The premises of the evaluation process and the production of school curricula: some reflections based on Geography

Abstract

Considering that the evaluation of apprenticeship plays an important role in the management and promotion of students’ intellectual development, this paper aims to present and discuss this role based upon the knowledge transmitted through pedagogical practices in different contexts. In other words, we aim to discuss the evaluation process and its implications on the school curriculum and the building of knowledge in school. This debate will be composed by the output of authors who establish a link between knowledge at school and the factors that are extrinsic to this environment, that is, the mix of social contradictions that characterize the school areas where students and teachers interact, as well as by considerations that derive from a doctoral research that looked into the relationship between the recontextualization of the disciplinary knowledge in different school contexts and the reproduction of educational inequalities. In this article, we show that the definition of evaluation criteria has an impact on the elaboration of the curriculum that is actually followed in school. Furthermore, the perspectives that people have in common and the primary context of students’ socialization also show some potential interference upon the choices made by teachers in their daily practices. At last, we put forward a perspective of evaluation in which parameters and criteria are explicit, but may be carried out through different communication and language channels. By doing that, we will hopefully be contributing to the building of foundations of a school that is attentive both to the recognition and valuing of differences, as well as to the mitigation of inequality of access to the socially and historically produced knowledge.