A PLACE IN THE SUN: NEOLIBERAL RATIONALITY AND THE CONSTITUTION OF DISCOURSES ON THE WORK IN DIDACTIC COLLECTIONS OF LIFE PROJECT OF THE NEW HIGH SCHOOL
Discourse; Work; Neoliberalism; New High School; Life Project.
This research analyzes didactic collections of Life Project, in order to investigate how discourses about work, present in these didactic materials, are articulated with the neoliberal rationality, which permeates the entire process of curriculum reconfiguration that Brazilian high school has undergone in recent years, especially with regard to the New High School (NEM) and the National Common Curriculum Base (BNCC). As a general objective we seek to analyze the discourses about the work in didactic collections of Life Project, with the intention of relating this discursive production with the functioning of neoliberal rationality. To cover this objective more accurately, we established three specific objectives: (a) to identify the conditions of possibility that make emerge discourses about work in didactic collections of Life Project; (b) describe the production of discourses on work in didactic collections of Life Project; (c) relate the discourses about work in the analyzed collections with the modus operandi of neoliberal rationality. In view of this, we understand that it is pertinent to use the theoretical-methodological perspective of Michel Foucault, more specifically from the archeogenealogical method, which is used to analyze discourses, to taking the speech as an event within the diverse/ different games of power-know-yourself, as Navarro (2020) says. With this, we approach some concepts that lead our look at the analyzed materialities, such as: discourse, enunciation, discursive formation, knowledge and power relations, as well as the theorizations of this philosopher about neoliberalism. In addition to Foucault studies, we seek to reinforce the theoretical framework, mobilizing authors such as Dardot and Laval (2016), Laval (2019), Han (2020), as well as other scholars who deal with the implications of neoliberalism in the educational field and in the world of work, like Antunes (2015;2020), Freitas (2018) Resende (2018), Veiga-Neto (2018), Krawczyk and Ferretti (2019), among others. The research is characterized as descriptive-interpretative documentary nature and follows a predominantly qualitative perspective. The corpus consists of statements extracted from three didactic collections of Life Project, which were approved in the National Program of Book and Didactic Material (PNLD), 2021 edition, namely: I) Walk and Build: life project, André Meller and Eduardo Campos, published by Saraiva; II) Young protagonist: life project, by Gabriel Medina and Maria Clara Wasserman, published by Edições SM; III) Life Project: experiences and possibilities, by Denise Guedes Condeixa, Caio Condeixa Xavier de Oliveira, Rui Condeixa Xavier de Oliveira and Maria Cecília Guedes Condeixa, published by Joaninha. From the analysis carried out and considering those that are in progress in the research process, it was possible to verify that the discourses produced are aligned with neoliberal rationality, because they defend values related to flexibility, resilience and competition, terms that currently enter strongly the business field and are interconnected with BNCC and NEM.