Public-private partnerships in the discursive contextualization of the educational responsibility law of Mossoró (RN): curricular repercussions?

Abstract

In this article, we aim to interpret the repercussions of public-private partnerships in the discursive contextualization of the Educational Responsibility Law (LRE) of Mossoró (RN), seeking to understand the curricular effects that emerge from the presence of these articulations within the educational field. Inspired by post-structural perspectives and the policy cycle approach (Ball, 2014; 2018), we understand policies as contested processes, marked by power relations and by the circulation of discourses that traverse the boundaries between the public and the private. The study, problem-oriented (Oliveira; Oliveira; Mesquita, 2013), draws upon document analysis and interviews conducted in three municipal schools in Mossoró, allowing us to observe how the Educational Map, established by the LRE, materializes as an instrument of regulation and curricular audit. The schools’ enunciations reveal tensions between instituted meanings of quality and the singular ways of enacting the curriculum. We argue that the LRE displaces discourses of accountability and performativity, instituting neoliberal rationalities that permeate teachers’ work and produce educational subjectivities attuned to the logic of performance. Thus, we reaffirm the curriculum as a space of enunciation, resistance, and negotiation, in which policies are continuously made and remade, constituting a field of multiple possibilities, of creation and translation, where their traces are inscribed, transformed, and give rise to other narratives, always partial and unfinished.