Becoming subjects of a profession: contours of the Self developed among the fragments of a Physical Education training curriculum

Abstract

This article problematizes professional subjectivations produced in a physical education undergraduate curriculum that tried to house broad work expectations in a single formative track, which included both acting in K-12 education and non-school contexts. Moved by post-structuralist assumptions, this problematization conceives the curriculum as a device, a weave-image composed of truths, power relations, and subject fabrication processes, whose analytical construction is made possible through a methodological gesture of a cartographic nature. From the narratives of graduates who followed the curriculum in question, two figures or characters emerged who, when described, have been delineated and recognized within Physical Education. These figures put us in front of distinct and dissonant ways of obliging oneself with professional truths, dissolving the plenitude of certain unifying pretensions that echo in this training field.

Keywords
curriculum; teacher training in Physical Education; professional training in Physical Education

Resumo

O presente artigo devota-se à problematização de subjetivações profissionais produzidas na urdidura de um currículo de formação em Educação Física que tentava alojar, num único e mesmo percurso formativo, expectativas alargadas de trabalho, as quais incluíam tanto a atuação na educação básica quanto em contextos não escolares. Movida por pressupostos pós-estruturalistas, esta problematização concebe o currículo como um dispositivo, uma trama-imagem composta por estatutos veridictivos, relações de poder e processos de fabricação de sujeitos, cuja construção analítica se torna possível por meio de um gesto metodológico de cunho cartográfico. Das narrativas de egressos que trilharam o currículo em questão, emergem, então, duas figuras ou personagens que, ao descreverem, delinearem e reconhecerem a si mesmas no interior da Educação Física, colocam-nos diante de modos distintos e dissonantes de obrigar-se com as verdades da profissão, dissolvendo a plenitude de determinadas pretensões unificadoras a ecoar nesse campo de formação.

Palavras-chave
currículo; formação docente em Educação Física; formação profissional em Educação Física

Resumen

Este artículo está dedicado a la problematización de las subjetivaciones profesionales producidas en la urdimbre de un currículo de formación en Educación Física que intentó albergar, en una única y misma trayectoria formativa amplias expectativas de trabajo, que incluían lo desempeño profesional tanto en la educación básica como en contextos no escolares. Movida por supuestos postestructuralistas, esta problematización concibe el currículum como un dispositivo, una imagen-trama compuesta por estatutos de verdad, relaciones de poder y procesos de fabricación del sujeto, cuya construcción analítica se hace posible a través de un gesto metodológico cartográfico. De las narrativas de los egresados que siguieron el currículum en cuestión, emergen dos figuras o personajes que, al describirse, delimitarse y reconocerse dentro de la Educación Física, los anteponen a formas distintas y disonantes de obligarse con las verdades de la profesión, disolviendo la plenitud de ciertas pretensiones unificadoras que se hacen eco en este campo formativo.

Palabras clave
currículo; formación del profesorado en Educación Física; formación profesional en Educación Física

Introduction

What can be said when the I is called upon in a professional territory? What is said about oneself as the effect of the crossing of senses in the imbrication of a formation field and its work universe? Which verdictive forces, conductors of conducts, and subjectivators weave this net?

Driven by these questions, we move toward a very specific territory: the formation and the work in physical education. A territory substantiated through the inheritance of two constitutive practices of modernity, education and hygiene, which historically creates and reshapes the government of bodies, though disguised as having generous purposes and addressing a beneficial destiny, as the task of those inhabiting the physical education territory. A territory that receives perpetual principles, populated by tautologies, claiming slogans and ready-made ideas, which constantly echo voices that announce ways of being-acting that should be embodied by those who decide to call themselves as subjects of this profession. A territory in which “needed understandings” (Veiga-Neto, 2012, p. 277) grow: “there is the need to prepare future [physical education] teachers to promote their own professional development” [our highlight] (Barbosa-Rinaldi, 2008, p. 200); “we stress the need of all subjects composing the curriculum [of physical education training] to think the training for professional work” [our highlight] (Poleto et al., 2020, p. 550); “the construction of a multidisciplinary formation based on corporal culture is needed and possible” [our highlight] (Furtado, 2020, p. 129).

