Youth cultures, new and multiliteracies and high school curriculum: possible dialogues

Abstract

This project aims to contribute to the prospect of renewal the secondary education, in regards to the proposition and development of curriculum proposals that can contribute to the permanence of youngsters at school, with equity, with quality of education improvement, mainly in regards to enable effective participation of youngsters in contemporary writing practices.Furthermore, the research aims to articulate the study fields on youngsters/ youth/ youth culture and participation in the fields of curriculum study of new and multiliteracies (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007, as first instance, and New London Group, 2006 as the second one), in order to produce syntheses that go beyond surveys of representations and expectations of the youngsters towards school, aiming to promote the formal curriculum - applied to collective creation projects that take into account the new and multiliteracies ones as well as its effectiveness. Therefore, we intend to make a documentary research, taking as objects of analysis: the curriculum proposals and High school proposed educational programs.Thus, taking into consideration the warning made by Hoppenhayn, quoted in Martin-Barbero (2008) - who believes that we are facing a youth plus political objects rather than subject-actor of changes -, this research aims to map views of youngsters and youth ranging from a spectrum that goes from the full affirmation of negativities - inadequate subjects, problematic, with the potential for violence, unable to decide etc. - to the apotheotic speeches that orbit around the idea of nation's future (Reguillo 2012). Even with Reguillo and reference to authors as Feixa, Borelli and Freire Filho, the concept of youth cultures will also be revisited.Similarly, it is intended to discuss some of the ways of participation in dispute, which according to Alvarado, Botero y Ospina (2012) circulate among at least two trends: one that prioritizes the formal aspects of political participation, which would stand as a development or implementation of the very essence of democracy and the configuration of the Nation-state, but is directed by the adaptation and by maintaining of status quo, and another trend that would be more socio-centric highlighting the mediations as well as cultural productions and communicative processes.Considering to be either via discussion about participation or via youth cultures or even by considering the current language practices, the new and multiliteracies claim their places at school, which, in most cases, still focuses its curriculum on written literacies. Therefore, an explanation is necessary when it comes to general postulations of theories that deal with the new and multiliteracies.Based upon these theoretical frameworks, it is intended to obtain categories for analyzing curricular documents and high school programs. It is hoped that these analyzes can derive notes, reflections and recommendations to guide curriculum development in the area of language in high school, towards the construction of curricula and better guided by the formation of subject-actors than by the idea of subject-objects of preventive public policies, compensatory or propaedeutic. (AU)