In search of new settings for Secondary School In search of new settings for Secondary School

PART 2 CURRICULUM POLICIES both educational perspectives. The discussions also included the need for teachers prepared to work in an integrated way and school leadership and guidance teams, essential for tackling the challenge.

At the beginning of the 2010s, research on secondary school (Cabral Neto & Castro, 2011; Ferreti, 2011; Kuenzer, 2011; Machado, 2011; Ramos, 2011) offers a picture of many of the problems that are still faced but also offering some solutions that could gradually help to combine the two types of curriculum.

CURRICULUM AND TEACHER EDUCATION IN SECONDARY SCHOOL POLICIES IN BRAZIL nation’s social structure. There is a close political-cultural relationship between the average schooling and the social elevation of this sector”. As with many educational questions, discus-sions about secondary education connect to social oppositions identified throughout history.

Here we find the tension between specific training for a job, answering market demands, and general education, closer to intellectual work and an academic path. It is the Integrated second-ary school that emerges as a potential strategy to smooth out such a split. Students graduating from this modality would ideally be trained to act as professional technicians and would be able to face entrance exams at universities.

Some questions remain, however, regarding the lack of consistency in the objectives of re- gular secondary school, general education. One focus on whether secondary school aims to deepen and expand the knowledge acquired by students over the previous years in ele-mentary school or should it focus primarily on preparing students for a college career. This duality puts the sector in the middle of a path, where the previous journey must be comple- ted but also where it is necessary to prepare for the next stage. A second question relates to the non-professionalization of students who do not go to university and are unable to per-form a qualified job for society.

Moura, Lima Filho and Silva (2015) understand that curriculum integration in secondary school is possible and desirable since it creates a unitary basis for all students, based on an integral hu-man formation, as assumed by the proposal of 2004, having science, technology, and culture as an axis. On the one hand, the technical aspect is fundamental, being necessary to prepare for a job, an aim of many students; on the other hand, the isolated humanistic formation does not enable students’ full development, particularly since its “abstract character” is not immediately relevant for performing in the job market. The articulation of technical with general formation is close to the meaning of “polytechnics”, as proposed by Saviani (2003), which we understand in the sense of uniting technical and intellectual work, not in the sense of learning a varie-ty of techniques. The polytechnic aspect that we highlight is very close to that of the already mentioned integral (whole) education. This enables the student socially, for the development of their autonomy, through reflection, knowledge of a broad and general culture, but also of their qualification for working.

In the traditional curricular perspective, the contents would be taught by a juxtaposition of subjects of a technical course and those that make up a regular secondary school course, com-bining this with other technical arrangements, such as the extension of schedules and organi-zation of a course grid of subjects. However, experienced scholars (Frigotto, Ciavatta & Ramos, 2012) highlight, since the first experiences with the integrated modality, that this is not the case.

The modus operandi of an integrated course, which combines knowledge and professionals from the technical area with those of the Basic Education area, involves and demands much more than that, touching the sphere of the curriculum, in its sense of trajectory to be traversed, reflected, understood and modified.

The integration between curricula is what constitutes the greatest strength and the greatest challenge to Integrated Secondary School. Promoting the integration of knowledge areas that circulate in this pedagogical context requires a great effort, as the movement to integrate is not

PART 2 CURRICULUM POLICIES common in school systems. And this is a new modality that is being acknowledged and known while it is being constructed and implemented. Unboxing the compartmentalized knowledge of the disciplines, and in a dialogic, pertinent, and systematic way, searching for consistent ways to promote the integration of curricula and the knowledge they contain becomes indispensable for the essential articulation in the promotion of autonomy (Freire, 1996) and the polytechnic formation (Saviani, 2003) of the students. The challenge also involves smoothing out the bor-ders that tend to be well-demarcated between the typical curricula of one area and another. This is needed because, for Integrated Secondary School, curricular objects are not seen in parallel, but in a unified, unitary way – since it brings together what is diversified, not because it equals or reduces it. The duality between the areas in a curriculum analysis of Integrated Secondary School courses is not appropriate. A technical course integrated within Basic Education is only justified if it is understood as a course that promotes the omnilateral formation of its students, enabling a multiple, integral, polytechnic course.

It is worth mentioning that Integrated Secondary School – general education associated with vocational education – is one of the ways of organizing education at this level. Still, the regular format, of general education, is much more common. Private schools generally take the regular mode, looking to guarantee success for their students on university selection tests.

The implementation of the Integrated Secondary School is done through its professionals:

teachers. Particularly, the teachers of these technical courses integrated into the secondary school, who are professionals from technical areas, who are not typical of the school context. A technical course integrated into secondary school, in the current Brazilian reality, consists of licensed teachers, responsible for the subjects common to regular secondary school courses, and by professionals from various technical areas, coming from their specific areas (in nursing, tourism, informatics, engineering... ), who act as teachers and, on an equal basis with licensed teachers, decide, judge, evaluate and organize the curriculum. It’s the case that in Integrated Secondary Education, part of Basic Education in Brazil, professionals who have no pedagogical training are working as teachers. The specificity of the teaching work is put to the test.

Since the Integrated Secondary School aligns the technical courses and the general forma-tion, we underline the issue regarding the training of professionals who work there: licensed teachers in the most diverse subjects, who have undergone teacher education; and teachers who are, considering their initial education, professionals from other areas. Since 2017, how-ever, with the enactment of Law 13415, which regulates new guidelines for secondary school, it becomes official the performance of professionals from different areas in this sector, provided they have “recognized knowledge” in the field in which they will act. Although they are not licensed for teaching in Basic Education, they are officially acknowledged as teachers. Following Roldão (2007), we understand that teaching supposes that someone is taught something and that someone takes what has been taught for themselves. Thus, any act of teaching is by nature a pedagogical act – and this entails a specific type of knowledge, the one involved in teaching.

From this perspective, pedagogical acts bring challenges and possibilities to actors who are in-volved in the process of teaching. In this sense, thinking about Integrated Secondary School means addressing the specific knowledge of teaching and how the professionals teaching there relate to it.

CURRICULUM AND TEACHER EDUCATION IN SECONDARY SCHOOL POLICIES IN BRAZIL A second analysis of this situation is based on the notion of powerful knowledge (Young, 2011;

Young & Lambert, 2014). We borrow it from its original understanding and take advantage of a possible polysemy to include it in this reflection about the curriculum in an integrated secondary school. In a context in which the technical aspect could be seen as the one that brings consistency, the specificity that seemed to be lacking in regular secondary school courses, there is a risk that the disciplines from this field will become those upon which the importance, the power of such knowledge rests. When it comes to Basic Education, it is intriguing to think of a curriculum in which powerful knowledge is primarily concentrated in areas that are not typical of this educational realm. In a context of disputes over what counts most, this singularity underscores the understanding that the integrated curriculum pro-vides a deconstruction of an established way of doing school, proposing a new movement of teachers and the school community.