With an eagerness that often borderlines dogmatism and Manicheism, Brazilian physical education is an arena filled with political and epistemological conflicts, partaken, as Nunes (2021) and Nunes and Neira (2018) insist, within neoliberal capitalist rationality, from where the places to be occupied between their borders are generated and arbitrated. Regarding the training curricula, mainly since the second half of the twenty-first century, this arena has been establishing itself through what Ventura and Anes (2020) identify as three disputing tendencies or by what Castellani Filho (2016) recognizes as sectors that border higher education training in physical education, one in the right political wing and the other on the extreme left of the political spectrum, there is between them, equally leaning to the left, an alternative prism. At stake is not only the expected shape and the conception of the courses in the area but, ultimately, the archetypes of professionalism postulated as true in the area.

On one of the tendencies, in favor of a different formation between teaching and bachelor degrees, there are groups mostly connected to private Higher Education Institutions (HEI) with similar interests to the CONFEF/CREFs¹ system, mainly seeking to offer bachelor courses anchored in a biological and market perspective of health promotion through physical activity. However, another tendency, though presenting itself also open to the logic of double formation, takes place from entirely different assumptions to those that motivate the previous position. In this case, it is a group of non-homogenous progressive researchers that see in the division of formation, justified by the differences between their two most significant work contexts – one delineated by schooling institutions and the other by the different spaces that develop corporal practices for health, sports performance, and leisure –, the possibility of establishing an identity for the teaching degrees, mainly those connected to public HEI. They seek to guarantee the qualification of physical education teachers, focused on K-12 education, and to enable alternatives for the public bachelor undergraduate courses to be reconsidered based on perspectives that go against the commodification of corporal culture. In one last perspective, equally belonging to the public HEI and self-called revolutionary (Nozaki, 2017), defends a single formation in teaching degrees with an broadened character – also called courses of “extended teaching degree” (licenciatura ampliada) –, which according to its advocates should be grounded in a conception of ontological totality, refuting the division of training between teaching and bachelor degrees. This training division would supposedly fragment (with no theoretical-scientific groundings) the area’s object of knowledge and work, serving late capitalism.

Each physical education course, considering its singularities and contingencies, is a peculiar time-space, an area of unstable circumscription that embodies, rearranges, and reinvents the fields’ disputes. Considering one of this times and spaces, we will focus on the processes of professional subjectivation produced in the weaving of curriculum from a public university in Bahia.

A curriculum device, a cartographic pathway, drafts of self

Grounded on Foucault’s ideas (Foucault, 2012, 2013, 2017) and dialoguing with Agamben (2009) and Deleuze (1990), we understand that the curriculum can be considered and problematized as a device. The concept of device, taken from a philosophical debate and reterritorialized in the field of curriculum studies, helps us see the curriculum as a changeable weave composed of different types of threads, articulating statues of knowledge, power relations, and processes of subject fabrication. In the scope of physical education formation, when moved by manifestations of truth that authenticate acts and words taken as legitimate to shape this profession, a curriculum device triggers strategies to lead conducts dedicated to grasping subjectivities in professional standards certified by a verdictive regime. If as a regulatory practice, a curriculum device has a robust capacity for subjectivity imprisoning, its constitutive paradox is to be, likewise, an investment void of any guarantee.

In this research, the acts of pulling and weaving the threads of a device, immersed in the economy of intensities, and pointing out these intensities in the array of the thinkable consist in a cartographic work. Relying on a compound maybe risky, maybe imprudent, we approximate the notions of device and the notion of cartography, emerged from Deleuze and Guatarri’s geo-philosophy (Deleuze & Guattari, 1995) to draft an analytical gesture expressed by the idea that we cartographically act over/with a curriculum device, in the attempt of creating a weave-image – non-representational, with no beginnings, nuclei, or ends – in which certain things can be said, conspicuous, tangible, and operational, giving life to ways of being, acting, and judging what one is and does.

