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Besides being a country with high inequality, Brazil faces an alarming sociohistorical moment in which the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is exacerbating a disastrous political situation that promotes polarization and social division. The context of this situation is described here through a critical lens, as a justification for conceiving a counter-hegemonic proposal based on different views that share the perspective of Global South epistemologies. Santos' (in Santos (ed) "Epistemologias do Sul," Coimbra, Edições Almedina, 2009) fundamental principle is that there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice, which is represented by the concept of ecology of knowledge. In a recent publication, Santos ("A cruel pedagogia do vírus," Coimbra, Edições Almedina.Santos, 2020) demonstrates that the negative effects of the pandemic on the planet and humanity were exacerbated by the planetary dimensions that capitalism has taken on. The author states that the current health crisis is connected to the ecological crisis, since both are manifestations of this model of society, which is based on the unlimited exploitation of natural resources. Building on these ideas, we envisage a science education that fights for the preservation of the planet, is critical of the capitalist model of society, and values the knowledge of the Global South.

Although in-depth educational reviews can be carried out building on curricular theories, the appropriation of this knowledge by science education scholarship can still be considered timid. In this paper, our intention is to work on this interface; we first introduce basic concepts from the main curricular frameworks and bring possible corresponding curricular emphases assumed by science education. Then, we highlight the post-critical curricular perspectives to problematize discursive demands and articulations as part of processes of struggle for the fixation of particular meanings in the field of science education. With emphasis on discourse theory and categories such as discourse, articulation, hegemony and antagonism, we sought to identify hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses defended in the struggle for curricular proposals of science education and teacher-training in Brazilian scholarship and in some international examples. In our analysis, the traditional and critical conceptions of science education were discursively identified as antagonist, in a scenario of uncertainties and lack of fundamentals, without, therefore, either one being able to represent a single and definitive intervention. Traditional curricular and teacher-training projects were seen as products of discursive articulations in defense of the universalism of West Modern Science ("knowledge itself") and of the technical rationality. Scientific literacy with a social function and a critical teacher-training proposal were identified as antagonist to traditional curricular discourses and approximated to educational perspectives that defend more generic and contextual educational competences ("knowledge to do something"). However, recent curricular discourses adequate to the new configurations of social organization that tend to blur the antagonism between these discourses in the name of social justice and democratic equality, from a post-critical point of view, create a paradox: If these demands are treated as prescription and control, they will expel all differences and uniqueness of education, rendering meaningless education, justice and democracy, which are constructs that require alterity to exist in the social.

This paper explores various theories of curriculum intending to provide a new approach--which we regard as a significant theoretical contribution--to examine the broad set of different discourses that have been shaping science education. We first introduce concepts and values that support traditional and critical curriculum theories and offer some examples of international science education discourses that could be in tune with each of these approaches. We then develop a post-critical perspective (Laclau, Emancipação e diferença, EdUERJ, Rio de Janeiro, 2011) on curriculum, with emphasis on discourse theory (Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemonía y estrategia socialista: hacia uma radicalización de la democracia, Siglo XXI, Madrid, 1987) and on categories such as discourse, articulation, nodal points, antagonism and hegemony, to identify hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses in the scope of Brazilian science education scholarship and teacher education. Our analysis suggests that articulations and nodal points such as scientific knowledge, method and assessment have been framing traditional curriculum features that boost the hegemony of "knowledge itself." On the other hand, nodal points such as gender, society, nature, curriculum and power relations have been forging the critical curriculum perspective as a counter-hegemonic discourse in the struggle for the hegemony of "knowledge to do something." Nonetheless, more important than this portrait is the disclosure that antihegemonic discourses can support researchers who work for reactivating contingency and new antagonisms to transform science education.

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