INTEGRATION IN HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION: HEGEMONIC STRUGGLE FOR SIGNIFICATION OF THE CURRICULUM

Abstract

The paper focuses on the discourses of integration in Brazilian curricular policy for secondary education, from 1998 to 2012. The central objective is to understand the production of integration discourses as a hegemonic struggle for the meaning of the curriculum, evidencing the articulation process that enabled certain provisional and contingent meanings to be established in the curricular texts. Methodologically, the research is based on a qualitative approach and is characterized as a bibliographic and documentary review. Ernesto Laclau's Theory of Speech (1987, 2011, 2013) and Stephen Ball's Continuing Cycle of Policies (1992, 1994) are the strategic contributions that support the research. This theoretical-methodological framework enabled us to analyze curricular policy as discursive production and as a struggle for the provisional establishment of meanings. The categories used to organize the data from the documentary analysis are: demand, antagonism, articulation, hegemony and empty signifier. These categories are derived from central notions that structure Discourse Theory. The results of this research showed that the hegemonized discourses of integration found in the curricular texts do not present fixed or stable meanings, but link a multiplicity of changing and shifting meanings, as they are constructed through relations of differences and equivalence between old and new demands that vie for space in the high school curriculum policy. Due to the impossibility of establishing a literal and transparent meaning that encompasses or cancels out all the differences that characterize the policy of struggle, a negotiation around integration led to the emergence of an empty signifier, under which ambiguous, contradictory and fluctuating meanings shift and change.