For now, we focus on a segment of this weave when highlighting the processes of professional subjectivation built in a curriculum device These processes are understood here as forms to delineate and recognize the self produced from the connections the subjects establish with a formative and professional truth, as figurations of subject-professionals (Mussi, 2005) that make emerge what, in Foucault’s analytical pathway (Foucault, 2014, 2016), we dare to perceive as experiences that subjects do to themselves when faced by discourses that intend to say a truth that directly relates to them; in our case, a professional truth. When formulating these experiences with figures or characters (Rolnik, 2016), we admit that the restricted plan of subjectivation (Castro, 2016)² always takes place through masks, fantasies of self – because they are dressed and undressed – of provisory territorializations enacted in a bumpy ground in which lay the self, the others, the sayable, and the unsayable of practices, in endless constitutions of immanent ways of being and not being; and not by a self-centered I, by a subject-origin-essence in which one resides, in a peremptory housing, of sovereign will, subjectivation itself. We do not think of subjects as beings but as effects that emerge from the meetings on the way.

To carry out the study’s objective, we appeal to the narratives of five graduates³ of the course, who graduated between 2011 and 2016. We were careful – though not sure if successful – not to fall into the trap of an “exteriorization metaphor,” in which “the speakers tend to be understood as the subject of an expressive discourse” (Larrosa, 2011, p. 64) that externalize and offer their subjectivity. Therefore, we make an effort to rarefy and elide the subjects’ countenance, thus presupposing that

the narrative is not a place of an outburst of subjectivity and self-experience but the discourse modality that establishes the position of the subject speaking (the narrator) and the rules of its own insertion within a plot (the character).

(Larrosa, 2011, p. 70)

***

The curriculum device focused on our analysis emerged in 1999 in a campi of a state university in Bahia, Brazil, in a warm city in the backlands. Since the beginning, it has faced all types of hardships imposed by the challenge of providing public higher education in Northeast Brazil. This course was created as a generalist teaching undergraduate – a curriculum organization guided by the same single formative itinerary that allegedly prepares subjects to act professionally as K-12 teachers or workers dealing with body practices in other spaces, grouped under the common predicament of not being schools, such as clubs, gyms, clinics, sporting associations, etc. This model was kept, with some modifications, when the course was reformulated between 2003 and 2004, and the distinction between bachelor and teaching undergraduate was only adopted in 2021, after a second curriculum reordering in 2019.

The research took place in 2018. We were interested in the subjective processes forged as part of a web acted by leitmotiv of a professionalism sense fed by a double promise: the unity of formation and the horizon widening of the job world.

This article is part of a longer research that sought to analyze the constitution, workings, and effects produced by this curriculum device (Oliveira, 2020). In this research, it was possible to perceive that the generalist format perpetuated by the course did not immediately position it as a signatory of the extended teaching degree. Its relation with this formative conception was the result of a sui generis historical-symbolical work, from a strategic meeting-coupling, as we named it, which we will not focus on here. From this generalist format and its bonds with the notion of extended teaching emerged the true discourse designed in this device. This discourse announces physical education as a profession of different attributes to be assimilated by the same subject who would supposedly be able to work on a broad array of tasks.

In that research, we were also faced with a disjunctive mechanism that unveiled the dismantling of a professional ethos and its legitimation attempts, which we have already discussed in another article (Oliveira & Neira, 2021). This ethos broke down, diverged, and gave origin to a bipolarization when aspiring to incorporate all that could fit into the type of physical education professionally enacted in school and in other environments where corporal practices are implemented aiming at health promotion, athlete preparation, or leisure. A truth-unit transmuted in a truth-double, in disconnected truths. The expected unity of a physical education in which the school universe and non-school coexisted in symbiosis reversed itself into an uncomfortable division that separated, confronted, and distanced these two cosmos. With these two sides, derived from the depletion of a matrix of a single subject-professional, unlimited in their abilities and functions, the curriculum device changed the offensive of a united-enlarged professionalism into uneven subjectivizing processes. Therefore, these are the processes that we will discuss later.

