School Subject Community in Times of Death of the Subject

Perhaps the death of the Subject (with a capital 'S') has been the main precondition of this renewed interest in the question of subjectivity.

Ernesto Laclau. In: Universalism, particularism and the question of identity, 1996.

Introduction

Ivor Goodson is considered the founder of History of School Subjects (HSS). He organizes his theoretical production as a movement deriving from the New Sociology of Education (NSE), while also influenced by the US curriculum reconceptualization movement.

Goodson’s works (1983, 1985, 1988, 1993, 1994) arise as a contribution to the field, based mainly on a sociology of curriculum geared towards the historical study of the schooling process. He focuses on the investigation of these processes in relation to the HSS, giving a more empirical form to the NSE project. In this sense, he researches the actions of communities and associations, as well as the relationships among its components, aimed at the denaturalization and understanding of conflicts waged around the definition and promotion of a school subject.

Through these studies, the epistemological conception of the school subject is questioned. The school subject is understood within the power dynamics of a specific community that supports and sustains it – and it is sustained by it. Goodson (1983, 1985, 1988, 1993, 1994) proposes to investigate the socio-historical dynamics that contribute to the emergence, maintenance and promotion of school subjects. He argues that the study of the disciplines, their establishment and stabilization process in the school curriculum – as school subjects – and in the academic and scientific field – as area of knowledge – is related to causative mechanisms of changes that occur, over time, in the contents and approaches of a discipline or school subject.

Goodson focuses on how power relations constitute education systems, on how school subjects are their own constructions rather than derivations of science. It is through the investigation of the HSS, in their relation to academic disciplines, that the problematic curricular elements reside even if influences from the academic field in the school environment can be identified. To understand the evolution of school subjects, Goodson (1993) constructs a theory based on David Layton’s model (1972) that, in general terms, intends to explain the process of development of a school subject, based on the socio-historical processes of legitimation of knowledge.

In addition to the numerous studies on the HSS conducted in Brazil and other countries, Goodson’s studies are the basis for works that advocate the differentiation among school subjects, academic disciplines and scientific disciplines (Deng, 2007; Deng and Luke, 2008; Lopes, 2011). These studies question the reasons for the stability of disciplinary curriculum (Lopes and Macedo, 2009a), and criticize the naturalization of academic knowledge (Lopes and Macedo, 2009b). These studies also move away from the thesis that hold teacher education or epistemological conservatism of teachers as maintainers of disciplinary curriculum. Goodson also inspires works that differentiate school subjects and academic disciplines through non-historical arguments (Stengel, 1997). Through this notion of school subject, investigations into curriculum policy also become more complex, because these investigations focus on disciplinary practices in the context of schools, rather than investigating the history of scientific and academic disciplines (Ball and Bowe, 1992; Darby, 2006; Winter, 2011).

In the works of our research group in curriculum policy, the notion of school subject community (Goodson, 1993, 1994) is explored. ¹ Goodson contributes to identify, in the broader field of critical social theory, a specific category of social agent and the socio-historical processes that constitute a school subject. The author’s work also concerns the dynamics that support a school subject as a social fact (Goodson and Ball, 1984).

Also part of the trajectory of our research group, however, is the incorporation of post-structural theoretical contributions. We have initiated with Stephen Ball’s contributions – also a scholar of the HSS in a sociological perspective (Ball, 1983) – that, a posteriori, strongly incorporates Foucault in his works (Ball, 1990, 2013). After that, as have many others in the Education field (Buenfil, 2009; Chueh, 2005; Clarke, 2012; Lapping, 2008; Lugg, 2009; Warren et al., 2011; Szkudlarek, 2011), we have deepened the incorporation of post-structural theoretical contributions with Laclau’s theory of discourse (1996, 2005). We began to explore discursive perspectives and decentered structures. We have strived to question the determinism of a power center over curriculum policies, as well as the postulation of a subjectivity capable of transcending any and all determination. There is no predestined identity in a main condition of political subjectivation; all identities are constructed in the political conflicts for significance.

