Curriculum and ethnic-racial relations: The production of the humanized subject in a confessional school in Belo Horizonte

Abstract

In post-critical educational theorizing, the curriculum, as a heterogeneous unit in which various worldviews compete for space, can be understood as an instrument of government, to the extent that, inserted in an intricate network of power-knowledge relations, it mobilizes techniques and strategies in order to produce a subject desired by it. In the curriculum investigated in this work – namely, the History curriculum of the 1st year of High School of a private confessional school in the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais – I argue that, through a device of raciality, in the "Colégio Machado de Assis" (fictitious name) the production of a "humanized subject" is operationalized from extracurricular activities whose main focus is the development of charity in students.  At the same time, during school hours, the focus should be on content to be used in the performance of tests and exams for admission to higher education. In this process, ethnic-racial relations, understood as power-knowledge relations mobilized by the concepts of race and ethnicity that occur at all times among all racialized subjects, including those who do not assume their own racialities, are experienced at school without, however, being problematized, making the notion that charity is intertwined with the problems arising only from the idea of social class emerge in the discourse.  but it distances itself from the notions of race and ethnicity as important elements in the subordination of certain groups. To this end, I use as a theoretical-methodological approach the post-critical perspective in education and curriculum, mainly from Foucauldian studies, in order to produce a strategic bricolage of four methodological procedures: digital ethnography, in the accompaniment of Helena's online History classes (fictitious name); semi-structured online interviews with coordination, faculty and students, and; "academic dates", i.e., discussion groups on some topics related to the concepts of race and ethnicity held periodically with the seventeen students participating in the research and; analysis of the Foucauldian-inspired discourse, based on the school's website and the information produced collectively in the research. The results showed that, being a school whose vast majority of the public identifies and is socially read as white, the power-knowledge relations operationalized in the curriculum of the "Colégio Machado de Assis" aim at the constitution of a subject, capable of solidarizing and being charitable towards those "less favored" without, however, promoting the questioning of the ethnic-racial issue as a relevant element for the maintenance of the asymmetry of these relations. Thus, although in the discursive field, there is an interest in the treatment of the ethnic-racial issue, it was possible to perceive that the curricular practices analyzed are relegating the discussion of ethnic-racial relations to a second plan, even if the students' own experience causes tensions in the curriculum.

DOI:https://doi.org//10.56238/sevened2024.013-012