The critical teacher and the personal trainer

Despite being unable to make all students, not even most, see themselves as professionals of institutionalized education – what graduates of teaching degrees should become – the course we analyzed had been shaping a professional image firmly committed to the school cause. The critical teacher presents him/herself as a figure notably regimented by the discourse of physical education as a school professional, who during their formative trajectory, was conducted and let itself be conducted by the rules of this truth and that, for circumstances that are not explained only by subjective guidance but that certainly include them, entered the school space after graduating. More than stepping on schools, the subjects that embody this character engage in a professional ethos strongly marked by the interconnection of two ideas: criticism and transformation.

I believe I should allow the experience of body culture elements, making students understand reality from such experiences, approaching themes related to society that are reflected in these body practices.

(GS⁴ 1).

My role as a professional in the area is to develop, together with students, a critical physical education that can be resignified, and bring this new perspective to physical education

(GS 3).

My activism is materialized through my professional practice, through how I lead my subject, and through understanding the role of physical education in our society

(GS 4).

By combining physical education’s role with the school one, contributing to a critical reading of society to help improve it through the thematization of body culture, I experience some challenges… As a professional in the area, I think that my role is to allow students to critically access body culture

(GS 5).

I think my role as a physical education teacher is to promote a critical perspective toward the themes involving body culture

(GS 6).

In the consubstantiation of this professional ideal, being a physical education teacher implies the responsibility of provoking, in the other, the student under the teachers’ guidance, a type of affluence, improvement, and unveiling of a look. Students need to see the reality and, more than this, access, understand, interpret, and read it. Mediated by body culture, the main intention of this look is to become a critical look, a way of seeing the world that belongs to the teacher and that will also be from the student. A critical look able to perceive in what ways body practices can be unfair, excluding, wrong, and fake, as they reproduce several parameters of contemporary social relationships, which perpetrate more difficult ways to live, less recognizable lives, less pitiful, and more threatened than others.

So, criticism goes hand in hand with change, suggesting a passage, a necessary rupture with the misfit state in which things are, in order to reach another state, more correct, and less tragic. On the one hand, this change is delineated by physical education teaching, considering its historical legacy. An ideal of physical education that “is more and goes beyond the courts and the weight rooms” (GS 1), “which can break with the role focused on biological aspects, in corporal aspects” (GS 3), because “ if boys see our classes as the time to play soccer and girls as the moment to play volleyball, or to sit down to watch the boys, my role is to break away from this limitation” (GS 6). On the other hand, change broadens its reach, imbricating the pedagogical task of physical education into societal dynamic, calling it to “help improve society, through the thematization of corporal culture” (GS 5), to “contribute to a more democratic society, less unfair, more equalitarian, a society in favor of the minorities” (GS 4).

To be critical. To make students see the world under critical lenses. To raise inevitable transformations that start in physical education and move to life in society. There lies the compound established as the fundament of a professional experience, reaching such a reach that its acceptance becomes a belief – “I believe that my role as a teacher is” (GS 1) –; a conviction – “as a teacher, I’m firm in what I defend” (GS 5) – ; a motto – “I continue to strongly follow the motto of a critical school” (GS 5) –; a cause – “I’m a militant teacher, a teacher that fights restless” (GS 4) –; a duty per excellence – “we, physical education teachers, should, per excellence” (GS 6) –; a type of public obligation toward which there is an almost undeniable inclination.

This type of self-government is close to a discursive front very dear to the curriculum theorization in education and physical education, which acts as a preeminent force to guide education nowadays, inviting teachers to guide their students to a presumed direction and a mandatory condition of lucidity that will allow them to apprehend the hardships of the current social order and rebel against them. In different degrees, the narratives about the profession that attribute to the self the mission of making corporal culture an instrument to guide students toward a specific and genuine way of decoding the world are interconnected to this discursive front underlined by a conception of teaching as mediation of representational knowledge. In line with this representation, the idea of “reading reality” indicates the unveiling of truths that mirror it and that would be covered. It refers to bringing out the “themes related to society that are reflected in the corporal practices” (GS 1), to unveil the “power relationships that permeate the curriculum and the appear from the corporal practices, implicitly or explicitly” (GS 4), undoing all and any lure that prevents such practices, and physical education itself, to be conceived as they should be. The “critical access” (GS 5) to corporal practices lead to the “democratization of corporal cultural humanly built and socially developed” (GS 2), the construction of a better society and the creation of “a new look toward physical education” (GS 3), able to free it from the “sporting and recreational character that imprisons us within false duties” (GS 6).

