CURRICULA, KNOWLEDGE AND EVERYDAY LIFE:

creations, reinventions and reexistences

Abstract

This work is one of the outcomes of my doctoral thesis. In it, I highlight the intricate relationship between curriculum, knowledge, and everyday life, emphasizing the impossibilities of controlling what happens in the classroom and hierarchizing knowledge. Through my autobiographical account as a dark-skinned Black man, a public school graduate, and a Geography teacher with 18 years of experience, I seek to demonstrate how teaching is shaped by demands that disrupt the supposed normative structure of curricula and lesson planning, underscoring the importance of valuing the prior knowledge of both students and teachers. From my perspective, knowledge is not something concrete, nor does it preexist in a way that allows it to be confined to a specific place. I start from the premise that knowledge is a flow, corresponding to entangled everyday experiences. Daily life serves as a stage for the joint creation and sharing of knowledge. The experiences of teaching and everyday inventiveness represent socially valid knowledge within networks of dialogue with students and other education professionals. Weaving together knowledge is a fundamental part of valuing both teaching and students’ knowledge. My writing is focused on dialogue with students and teachers, affirming that what we do in the classroom is the construction of socially valid knowledge—the possibility of narrating and writing for a world in which we can live, create, and reinvent curricula.