Participatory democracy, public consultation and curricular policies in Brazil: The case of Natural Sciences in the Brazilian National Common Core
The present work proposes an investigation on the process of construction of the new Brazilian National Common Core (BNCC). Since 2013, the Ministry of Education of Brazil (MEC) has carried out public consultation with the BNCC, based on discussions between public and private agents organized in the Movement for the National Common Core, namely: an online Public Consultation to the First Version of the document, the Seminars With the participation of more than 9 thousand people, including school managers and educational networks, focused on the Second Version of the Base, Public Hearings held by the CNE in the five regions of the country, focusing on the third version of BNCC, and D-Day of the Common Core, held in August 2018. The official narrative that transversally animates the last five administrations of the MEC states that the construction process of the BNCC had broad participation of several social actors and educational sectors. The objective of this work is to describe how the participation process of the individuals in the construction of the policy, mainly in the scope of the curriculum of Sciences (Basic Education) and Physics, Chemistry and Biology (High School) was analyzed, analyzing to what extent the processes of consultation to the BNCC were constituted as spaces of participative construction of the curricular policy. The data obtained through the Law on Access to Information, as well as theoretical references on participatory democracy, such as Carole Pateman and Sherry Arnstein, were analyzed.