At this point, we question the fixity of perspectives based on the conception of a subject designed before political conflicts, guided by teleological readings (historical, economic or cultural, for example). Differently, we argue that there are processes of subjectivation/identification marked by contingency. In our focus, based on a post-foundational and post-structural view, these processes should not be thought of as standing over the identification of individuals, social actors, social groups, professional associations or party affiliations. The subjectivation is produced through contingent responses and in relation to what, on one occasion, constitutes a threat or something to be blocked. Through fixed subjects, therefore, the political subjectivation, in its temporariness, constitutes the claims in politics/policies, in the articulation of meaning, and the discursive production of contextual truths.

In turn, we agree with Goodson (1993) that disciplinarity, particularly, but not exclusively, in High School is part of how teachers enunciate their identities. Many studies (Siskin, 1991; Grossman and Stodolsky, 1995a) conclude how disciplinary characteristics (subject area departments or subject matters) are even more significant in the cultural education of teachers than the institutional characteristics themselves. In schools, subjects form the first organizational unit of the institution, in which the teacher negotiates his/her teaching performance – content sequences, curricular materials, topics chosen for inclusion in a course of study, pedagogical techniques. These processes considerably influence the micro-policy related to ‘what’ and ‘how’ teachers work, and the decisions and forms of action of social subjectivities (Siskin, 1991; Darby, 2006). Due to these processes, school subject boundaries become even stronger.

School subjects are linked to a teacher’s professional identity. They are understood as cultures that create a conceptual context in which teachers work and reinterpret curricular definitions (Grossman and Stodolsky, 1995b). Affiliations to subject communities are capable of influencing the teachers’ ways of teaching, their perceptions and self-image, conceived as a space for the construction of teachers’ needs (Tytler et al., 2011). In addition, curricula remain being constructed on behalf of school subjects. Curricula reforms are carried out with the participation of social actors linked to disciplinary and subject communities. Curricular proposals are presented according to a subject matter organization, even when they incorporate the enhancement of curriculum integration in different countries (Ball and Bowe, 1992; Beane, 1995; Dowden, 2007; Klein, 2006; Newell, 2010; Vars and Beane, 2000; Whitty et al., 1994a, 1994b).

The persistence of disciplinary curricular organization seems to maintain Kliebard’s statement for the North American curriculum as relevant (2004): the school subject proved to be an impregnable fortress; it changes, but it survives. Thus, as Goodson’s theory has structural concerns and, therefore, is organized with socio-historical conditions for the explanation of the phenomena, we consider it relevant to reconceptualize the school subject community category, or even to enact its deconstruction (Derrida, 1982). For this purpose, we propose to include other subjectivity senses through post-structural theory. While we acknowledge the impossibility of containment of differential senses, we point out that our distance from Goodson’s reading of ‘community’ takes place, also, due to our distance from the assumption of the existence of common, positive data, capable of generating cohesion and/or unity among individuals. These features characterize the community approach on which Goodson’s is based, namely, the sociological and anthropological/ethnographic perspective (Costa and Lopes, 2016). Hence, guided by our history of research and Laclau’s theory of discourse, we discuss the possibility of thinking about the subjectivity of a community.

We started this debate in other texts that reflect on the very sense of discipline (Lopes, 2011), as well as questioning the idea of a project based on the action of certain fixed subject positions (Lopes and Macedo, 2016). However, there remains the need to face the essentialization of the notion of school subject community. This essentialization is constructed by setting the actors that belong to a school subject community or by the idea of a collective that advocates some actions or acts in favor of some ideas in a disciplinary context. It becomes a theoretical-strategic impasse to link this community to a notion of social actor/agent capable of being the center of political action, even within the realm of a community. If subjectivity is not understood with fixed identities in the post-structural perspective, if there is no ontological foundations outside contingent dynamics, if the Subject (with capital S) does not exist, how can one think about the meaning of the school subject community? ² How to research the school subject community as a collective subjectivity without essentializing this subjectivity?

In a general sense, we agree with Fendler (2006) when she suggests – also using the theory of discourse – that to problematize the idea of community opens up space for difference. In addition, we agree with Tesar (2016, p. 1) when he argues that ‘thinking of philosophy and policy together, no matter how complex their relationship may be, is a productive space’.

