Ghosts strike back: spectral teaching in curricular policies in Brazil

Abstract

CARVALHO, Ana Paula Pereira Marques de  and  BARROS, Caroline dos Santos Florentino de. Ghosts strike back: spectral teaching in curricular policies in Brazil. Sér.-Estud. [online]. 2025, vol.30, n.70, pp.9-28.  Epub Feb 20, 2026. ISSN 2318-1982.  https://doi.org/10.20435/serie-estudos.v30i70.2112.

Inspired by the film The Ghosts Strike Back, this work draws on Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler’s ideas about specters to problematize teaching as an absent presence that inhabits, is haunted by, and also haunts contemporary curricular policies in our country. Using poststructural approaches, the proposal is to challenge discourses of efficiency, responsibility, and commitment that contribute to ways of being a teacher and seek to fabricate subjectivities guided by standards of performance and control. Policies such as the Instituto Natura’s Trilhas Project and the National Literate Child Commitment (CNCA), whose development has been implemented in partnership with the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, attempt to establish meanings for an “ideal teacher” that appear as normative standards and promise redemption through standardization and adherence to performance norms. Under the banner of cooperation and collaboration, these policies seek to normalize practices, establishing subtle forms of subjection, even with the possibility of counterattack from those haunted. Thus, we propose to understand teaching as a spectral figure field, marked by performativity haunted by norms, but which, at the same time, is performed by traces, returns and reinscriptions of meanings about being and doing as teachers.

Keywords : spectrums; curricular policies; teacher training..

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