Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC) and the “curriculum in motion” of the Distrito Federal: contradictions and prescriptive subversions

Abstract

This article aims to present arguments around the contradictions that approximate and distance the Base Nacional Comum Curricularand the curriculum in movement (CM) of public schools in the Federal District, Brazil. The investigation took the two normative prescriptions as guidelines for a documental analysis that also included a brief state of the artaccount on what recent research has highlighted regarding the local curriculum policy. Furthermore, we conveya bibliographic review of the curriculum studies that support us to reflect on this theme. The text is organized as follows: a discussion on the relevance of curriculum studies in the scope of schools, followed by a debate on the BNCC and the place and non-place of the curriculum, going through the reality of the Secretaria de Educação do Distrito Federal, the potentialities and weaknesses of the CM, ending with the data collected. Through the axes elaboration processes, the conception of education, curriculum theories, structure, output profile, management, and assessment, preliminarily findings indicate that the CM in its prescribed version subverts the BNCC because it is based on  historical-critical pedagogy, whose theoretical maxim is the guarantee that working-class students have access to scientific, artistic, philosophical, and cultural knowledge accumulated by humanity in public school, which does not seem to be the target of the national document.