In this article, we aim to theorize the understanding of a school subject community using a discursive approach, in particular concerning the theoretical and strategic possibilities of this notion in the research of curriculum policy. In summary, in these times in which the death of the centered, conscious and cohesive Subject is assumed (Hall, 1992; Laclau, 1996), what precisely do we mean by subjectivity (collective or not) when we are talking about a school subject community? We try to consider the consequences of the death of the Subject (centered, conscious) to the conception of community. There is a subject (decentered, non-conscious) and there is a constitutive lack in the subject. Therefore, how do we conceive the community of subjects? How do we conceive the school subject community? In addition, how do we investigate school subject communities in curriculum policy?

Seeking to answer those questions, we first present how Goodson conceives the school subject community and present a discursive conception of the school subject community. After this, we present our interpretation of a school subject community as a discursive articulation, and discuss how we investigate the action of school subject community in curriculum policies.

Discourse and subjectivation (in) policies

To Goodson (1983, 1985, 1988, 1993, 1994), a community is composed of a history, and is produced by a range of factors and individual and collective possibilities, engaged in professional missions, also of corporate nature, and, therefore, authorized by a center: the school subject identification. This center gives them an essence, a common sense, and produces a comm(on)unity. This sense of community is based on a socio-historical construction perspective and on sociological identity. The socio-historical community, as a political subjectivity, brings together the interests of individuals and internal subgroups, based on their historical processes.

The history of scientific fields, of school subjects, of schooling, the social demands of a determined moment and market demands are placed by Goodson (1985) as the entire range of causes for the changes in configuration of a school subject and, consequently, of the curriculum. In this sense, Goodson (1993) proposes the comprehension of subject communities as way for the investigation about the influence of such (re)configurational effects of a school subject. The focus on the school subject community is based on the understanding that actors compose the community. These actors support the school subject, since they organize it with the intention to acquire professional benefits.

Thus, different groups, in different historical periods, using a common name/flag (the name of the school subject), constitute, according to Goodson, a school subject community. Such groups construct the school subject, creating specialized associations, with its own standards and ethics. They also dispute the social space of school subjects. In Goodson’s conception (1993), a school subject community is not a homogenous group, but is constituted by the relationships of the internal sub-groups, professional factions with different perspectives. The author also highlights that, since its internal groups have different conceptions, there are disputes and divergences, and, through them, there are agreements and negotiations. To Goodson (1993), a school subject community operates in the attempt to maintain the curricular stability of a school subject and, simultaneously, to promote it in the knowledge market.

Even though the school subject community is not seen as homogenous, but internally fractioned, it is admissible to think that Goodson conceives it as having a positivity. This positivity is able to integrate individuals acting inside it: the professional identification with the school subject is a symbolic mechanism. In this way, it is possible to interpret that the policy action is developed only among peers, i.e. the school subject practitioners.

In this sense, we defend that Goodson (1985, 1993) constructs the reflection about the actions of the school subject community as looking for growth of the school subject dominions. In this scenario, the school subject is thought of as a ‘coalition’ (Goodson, 1985, p. 190), which holds different identities, values and interests. The professions made possible by the school subject field (schoolteachers) became a range of different objectives. In this case, the name of the school subject (Mathematics, Natural Science, History, or any name) is a common name that keeps these professionals together.

The character of a subjective conscience, as well as the determining factors of policy engagement, are very clear aspects for Goodson (1985, 1993). These aspects symbolize the material interests of the community in the search for professional and corporate benefits. In addition, the coordination of the historical and social factors is highlighted as the way for policy associations in the context of the school subject community and, later, in the way each teacher will deal with the socio-historical structure in which he/she finds himself/herself.

The school subject community, to Goodson, is the central policy of subjectivity in the school subject promotion. However, we stress that limiting the school subject community to professionals practicing in the field and, consequently, to consider that all possibilities for involvement in the curriculum policy are based fundamentally on corporate questions, throughout Goodson’s work (1985, 1993), inspire us to question his perspective of subject and policy struggle. With the incorporation of theory of discourse in the reading of what the school subject community may be, the interpretation of the political subjectivity as not being a person aware of his/her possibilities in the face of a problematic policy stands out. In Laclau (1996), the political subjectivity consists precariously in the temporariness: differential demands, in view of the representation of a threat (an antagonist), are articulated discursively, constituting policy subjectivities. The subjectivity is not conceived from his/her life story, his/her work experience, his/her political party or corporate engagement. There is no essence defined a priori. Any subjectivity is contingently produced, through discursive means. As discussed by Laclau (1996), any political subjectivity is relational and contextual, because social differences are articulated in an equivalential moment (never equality). The equivalential moment is made possible by antagonism to a difference that is expelled from the articulatory chain of differences. Therefore, this antagonism is a condition of possibility and impossibility of articulation.

