ABSTRACT
This chapter has, as its central focus, the ideologies and language ideologies refracted in the Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC). For at least two decades educational policies in Brazil have been highly inspired by the theory of learning and development designed by Vygotsky (1998 [1930], 1998 [1934]), the philosophy of language proposed by the Circle of Bakhtin (Bakhtin, 2016 [1953]; Volóchinov, 2017 [1929]) the concept of critical (Pennycook, 2004; Souza Santos, 2013) and notions concerning critical education (Freire, 2002 [1968], 2015 [1967]). The replacement of previous educational policies by a Common Core Curriculum (BNCC) in 2017 coincided with President Dilma Roussef’s impeachment and the emergence of more conservative economic, social and educational policies during Temer’s government and more emphatically after Bolsonaro took office in January 2019. Parting from the principle that BNCC answers both to neoliberal colonial ideologies concerning the commodification of education and to conservative perspectives on what counts as legitimate teaching and learning practices, we problematize the ideologies (Volóchinov, 2017 [1929]) and language ideologies (Woolard, 1998; Kroskrity, 2004) that are refracted in the Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC), more specifically in relation to the curricular component called “English”. Our interpretations concerning what is (or is not) legitimized as English in BNCC are woven from our locus of enunciation as Brazilian applied linguists committed to critical education and to unlearning the colonial logic.
