect actively but just me, and the class opened to “a greater I”,

A dynamic with actions that make a contribution (F);

- Clarification. Reflections and doubts were raised and here you were able to clarify, it seems simple, but it is complex, and you presented it to us in a way that it was possible to understand (JD).

The fragments above reveal aspects of the activities evaluated at the end of each encounter, and how a multimodal didactic perspective used in combination with Simulated Learning Episodes provided an important opportunity to identify how certain technologies are correlated not only with contemporary society, but with specific cognitive processes. It also allows greater flexibility in the teacher-student interaction and can improve the learning environment, as Marchetti and Cullen (2016) emphasize.

The following narratives demonstrate a broad perspective, and were expressed at the end of the course at the time of evaluation to consider the learning of the contents, the participation in the dynamics proposed and the multimodal didactics in the Episodes of Situated Learning. The evaluation was made by using metaphors, designed and written on paper, and presented like post its, to later share the meaning with the group:

- Lightbulb. As if by learning with the other and in different forms, a light is turned on. The sharing of ideas, concepts, visions contributed to the formation of new ideas about the object studied (JM);

- Puzzle. (…) Reflexive practices with meaning within each text associating to the ideas discussed. Opportunities to exchange experiences among us but that were complemented with thorough summaries, showing that the method is not closed but can be built through practice so we can understand the meaning of what we do and learn (T);

- Conceptual map. The course allowed expanding knowledge (by) deconstructing and reconstructing concepts; it broadened my cognitive abilities, my writing; stimulated my curiosity about new issues, authors and concepts. It allowed socializing and discussing knowledge and experience based on different languages; it developed partnerships and even making new friendships (V);

- Spiral. The course was a spiral of learning in movement of knowing, questioning and relearning with constant advances and returns to other points. The importance of a theoretical basis that I did not have. The moments of explanation were very important and fundamental to rethinking concepts that were not clear to me, in addition to group activities and debates (S).

Even if certain narratives better express the sense of the experience of learning with Episodes of Situated Learning, some evaluations and metaphors also express the meaning of other possibilities that we highlight for the curriculum during this reflection: the question of “little time”, of the need to choose “certain contents” to work with in depth, of the space of freedom to raise or include other issues that were not previously delineated, the incompleteness of certain processes and of the necessary mediations:

- Half of a full moon. The moon in its process of becoming full, with the sensation that 2 credits are little, but 4 would also be. A deep and pertinent formation that visualizes so many things. The impression that we travel a path, or half of it, and this horizon remained to be filled in. Not that this is bad, but I wanted to continue to travel a bit more together. Yet the horizon remains before us, for to keep walking (JD);

- A girl with a notebook. A different reflection remained of an education with more active situations. The course was very meaningful, many questions remained but others were included, and this expanded the opportunity to look for answers (F);

- An experience of a pot of beans. The course went too quickly but full of light, it was dynamic, a productive cycle of creation, participation and flourishing- like planting beans in cotton. At times the explanations were made quickly and many questions were left open, but they were excellent. The contact with the authors, the help of colleagues, it all grew quickly, and this leads to satisfaction and influences the learning (E);

- Symbiosis. It raised new disturbances and mutation. Symbiosis between two beings in knowledge, and the case studies raised more questions than answers, which led to new searches (AP).

Although the use of metaphors can be deepened, at this moment we consider that they reveal aspects of learning, teaching and communicating based on other modes of constructing knowledge by resignifying the meanings of reading, seeing, doing, learning, reflecting and sharing. These are clues for an exercise in thinking of a different curriculum, which is being constructed in the fabric of an education that is also understood as “cultural action for freedom”, as Paulo ^{Freire (1979}) would say, and that precisely for this reason is not free of contradiction and can be understood in the dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity. For Freire, we are inserted in time, and not immersed in it and we move in the world in which we make choices, we select, we decide, we value, and we guide. In this process, the act of studying “is an attitude toward the world” and involves “assuming a curious posture. Of one who asks, of one who questions, one who searches” (¹⁹⁷⁹, p.11). Thus, in Friere’s view, “study is not measured by the number of pages read in one night or by the number of books read in a semester. To study is not an act of consuming ideas, but of creating them and recreating them” (idem, p.12)

And it is in this perspective of (re)creation, of shared authorship in the construction of the class, and consequently of another idea of curriculum, that we envision the possibility to “make flexible the mechanism of power” of the school and its rigid curriculum without giving up the “valid nucleus”. It requires sketches of a design traced by many hands that leave marks and indicate experiences of knowledge elaborated in partnership, between what was proposed by the teacher, initially contemplated in the course curriculum, and what was chosen by the group in the search for the meaning of the knowledge through other actions. In our understanding, this leads towards liberating and disruptive practices.

The intense participation in classes and the constant dialog of the group with the territories of the school and with other educational and cultural spaces, carried in the multiplicity of experiences and texts by all those who construct these encounters, allow other perspectives on their practices and research, and this can provide clues to a transformative practice that is also in transformation.

5 CONCLUSION

The experience in the classroom demonstrates the possibility to take a different approach to the curriculum. The concept, as the theoretical portion of the article affirmed, can be understood by disarticulating the traditional pedagogical discourse, so that curriculum is no longer considered as a rigid frame that gives visibility to the device of the school - in a Foucaultian sense - and can be reconceptualized as a text that is made and unmade in the pedagogical practices and interactions between teachers and students in classrooms. Thus, what is experienced is a movement from the institutional plane (programs and structures) to the individual biographical and or collective planes: as the active pedagogy highlighted. In this perspective, curriculum becomes a trajectory (from the Latin “cursus, currere”) that students describe and construct, accompanied by teachers in a constant exchange of ideas and practices. Curriculum is treated as an open and plural text that is made and remade by describing each individual’s history of learning while in contact with other histories, assuring more spaces for invention and creation, beyond spaces of power. It is a curriculum that can also be understood as a practice of freedom and transformation.

In this perspective, the Episodes of Situated Learning methodology is a pedagogical and didactic tool for materializing this movement, in at least two senses. First, because it encourages students to investigate, as well as group collaboration, and critical reflexivity about processes. Second, because it makes viable multimodal practices in short time periods, respecting the rhythm of learning of students.

Finally, to think of cultures in school in dialog with this methodological perspective has repercussions on other possibilities for understanding curriculum. This leads us not only to question certain models but to reaffirm the importance of constructing educational experiences with multiple meanings and with a creative and transformative perspective, which can involve dream, silence, a polyphony of voices, images and the beauty that the educational practice can have.