In this process, the equivalential moment (the moment of subjectivation) is represented by a name. Based on the Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Laclau (2005) considers that the unity of a given object is simply retroactive and resulting from its naming process. There is a heterogeneous array of features whose unity is sustained by the name. Without the presence of the name, the community – produced in a context of subjectivation – would dissolve in a spray of disarticulated elements. The same would happen with its antagonistic identity.

Given the importance of the naming, of its consequence for the construction of identities and its relevance in the political game, it is important to understand the signification processes that feed the names. These names will ensure the unity of conflicting identities in the curriculum policy in focus. According to Laclau (1996, 2005), it is based on the set of differences involved in the articulation that an individual demand will represent, precariously, the entire chain of equivalence. In that condition, this difference begins to undergo emptying/excess of fulfillment of senses. In order to encompass the totality, it seeks to admit the maximum adherence by all other differences involved. These differences need to be supplemented and integrated in the representation through this identity that try to represent the others. In this process of openness to other senses arising from other social identifications, in the search for universalization, this peculiarity becomes hegemonic (Laclau, 2005). To Laclau, hegemony is precisely a metonymic process whereby a signifier – a name – comes to represent something larger. In another sense, hegemony arises if the particular assumes a universal function.

In the hegemonization process, a demand shall be emptied of its previous meanings and will conform to an empty signifier (Laclau, 2005). It is in this condition of symbolic vagueness, of inaccuracy of its senses, that the greater possibility of the attempt of representation of the ‘social totality’ resides. It is impossible to represent the totality in a direct manner, since the total is composed of elements that are heterogeneous between one another. An empty signifier cannot be signified univocally, precisely and directly as a totality. It presents itself ‘in the fulfillment’ of senses. That is the condition for all identities involved in the chain of equivalences, in articulation, to be understood in the same political struggle, even if distinctive in meaning (Laclau, 1996). However, we stress that, in the same field, it is possible to have signifiers whose senses are sharper or nuanced, even if not fixed. The articulations that lead them to coalesce certain demands are sustained on the precarious and contingent ground of the political articulations. Such a signifier is considered capable of producing/binding to specific meanings, and is conceived as a fluctuating signifier (Laclau, 2005). ³

We argue that, if Goodson´s school subject community were read in light of the theory of discourse, one might point out that, in other articulations, a given subjectivity may (would) act antagonistically to what it is (would be) identified as school subject community at a given (other) context. This is because, to Laclau (1996), the subjectivation is not constructed by a positive adherence to a particular political platform by an awareness or respect/sense of mission to its socio-historical factors. From another point of view, the subjectivation is triggered by the opposition to something meant as a threat.

There is not, to Laclau, the possibility of accounting for a hard core, as a symmetry among the differences, of a community that is able to render itself essential, and, hence, function as a guide to decision-making. Antagonism is the element that generates a sense of cohesion to the differences involved in a given discursive construction, against a given negativity, something with which to confront.

The uncertainty, ephemerality and inconsistency of the constitution of subjectivities, to Laclau, leads to conjecture that the community is composed of the most different senses, by fragmentation and differential readings. ⁴ These senses and readings cannot have a history with the school subject. They are not owned (professionally or by a common training) by a school subject field to which they are, in a specific context, constituting a community.

By stressing this reading of a subjectivity (subjectivation), we emphasize the character as non-consciousness of the subject. The subject is constituted, temporarily, by dynamics that never cease, which are uncontrollable (logic of difference), and also by attempts to coalesce and reconcile, among dynamics considered common (logic of equivalence). This reading of a subjectivity (subjectivation) is due to the very problematic motivating politics/policies, it is nothing more than a unique signification of a name, a word, a flag, whose ultimate meaning is never given.