The critical notion stimulating this way of perceiving the physical education teacher is strongly based on humanism, metaphysics and theology. On it, the subject is a central ontological category and creator of truth – a traditional philosophical formulation of the relationship between subject and truth, as Foucault (2016) would say. Thus, the questions that make this professional figuration think about itself gravitate around allowing the cognitive experience to access the authentic knowledge of corporal practices. Hence, these questions are also fueled by the elixir of later purging, with the antidote of a becoming that will fix what is not right, make fair what is unfair, and help us reach where we should arrive. Beliefs that excite the sanitizing role of modernity’s schooling-civilizing project, reconfigured in the mid-twentieth century through the visionary salvationist of critical pedagogy, are so closely intertwined in the formative and professional imaginary of teaching that it is very hard, if not unimaginable, to question. In rejecting an insufficient educational present (what it is and needs to stop being), the fortune of professional exercise is placed elsewhere and a posteriori, submitted to virtue models that despite envisioning a future equality, neglect the life that exists and is experienced, with its delights and disappointments (Aquino, 2015; Costa, 2005).

However, notwithstanding the utopic heritage affecting this way of relating with a truth discourse about being a physical education teacher – a relationship that was not exclusively built from the curriculum device but that is effectively implied with one of the objectivation of the subject presented on it –, and regardless of its prophetic outbursts, in this subjectifying processes persist an effect that open the professional practice to the creation of other experimentation possibilities. An openness that may be seen as a small gap but keeps open the chances of not succumbing to current domestications (Aquino, 2015), which insists on weight on schools. The endorsement of a pact with change that creates itself as an inherent element of physical education and a school that are understood as criticisms raises the alert toward the embarrassments of the educational monument and, on some level, the disposition to shake the present and potentialize its transformations that are not given beforehand, despite the attempts to foresee them.

The personal trainer was another character that emerged in the scenario of the curriculum device analyzed, a narrative that places the professional self in an identity area that lends itself to conduct other lives towards the benefits of guided physical exercises, splashed by a contemporary aesthetic ethos of reverencing body correction.

After this formation process, I preferred to work only with individualized training, as a personal trainer. ... So, I think I’m quite happy with my profession today… I see my role, as a physical education professional, as important. Very important. Mainly in my space, because I work with people going under rehabilitation processes, people with pathologies and, thus, when seeing the changes happening and improving their life quality, I see that I’m really doing… I have an important role in the life changes of those people

(GS 7).

Improving the life quality of those who rely on their work: these is the task of this professional figure called personal trainer. There lies a notion of life quality that is founded as one of the conditions of what Ortega (2003) conceptualized as bio-sociability, a new form of sociability that can be thought as an unfolding that reformulates and re-subscribes nowadays, more precisely in the second half of the twentieth century, the biopolitics genealogically drawn by Foucault (2005, 2008, 2017). As a power over life and focused on the phenomena derived from populational problems (reproduction, birth and death rates, and longevity, for example), the classical biopolitics, developed in Western societies between the end of the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, fomented a type of nationalization of the biological life or a “bioregulation by the State” (Foucault, 2005, p. 298). Conversely, the core of contemporary bio-sociability is not on the State apparatus, though it does not abandon it. The topics related to life now carry new values, transforming themselves into identity issues and takes by the micro powers of the social net, giving way to a “repolitization” of health as an allegory of moral candor. (Ortega, 2004).

