Teaching with an Attitude: Finding Ways to the Conundrum of a Postmodern Curriculum

Abstract

Several scholars in the field of education have questioned the constituent aspects of a curriculum that would better respond to the rising demands in contemporary societies. The relevance of such enquiry finds its place in the very transformations in today's societies marked by significant changes in the ways of knowing, being, and acting primarily due to the advent of new digital media in more recent globalizing processes. As Burke (2009) has stated, if schools wish to maintain their relevance in society, they must take into account such changes by first and foremost acknowledging the new and complex ways of making meanings in out-of-school literacy practices as equally legitimating those happening within school contexts. Along with Burke (ibid.), this paper advocates the need of rethinking the notion of curriculum in the light of the new ontologies and epistemologies of postmodernity. Such task proves itself to be a conundrum inasmuch as the very notion of curriculum has been traditionally founded on modern principles such as linearity, stability, and universality (Silva, 2009). In view of this, how can educators respond to the challenge of redefining what should be taught in schools in postmodern times so that students would better perform in relation to the self and the other within their social practices? This paper aims to analyse the relationship between postmodern philosophical concepts, curriculum theory and educational practice by presenting the notion of curricular attitude (Duboc, 2012) as a local redesign of teaching practices within a Brazilian educational context. Despite being situated in the field of foreign language teaching, the notion of a curricular attitude might be of interest of other areas of knowledge since it seeks to revisit teaching practices in the light of wider philosophical concerns.

Reading Ourselves: Placing Critical Literacies in Contemporary Language Education

“…By bringing the authors' argument closer to CL studies, we do acknowledge the value of CLs as a problematizing local practice, developed in the gaps of the curriculum (DUBOC, 2013(DUBOC, , 2014, in those small spaces and places (MORGAN, 2010), in the very instants or points of significance being transformed into critical moments (PENNYCOOK, 2004), much like those that we have been fostering in our own teaching practices. Still, we also find ourselves in a moment in which we end up questioning whether such localized practices suffice if one considers that one of the key responsibilities regarding critical education is related to justice, democracy, and social change.…”

“…By addressing the importance of CLs in education, Duboc (2013Duboc ( , 2014, in turn, advocates in favor of a critical attitude between the gaps (or between the cracks) of the curriculum by deconstructing discursive practices which constantly arise in the classroom, be they in language textbooks, curricular guidelines, or the students' and the teacher's perceptions, ideas, and values.…”

Literacies in Times of Crisis: A Trioethnography on Affective and Transgressive Practices

“…Brian: Your perspective on design (applicable from policy to curriculum, syllabus and lesson plan) makes a lot of sense to me. Learning to recognize and mobilize pedagogical opportunities for rupture and change reminds me of Ana Duboc's (2013) important discussion about fostering "curricular attitude" in language teaching and teacher education. In spite of policy prescriptions and institutional controls, there are always small spaces and fissures in official curricular and disciplinary norms to work with and around.…”

Transnational Imaginaries of Emerging Identities in English Teacher Education in a Period of Accommodation to Social Change in Brazilian Higher Education

“…The western educational system, influenced by the modern way of thinking, has separated knowledge in different areas of cognition or disciplines (disciplining the minds by organizing knowledge) and established that the acquisition of knowledge should be obtained through a universal, "logical" and gradual system of content delivery (SILVA, 1999, p. 24;DUBOC, 2013). However, these systems of gradual acquisition of the different knowledges do not take into account the diversity of contexts in which students and teachers are called to construct knowledge together.…”