This reading entails to understand the social, the political struggle or the political motivations as dislocated from historicist, structural foundations, and of a vision of subjectivity capable of consciously acting strategically in order to carry out his/her projects. Strategies are in the order of the non-political calculation, unable to account for meaning, to eliminate the possibilities of translating, of iterating. ⁵ The teleological, deterministic character of a history on a subjectivity fails to define the policies, and may be presented only as one more name, discourse, through which articulations are produced by the signification of differences that are never homogenized. Any homogenization is just a temporary illusion over a consensus around a name that someone thinks protects him/her of something.

This discursive interpretation of subjectivation is made possible by an understanding of the discourse as an integrity intertwined with the relationships of signifiers that temporarily hold the significance of certain practices, and, once articulated, face an antagonistic constitutive exterior (Laclau, 1996). The antagonism is not a simple opposition, contained in a being/non-being relationship (which identity is or is not), since, in this binary nature, the being is defined by a structure that places him/her in certain identity.

We refer to a non-essentialist being/non-being relationship: the identity is made possible as much as blocked in its fullness. Antagonism refers to what prevents the subjectivity (identity) from being, and, simultaneously, the antagonism is responsible for the constitutive lack of all identity (subjectivity).

It is from this discursive perspective that identity construction is conceived. The identity constituted in the political articulation has no origin, no genesis. The community is always a heterogeneous set of articulated particular demands (not individuals or groups or institutions) made equivalent, in the face of an identity threat, in a given context created by the same discursive description. ⁶ The idea of an institutionalized and cohesive community supposedly universalized is due to particular demands that are provisionally and contextually capable of representing the same community, ensuring it an always absent plenitude and homogeneity. The representation of this community is always the attempt to homogenize – thus simplify – a heterogeneous social. As discussed by Laclau (2005), the institutionalized discourse tries to coincide the limits of a discursive formation with the limits of the community.

Although there is no integrative positivity of differences articulated in an equivalential chain, Laclau (1996) argues that there is the production of a ‘truth’ or a value able to cement the equivalence among articulated differences. This ‘truth’ or value, according to Laclau (1996), does not exist outside of a context. The validity of any claim or statement can only be defined contextually, internally to the assembly founded in equivalential occasion. These marks that foster the formation of an equivalence chain – exclusion and antagonism – are constitutive of all identity: community, subject, curriculum, knowledge and so on.

School subject community as discursive articulation

We argue here in favor of a school subject as a discursive construction. There is no common training, no professional competences or primordial knowledge or even consensual epistemological commitments to be appropriated by the members of a community, without which they would be excluded. We argue that such trainings, competences, knowledge and commitments are constituted while we become disciplinary. It is through different political struggles that school subjects are made hegemonic and identifications/subjectivities are constituted in these struggles. School subjects, seen in this light, are not linked to the identity setting process, but are discursive communities.

The school subject community, consisting of equivalential relations, is based on articulated differences in a specific policy: policies in support of a curriculum centralization, those that propose curriculum by competences, which strengthen the links between curriculum and assessment, and many others that we can investigate. From an assumed wider social whole, differences are articulated and certain communities, or equivalential identifications, are formed, not by having a foundational property, but because, on one occasion, they are jointly opposed to a constitutive exterior, with which an antagonism is established. They are opposed to a threatening subjectivity, and, thus, are constituted as precarious and provisional subjectivity, marked precisely by the illusion of speaking the same language: building a knowledge, epistemological foundations and legitimacy practices are assumed as non-political.

For example, if we investigate the community in defense of the school subject Mathematics, we have to research all demands in the name of the school subject Mathematics. The discourses that Mathematics is important to get a job, to understand the world and to create a science have to be considered as well as the school issues and Mathematic teachers’ careers. In the Brazilian school subject Geography, the defenses of integrated curriculum through interdisciplinary (considered as a proposal to overcome the disciplinary curriculum in the national curriculum policy) were articulated to the scientific and philosophical arguments of geographical thought that define the discipline as highly interdisciplinary. In addition, the articulations in the name Geography also involve generic senses of defense for disciplinary curricular organization, and specific views (not only defended by geographers and/or Geography teachers) to Geography teaching. School Geography is understood as a way of producing a full understanding of globalization, a complex thought, and contributes with answers to urban and environmental challenges.

Therefore, the differences between school subjects, academic disciplines and scientific disciplines are not sent to the institutional locus of the different struggles for legitimacy within each of these communities. They are distinct discursive productions, because they refer to different social demands, articulatory practices that support different identifications, different antagonisms.