Still according to Ortega (2003), the bio-sociability rules are subjectively reproduced through bioascesis, modern forms of body asceticism accomplished through several techniques (medical, hygienic, aesthetic) that invest in the govern of self through bio-sociability. Standards that become desperately wished for and encompass an idea of a healthy body as the equivalent of a lean, toned, and, consequently, beautiful body. The subjects carry out bio-ascetic practices by bearing the promise of framing this body ideal. One of its main attributes is the constant vigilance of self, or self-expertise, in Ortega’s (2003) words.

Physical exercise, offered in a myriad of versions, mainly in gyms, is – together with diets, aesthetic and surgical procedures, pharmaceutical and food industry products – one of the main bioascesis of late modernity. If we submit to it, subject ourselves corporally and subjectively, with discipline and diligence, we will see our bodies shape themselves into a healthy body, our life materializing itself as a quality life, marked by the predicates of youth and happiness. In this same spiral of precepts, disease and/or more corpulent silhouette are seen as the coloraries of pusillanimity and the lack of restraint of sedentary people who do not make enough effort and, because of that, deserve a degenerate destiny, becoming the target of social rejection. Supported by a substantial sanity discourse, anchored in the scientific reason of biomedical knowledge, bio-sociability transforms as truth a health construction as an individual responsibility, self-control, sacrifice, relentless commitment, and deviation from risks. A whole lexicon that makes the body the epicenter of morality.

Hence, existing as a healthy body becomes a wish only reachable through a legitimate ascesis, as this life state depends on the implementation of a series of austere practices that rapture the government of self, aiming the realization of another self, a more elevated self, closer to complete correction. “Asceticism implies a subjectivation process” (Ortega, 2003, p. 62), as its purpose is to shift a refused identity toward a desired identity, whose shape varies depending on the historical context of ascetic practices.

Therefore, in its bio-aesthetic appearance, physical exercise establishes itself as an elementary tool seeking this supreme way of being and living. Thus, the professionals that work with this object is bequeathed by a virtue, considering that they are perceived as someone who inhabits this blessed place of a healthy life (which is not always a fact) but, mainly, because they are the ones apt to lead others to this horizon that one has to wish. Who would dare refuting the nobility of this mission and future?

There is nothing new or extraordinary in what we have said about the codes that cross the emergency of the personal trainer in this curriculum device considering the long debate held around the contemporary regimes of truth about the body, filled by a neo-hygiene movement in which physical education is clearly positioned. We are left to wonder about how this status of recognition and valuing in which this position is placed can help us understand the vigor of subjective capture undertaken by this way of experiencing the profession that is established in the curriculum device and predominantly act in the production of senses about what is considered as non-school physical education. Hence, we move over a bipartisan device composed of two clashing hemispheres. In one of them, the hemisphere that is not the school, the aesthetic ethos of fitness reigns and does not face challenges to persuade subjects to join its professional guidelines.

The task assumed by the figure of the personal trainer is paved by a belief as hard to disturb as the one that supports the professional injunction to which the figure of the critical teacher is submitted. On the latter, there is the sketch of an image of school physical education responsible to create a more lucid and solidary way of seeing the world, vital to the creation of a democratic culture. On the first, irradiates the imaginary of a physical education that provides tools that can make many lives achieve the triumph of a healthy-beautiful-happy life, if they so desire. Despite their obvious differences, both have in common the subordination to a type of duty that have an almost demiurgical appeal, discursively built as sublimity.

As the critical teacher, the personal trainer also ascribes to the spirit of change. A change of character is clearly very different because what matters are not the injustices, the decoding of reality, the teaching of physical education in school, or the social configuration but the individual condition of life, a bio-identity that needs to stop being pathological to become healthy. Anyway, change or a commitment to the creation of other things in which a non-conformity flow might emerge.

Hence, the figures of personal trainer and critical teacher emerge as subjectivations that passed away from the single professionalism triggered by the curriculum device. When entangling the lines of other devices – a critical pedagogy or a fitness pedagogy –, they dissolve the plenitude of unifying pretensions.

