Letter to my student teachers: Another knowledge is possible

Abstract

The proposal will analyse the impact of current curriculum and teacher education policies and practices in the daily lives of students and teachers in Portuguese schools. The author will adopt the genre of letter to her student teachers – inspired by the work of Paulo Freire -, to question the neoliberal momentum that is taking over the capacity for critical analysis and informed choice by teachers. Taking a critical discourse analysis approach by building on the idea that “reason is ideological, not grammatical” (Freire, 2013, p. 48), the author will analyse samples of the discourses produced by teachers on their students, on the purposes of schooling, and on the justification of their pedagogical options. This discourse mirrors (educational) common sense ideas that, by naturalizing discrimination, racism, sexism, colonialism, and patriarchy in educational policies and practices, severely hamper the right of all children to a democratic and inclusive education. Their discourse also reveals their epistemological standpoint, based on a foundational colonial assumption: knowledge as a product of a relation subject-object (Quijano, 1992, p. 14). This assumption clearly shows the what and whose knowledge is of most worth: the one embedded in a Eurocentric colonial matrix that hardly goes “beyond the Western-European, Christian, white, blue-eyed, heterosexual, male cultural terrain” (Paraskeva, 2016, p. 45). As Paraskeva (2011, 2016) vehemently argues, we need to fight for (an)other knowledge outside the Western epistemological platform, one that will engage us in the struggle against daily curriculum epistemicides that take place in schools worldwide.

References Freire, P. (2013). Pedagogia da autonomia: Saberes necessários à prática educativa educativa [Pedagogy of autonomy: Knowledges needed for educational practice] (45th Ed.). São Paulo: Editora Paz e Terra. Quijano, A. (1992). Colonialidad y modernidade/ racionalidade. Perú Indígena, 13(29), 11-20. Paraskeva, J. (2011). Conflicts in curriculum theory: Challenging hegemonic epistemologies. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan. Paraskeva, J. (2016). Curriculum epistemicide: Toward an itinerant curriculum theory. New York, NY: Routledge.