These are the subjectivities produced in the political articulation. We conceive its operations beyond Goodson’s idea of school subject community, based on identified groups, associations, institutions and disciplines or subject matter. We also emphasize not to be the consideration of other institutions, ‘external’ or non-disciplinary, non-school, as the reason for the redefinition of the proposed school subject community, but rather to understand that the attempt to stabilize such influences, even in Goodson’s work, already mark the productive potential of disseminated discourses. It means to take into account that understanding a curriculum policy of a school subject follows a different path of enumeration of (pre) supposed actors or institutions. In this perspective, the school subject community is formed by subjectivities constituted by provisional operations in the discursive field of the school subject.

With this interpretation, we also distance ourselves from interpretations, as supported by Borg (2003) and Swales (1990), which operate within the disciplinary and teachers’ professionalism as discourse community (see, for example, Tytler et al., 2011). Such interpretations incorporate the social construction of language and communication as components of teacher identities. However, they work in another view and maintain certain transparency of language. For them, there is a subjectivity centered and capable of conceiving ‘a discourse community of science teachers and discipline-based professionals that is characterized by common epistemological and axiological commitments, and which has a traceable history of production of ideas across the range of genres’ (Tytler et al., 2011, p. 878).

The school subject community conceived in a discursive perspective – the discursive community – is a space of ongoing dispute for signification, for the hegemony of senses. Therefore, it does not have a stable center, an integrative positivity. The threat to which it opposes is also constructed in this perspective. As the differences articulated in the chain in focus does not cease to exist (they are just limited due to the equivalence that subverts them in the articulation), the heterogeneous and unstable character of equivalential chain is highlighted. The same process sets up its opposite, its enemy (the threat, the antagonism). If this enemy is not homogeneous, it has no essence nor does it refer to an ontic dimension, articulated identities can be translating different elements only as one same threat, a catalyst on behalf of the significance of the threat, and thus articulating against that name. The name of the enemy can be: ‘the process that left one child behind’; ‘neoliberalism’; ‘the teachers that don’t know how to teach’ and many others, which are understood in so many different ways in different contexts. Hence, the importance of the name or naming process to generate certain conceptual positivity that guarantees the provisional unit.

In these terms, research questions change. We attempt to understand what is named as a school subject, who speaks on behalf of the school subject and who defends this name in/for the school curriculum, what this naming excludes and against what it operates. The HSS already made us understand that the investigation of a school subject could not cease with the identification of its name in the curricula plans, so as to affirm or not the teaching of their matter in school. On other hand, the research of school subjects in the curriculum policy in a discursive approach disconnects, once and for all, that link between the name of the school subject and the subject matter. Supported by the separation between signifier and signified, developed after the post-structural perspective, the name of the relation between the name of the school subject and the subject matter is designed as a set of epistemological meanings, politically articulated on behalf of a disciplinary significant.

In theoretical and strategic terms, the discursive boundaries of a school subject community cannot be defined in advance to political actions. Neither can social actors be listed as stable, stabilized nor stabilising leaders, as authorities constituted of an epistemological view, even if socially constructed, thus producing senses to curriculum policies, indifferent to policy itself. Through the name of a school subject and the very disciplining of school, curricular interpretations are sedimented. In an attempt to stabilize a curriculum, pedagogical actions are constituted, beyond and below the actions of professional teachers, legitimized as spokespersons for this name. To investigate curriculum – its policies, its organization or its history – seeking to contain once and for all the boundaries of what is named as school subject community becomes a vain and necessarily imprecise task.

This option has led us to invest, particularly in policy research, in interpreting the contingent identification/subjectivation, linked to a given context, to commitments made and options to perform a set of policy actions. Instead of focusing on investigations of social actors linked to school subject or disciplinary name that participate in policies – signed documents, texts, positions held – we seek to focus on articulations that constitute disciplinary or school subject discourses.

We believe theoretically that discourses subjectivate collectives. These collectives speak in the name of the school subject, beyond the professional groups constituted around disciplinary knowledge. After all, the social demand for certain school subjects – Mother Tongue, Mathematics or Science, for example, to name only labels that have been repeated internationally as symbols of what is thought to be knowledge universally valid – is neither sustained or enunciated only by those affiliated to work with them. Demands for school subjects have ties to an imagination of what comes to be the school, curriculum, knowledge, supposed guarantees of success in school and in life. They are articulated, in turn, with so many other curriculum demands.

