A interculturalidade nas políticas curriculares da Educação Bilíngue Pública da cidade do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

In the context of the implementation of a Prestigious Bilingual Education (García, 2009) within Rio de Janeiro’s public school system in 2013, as an outcome of the Rio Criança Global Program (Rio de Janeiro, 2009), emerges the need for a critical understanding of what kind of bilingual individual the Municipal Department of Education of Rio de Janeiro (SME-RJ) aims to form through its Bilingual Education Program. This research aims to investigate the perspectives of interculturality that permeate the educational policies that underpin bilingual teaching in public schools of Rio de Janeiro. The study is theoretically grounded in the concept of Bilingual Education proposed by García (2009) and Megale (2019a), Critical Interculturality by Candau (2013) and Walsh (2009), and the notion of De-encapsulated Curriculum by Liberali (2019). In terms of methodology, this is a documentary analysis based on the assumptions of Critical Collaborative Research (Magalhães, 2011). The study analyzes official normative documents and initiatives by SME-RJ related to school curriculum and student education. Data were collected through the analysis of normative and institutional documents available in the public domain. The results indicate that the existing educational policies legitimizing the functioning of bilingual public schools in Rio de Janeiro are insufficient to guide the conception of curricula and the formation of students and teachers oriented toward a critical and intercultural bilingual education. Furthermore, the current policies are mostly anchored in a conception of assimilationist multiculturalism (Candau, 2013) or functional interculturality (Tubino, 2005; Walsh, 2009), which may reinforce an encapsulated bilingual formation (Engeström, 2002; Liberali, 2019) within the SME-RJ public school system