Teaching with an Attitude: Finding Ways to the Conundrum of a Postmodern Curriculum

Abstract

Several scholars in the field of education have questioned the constituent aspects of a curriculum that would better respond to the rising demands in contemporary societies. The relevance of such enquiry finds its place in the very transformations in today’s societies marked by significant changes in the ways of knowing, being, and acting primarily due to the advent of new digital media in more recent globalizing processes. As Burke (2009) has stated, if schools wish to maintain their relevance in society, they must take into account such changes by first and foremost acknowledging the new and complex ways of making meanings in out-of-school literacy practices as equally legitimating those happening within school contexts. Along with Burke (ibid.), this paper advocates the need of rethinking the notion of curriculum in the light of the new ontologies and epistemologies of postmodernity. Such task proves itself to be a conundrum inasmuch as the very notion of curriculum has been traditionally founded on modern principles such as linearity, stability, and universality (Silva, 2009). In view of this, how can educators respond to the challenge of redefining what should be taught in schools in postmodern times so that students would better perform in relation to the self and the other within their social practices? This paper aims to analyse the relationship between postmodern philosophical concepts, curriculum theory and educational practice by presenting the notion of curricular attitude (Duboc, 2012) as a local redesign of teaching practices within a Brazilian educational context. Despite being situated in the field of foreign language teaching, the notion of a curricular attitude might be of interest of other areas of knowledge since it seeks to revisit teaching practices in the light of wider philosophical concerns.