When operating in this perspective, we draw from Laclau’s proposition (2005, 2014). Questioning policy investigations of sociological basis, Laclau proposes that policy research does not focus on social groups usually assumed as already established, but rather to unmet needs that, once articulated, are capable of producing different social groups. A social demand is characterized by Laclau (2005) as request and expectation that, once missed, can turn into claims in defense of a vast array of groups that come together in a political struggle. Responding to Zizek’s questions about the notion of demand, Laclau (2014) emphasizes that, by the extent of equivalence among different claims, it becomes more difficult to determine the instance to which such claims are directed. Such an instance – stated as an enemy, a threat – is then constructed discursively by modifying the identity of all those who participate in the claim. This process produces political struggles as a battle of representations, in which claims directed to institutional order become claims against the established order. Movements produced by the equivalence among a plurality of unmet needs turn out to question the legitimacy of institutions.

From this perspective, the research of those who assume rightwing or leftwing labels in curriculum policy do not gain prominence or centrality. Besides that, groups linked to certain social movements, political parties, associations of all sorts and other institutions are seen as social actors. What interests us is precisely the identifications of contextual demands around which subjectivities are constituted. Such subjectivities may include reference to most common perspectives, the strength of their names must be considered in the political movement: claims on behalf of the black movement, for example, is not the same as claims on behalf of a specific school. ⁷ However, it is not through prior understanding of alleged positions linked to each of these views or the use of contradiction category with a given history of political struggle that seems to be possible to discursively investigate a social identification. Prior to the political game, with its conflicts and antagonisms, there is no stable identity that allows one to predict or assume a given policy action. Once a particularity is raised as a condition of threat to the fulfillment of differential demands or to the realization of projects that allow us to suppose that same fulfillment, discourses are constructed and proven to be able to coalesce around different actors and social institutions.

Thus identifications are made, without awareness or strategy, of multiple articulation chains into which they are inserted. This way of operating, always interpretative, takes us away from an essentialization of identities of actors who work in policies, since we understand such identities as constituted by the way in which such unmet demands are incorporated into articulatory practice. To Laclau (2014), social actions are conceived as demands, because the subjectivity is always ‘the subject of lack’: ‘it always emerges out of an asymmetry between the (impossible) fullness of the community and the particularism of a place of enunciation’ (Laclau, 2014, p. 149–150).

Particularly in curriculum policy, we seek to build the notion of curricular demand. By curricular demand, we understand the demands at stake in curriculum policy. Demands for content, for pedagogical trends, school subjects, curricular activities and ways of conceiving and making the curriculum. Those demands, once articulated, produce the meaning of curriculum. We do not provide these demands with any idea of ‘purity’ in relation to the struggle for quality education. Curricular demands also hybridize with demands for working conditions, demands on professional issues, to the prestige and teaching career, salary, so that claims of social order are not separated from personal claims. In the enunciation of these demands, references are made to curricular tradition, to sedimented pedagogical discourses, but the very political struggle modifies traditions and demands, and discourses are constituted by articulations.

These demands, when not met, can be articulated in wider chains of equivalence, in which the demands for better education become moments of a political process connected with other struggles, such as employment, health, and so many more differential demands, impossible to predict. The recent movement by The Penguin Revolution, in Chile, can illustrate this process in the realm of educational policy struggles. ⁸

We are, however, interested in focusing on articulations among curricular demands in a more specific, but no less important, context on curriculum policy. We argue that, by means of such articulations, disputes develop among the meanings of what content, competency, evaluation, educational success, subject matter and school knowledge may be, designing social identifications with multiple intangible effects. If connecting the curriculum policy struggles to broader political and social struggles was important in the field of reconceptualization of curriculum from a critical focus (Lopes and Macedo, 2014), it seems to us that to deconstruct sedimented curriculum discourses can help make pedagogical readings more plural and differentiated. ⁹ This deconstruction seems to us important, especially when such sedimented curricular discourses operate in the stabilization of non-democratic educational institutions. We invest in these different readings to modify the institutional curricular rules, which, in turn, can contribute with unanticipated ways and not determined by other political struggles by social meaning.