Final remarks

Faced by what we could scrutinize in our cartographical wandering, we raise some remarks that somewhat talk about the limits of an analytical endeavor of this kind and that mainly refer to a way of thinking the curriculum as an event (Corazza, 2004).

The figures problematized here do not represent the only forms of subjectivation developed in the reach of this curriculum device and that each one is not stuck in the same place, as if it were the mere result of a procedure of subjective serialization. They simply emerged as the more audible echoes of the fleeting ways of being a subject-professional, operated by the arbitrary workings of language. As processes, they continue in movement, granting to the subjectivities their single undying gift: being always on the making.

If there were many forces intersecting these processes, there were also many characters created in this weaving. There were some stepped into school engaged in the commitments built outside it; those who sought to carry the duties of a critical school to a universe eager for healthy subjexts; those who rejected school and ended up working on it; those who initially started in school physical education and later embodied the personal trainer mission; those who, undisturbed, moved between different terrains and professional responsibilities... The exchange of codes is inestimable. Nothing guarantees that the fantasies of self will be worn exclusively, one at a time, until rotten. They can be overlapped, intercalated, customized, remade. As Larrosa (2011) warns us, there is also no guarantee of parallelism between the position subjects occupy in the truth discourse and what these subjects say when talking about themselves. Furthermore, we should consider that the production of self-relations results from several devices’ interpellative dynamics. For all this reasons, concerning this delicate and unstable relationship between subjectivity and truth, this study could apprehend just some ripples of the subject, which certainly vibrate in the web-image of the curriculum device but they do not allow us to consider them as a complete portray of the subjectivations engendered. Apart from not being our objective, this type of portray would never be possible.

Some gaps are forged in the polymorphy of crossings, through which some subjectivities leak. Dissident subjectivities (Guattari & Rolnik, 2013), practices of freedom (Foucault, 2004), lines of flight (Deleuze, 1990) that break away from the recognized identities and create other world. However, from this, we obtained only indications mainly situated in the scratches of change bubbling in these different ways of ethically subject oneself to the profession. A change on how the other addresses the world, a change in the physical education teaching practices in school, social change, change in people’s life quality, change of self. Incongruent changes, of little power, of questionable ends, limited by regimentation threats. Even so, changes.

Although the intersections and openings continue, we dare conclude, after diving in the complex of truth, govern, and subjectivity that moved the curriculum device, that a certain logic of suggestion predominated, acting so far: the logic that opposes a school profession and one that is not. This side, that side. A genuine binarism, unfortunately converted into bipolarity, affecting the curriculum machine and the processes of professional subjectivation. A binarism that captured and divided, though not closing it.

• 1
  This system is composed by Conselho Federal de Educação Física (CONFEF) and the Conselhos Regionais de Educação Física (CREFs). Its regulating and guiding actions, aligned with market strategies, are frequently combated by a large part of the academic and professional community in the area.
• 2
  According to Castro (2016), two senses of subjectivation can be seen in Foucault’s work, one broader and the other more restricted. The wider one refers to how the subjects appear as the object of a connection of knowledge-power, what they should be, the place they should occupy, and an explanation that, in Foucault’s terms, can also be given with the notion of objectivation. Thus, we adopt the broader sense of subjectivation as equivalent to the idea of objectivation, as we believe that Castro’s (2016) interpretation is quite fruitful for thinking about the subject dimension in the devices. In its turn, the more restricted sense corresponds to the production of subjectivities, to the forms of activity of the subject over oneself, and is related to the area of ethics present in Foucault’s last works.
• 3
  Built through interviews, oral testimonies recorded in audio, and written accounts. The instrument to create and register each participant’s narrative was selected according to their choice and availability. All participants agreed to participate in the research.
• 4
  All the excerpts of graduate narratives are identified by GS.

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Edited by

• Responsible editors:
  Associate Editor: Raumar Rodríguez Giménez https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9643-9314
  Editor-in-Chief: Antônio Carlos Rodrigues de Amorim https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0323-9207

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  22 Nov 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  28 May 2023
• Accepted
  17 Aug 2024