Curriculum Studies in Brazil: An Overview

Abstract

Brazilian curriculum studies can be roughly divided into three phases: Pre-Marxist (1950s-1970s); Marxist (1980s-mid-1990s); and Post-Marxist (mid-1990s-present). The pre-Marxist phase is not discussed but referenced in the chapters that follow; it was dominated by a Tylerian instrumentalism variously depicted as positivist, behaviorist, technocratic, administrative, and/or scientific (see Macedo’s chapter 7 of this volume¹). The Marxist phase focused on school-society relationship employing concepts such as power, ideology, hegemony, and reproduction. Marxism—characterized by emphases upon subjectivity, everyday life, hybridity, and multicultural-ism—dominated the Brazilian field until the mid-1990s when postmodern, poststructural, and postcolonial discourses replaced it.