Abstract:

The Brazilian Curriculum Design study meets the need for a comprehensive description of the different perspectives and views that currently exist in Brazil on curricular issues. Brazil is a federal country with a decentralized education system where the various Federal Units (states, municipalities, Federal District and Union) share educational responsibilities. There is not a single curriculum in Brazil, and each state has their own policy for secondary education, and the municipalities has the responsibility to draw the curriculum for primary education.

The Ministry of Education has prepared and submitted for discussion early drafts called the Common Base National, document that seeks to establish a common curriculum base for the whole country, that should have the support of all stakeholders.

The study shows an overview of how policy makers of Brazilian states and municipalities are thinking and developing their ideas on curriculum, and the fortress, weakness and challenges of the current situation, at the edge of a new curriculum definition.
The study is a descriptive approach to the Brazilian curriculum complexity. The Brazilian federal order states the division of the curriculum responsibility, and opens the possibility of more than five thousand different curriculums in the country (27 curriculums for secondary education and more than 5,500 for primary).

The analysis units of the study are the official documents of each of the 26 states and the Federal District, and four municipalities. This definition was based on the decision to work with the currently existing and publicly available documents.
In order to complete the analysis and to give a general look at the curriculum flows between primary education and secondary education were also analyzed four municipal curriculums.

The analysis of curriculum documents was supplemented with semi-structured interviews conducted in 12 of the 26 states, and 3 municipalities. The purpose of the interviews was to gather information from three groups of key actors in the development process and curriculum implementation: Political authorities, curricular experts at the educational secretaries, and school teachers.

The study allows to observes that the collaborative regime, constitutionally established for the proper functioning of the Brazilian education system, does not work in practice. Is almost guaranteed that every student should face different curriculum and pedagogical scopes in their education. The most of the curriculum designs states learning outcomes by levels or cycles while just a few have definitions more linked to academic settings, with very broad guidelines. There is a great diversity in educational scopes, while some of them are competences oriented, other has an explicit rejection about competences curriculum and take options by knowledge based curriculums. What students should learn, despite the efforts developed by states and municipalities in order to provide a curricular referent for their educational systems, finally became provided by other stakeholders. Diversity is a national compulsory subject and all the curriculums must have a definition about it. Although, these definitions are mainly discursive, and do not have expression in the prescriptions or practices. The non-existence of a common curricular reference in Brazil has as a consequence the non-existence of a common language to dialogue about education in the country.

Keywords:

Curriculum, curriculum design, curriculum policies.