WHERE IS THE BNCC THAT WAS HERE?

Abstract

This thought experiment is the product of an extended dialogue between the authors. Drawing on their experience of collaborating on research-intervention projects concerning curriculum and difference with schools and public education networks in their cities, the authors explore how the BNCC disappeared from the concerns of teachers, administrators and students. Structured as a dialogue in which the authors ask each other questions, the text uses queer criticism and radical black thought to answer the question posed in the title: where is the BNCC that was here? This dialogue exposes a dual path that questions the normative centrality of national policies in curriculum theorization. Firstly, it starts from the reduction of the curriculum to knowledge to be taught, as performed by the document, and arrives at the idea that Black lives are irreductible and interrogate the ontological basis of who is the subject of the legal and ethical framework of learning rights. Secondly, it begins with the uncontrolled multiplicity of political action to reveal how its monstrous and aberrant aspects, and its unassimilable edges, are engulfed by the fantasy of the sovereign human subject. Between these two axes, the conceptual operation problematises the (im)possibility of considering a given curricular policy as a closed unit and explores the agential cuts that package different parts of various policies into an unscalable tangle.