Curriculum Policies and Teacher Education in Brazil: The Dispute on the Concept of Skills

Abstract

The 1990s Brazilian educational reforms introduced competences as a core concept in curricular orga- nization, integrating this concept in curriculum documents used for teacher education at the national level. In fact, building quality in teacher education was a predominant discourse during the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the concept of competences was a pivotal part of this rhetoric. However, such discourse has lost strength in curricular documents at the end of the first decade of the 2000s, with the rhetoric now revolving around the consolidation of a common national foundation for initial and continuous education, and on the link between the National Education System, different government policies, and the performance evaluation of education professionals. This article seeks to assess the policy discussion processes that revolved around the effectiveness of proposing competences as a core component in curriculum texts as well as the discussion process for their rejection. Although the author specifically addresses the way in which these discussions were developed in Brazil, the article sheds light on relatively similar processes, which also occurred in Colombia and other South American countries.