Epistemic Colonization in the Brazilian Scientific Curriculum

Abstract

The curriculum is characterized as an official document consisting of a space in which there are political, ideological, and cultural disputes. In addition, its existence configures the importance of making choices about what will be taught by teachers. In this way, such choices are characterized by political and ideological elements, since determining what is taught is, at the same time, defining the type of society that one wants to build. In this sense, this paper presents an investigative study on decolonization as an epistemological level that is manifested in the Brazilian curriculum, highlighting the normative document for high school. Thus, based on the fact that Brazil is a historically colonized country we have a hypothesis studied that there are elements in the Brazilian curriculum that contribute to colonizing at the knowledge level. In order to identify such elements with documentary research, we used the Discursive Analysis (DA) and Critical Discursive Analysis (CDA) to show which socio-cultural and power elements manifest the epistemic colonization in the curriculum. As initial results, aspects of the discourse of the curriculum are presented, materialized in the form of rule and pedagogical orientation, which corroborate with theoretical aspects about epistemic colonization.