Such discourses are always translations trying to contain the process of difference that cannot be contained completely (Derrida, 1981, 1982, 1985). In the investigation of curricular demands, we name discourses – constructivist, historical-critical, instrumental, neo-Marxist, phenomenological, interactionist, psychological, sociological, Freire’s – by attempting to refer to the spectres (Derrida, 1982) of pedagogical discourses that we know cannot stabilize, since demarcated original texts are not fullness to which we may refer. Every reiteration of these texts succumbs to the supplementation, to the language games pertaining to differ. Every involvement, in that sense, performs translations that, even if committed to a communication, accuracy or control of certain enunciation, always lead to the dissemination of and in the text (Trifonas, 1993), because it is always exposed to the other, to the uniqueness of the other (Munday, 2011; Sinha, 2013). Hence, we point out, in line with Ruitenberg (2009), that, while we dispute the signification of a given name, we operate in ways of failing to control its ultimate significance.

This theoretical option, in turn, under the approaches we have agreed upon, makes sense only if referring to such a radical contextualization of policy. We try to refer to the circumstances and institutional structures in Derrida’s sense, of a given reading (Derrida, 1982). We always investigate a context – which is not confined by time and space, but by the chains of possible substitutions that constitute a given discourse. In this context, a given community speaks on behalf of the school subject, deciding on behalf of what is supposed to be the truth of disciplinary knowledge. For this decision, school subject community is rendered subjective, it makes judgements and commitments and creates a history that supports the reasonableness of the same actions and decisions.

In the post-structural approach we advocate, the context is not a datum of the world to be investigated, but a discursive construction in the world. It is an interpretive construction, precarious, without fixed boundaries, except for the contingent options performed in a given research, in a given policy. We affirm with Derrida (1982) that a context is never absolutely determinable, it can never be saturated with a given meaning, mainly because it is sustained by the assumption of an implicit consensus, structurally vague and fragile, which tends to attempt to coordinate what it should or can treat between its limits. It depends on the border built with what is presented as constitutive exterior to its signification: curriculum of a school, everyday practices of a social group, governmental actions and so many other enunciations. Instead of a question about what is in a given context and what is not in the same context, or about what is contextual and what is not, we started a relationship with what threatens the establishment of a context and, simultaneously, define its borders. We begin to think about what threatens the national context, the educational context, the historical context, but allows the conditions that make possible its existence.

The boundaries are, therefore, constructed by power relations, by interpretations. They are not data in the world with which we operate, placing them sometimes at a point, and at other times in another point. Similarly, everything we affirm to ‘bring’ into a new context or belong to it – traditions, heritage, history, knowledge – creates this context and is simultaneously recreated on a continuum, since it is iterated as belonging to the context, to what it is, its history, its limits. There is no steady heritage to be recovered in other relationships. All heritage only appears as a precarious trail to be translated. There is no concrete, accurate, contexts to be retrieved, or considered in the educational process, because there is no given reality, extra-discursive, to be considered or taken by reference. But what we do in relation to what we judge to be a context is to build a reality discursively. It is in relation to a whole range of senses that we take as properties in and of the world, that we say to be treating sameness and seek to curtail objects and authorizations on them.

Final words

In conclusion, the school subject community is a result – precarious, temporary, contingent – of discursive articulation. It is not the set of primordial knowledge to be appropriated by the members of certain groups that, without this knowledge would be excluded from the community. It is not the group of professionals or individuals with the same education that are organized in defense of their interests and career. The school subject community, through the argument we have built, is the set of subjectivities formed in provisional operations in the discursive field named disciplinary. The community and the subjectivities/identifications do not have a source, a genesis, they are contextual illusions. Knowledge is built up while disciplinary subjectivities are as well. Practices and knowledge are always political, because they are always submitted/constructed through disputes over interpretations. It is through different disputes that discursive communities are organized, while simultaneously organizing disciplinary identifications. Contextual demands are articulated in the face of the representation of a name as a threat to meeting these same demands. With this, we succumb to interpretation, and commit ourselves to the construction of arguments that reasonably render what we stand for, in this or any other disciplinary field.