Curriculum and competences: The reform of secondary education and the schools’ appropriations

Abstract

This article aims to investigate how the propositions present in the curricular reform of secondary education have been incorporated by schools. In order to do that, official documents were studied, especially the Guidelines and the Curriculum Parameters for this level of education, indicating that the main formulations are the association between knowledge and its technologies and the curriculum based on skills. In addition, it was also performed a study with all high schools in Curitiba (PR), in order to gather information on which of these propositions schools have adopted as a reference, what kind of changes they had to perform in adapting to the reform, and in which ways they incorporated the new legislation in their pedagogical proposals. The hypothesis that oriented the research was that the adoption of the official curricular policy by schools does not occur in a linear way. The analysis of the answers showed different processes of adopting official prescriptions, indicating that the accomplishment of the reform is only relative.

Key words: curriculum and competences, high school education, educational reform.