Novos sentidos das políticas curriculares para a educação profissional no Instituto Federal Sul-rio-grandense

Abstract

This work discusses new meanings that are being produced in the curriculum policies for professional education at the Sul-rio-grandense Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology (IFSul) during its institutional transformation in 2008. Considering educational policies in a complex way, as proposed by Stephan Ball and using the theoretical framework of Ernesto Laclau s Discourse Theory, we seek to identify some senses through official documents from the Ministry of Education (MEC), IFSul, as well as from interviews with IFSul s administrators and faculty. Different documents were organized into groups and analyzed with WordSmith Tools. By adopting the concept of curriculum/curricular policies as a discursive practice, as proposed by Lopes and Alice Elizabeth Macedo, we aim to analyze the different elements that compose the field of discursivity in Technological and Vocational Education, at local and national level, emphasizing historical conflicts and structural, cultural and discursive aspects which induce limits and possibilities for curricular policies at IFSul. In the process of analysis, we chose to identify, in different contexts, meanings and displacements around the significant teaching, research, extension and articulation. First it is verified that there is institutional priority for the teaching dimension, we find different forms of acceptance for discourses of integration and verticalization and we identify the myth that teaching is consolidated in the federal vocational education system and in this school. It is concluded that there are difficulties in fixing senses for research and extension and there is an acceptance of meanings for these dimensions similar to them in the university context, which does not seem to be consistent with an institution that acts predominantly on vocational education at high school level. Although there are advances in the administrative structure and research funding, the main expectation is that workers are able to institutionalize research and extension, although we found sensations of intensification on the part of teachers that now have to cope with the overlapping of work of the three dimensions in an institutional context that values formally only the time for teaching. The signifier articulation was identified as overdetermined of meanings, with the capacity to become an empty signifier for construction of hegemonic curriculum policies in the institution.