My experiene with a three year research which focused on how teachers negotiated a linear, structural curriculum to a more open, uncertain, rhyzomatic and complex perspective. In the negotiation process we had to combine the didactic, authentic and transformative education due to the fact that schools create mechanisms to keep the status quo, such as assessments, lessons plans, among others.

One alternative was to work with English language teaching through themes, including the structural contents but according to the new literacies and critical literacies philosophical perspective. In one the lessons students were supposed to describe their neighborhood using certain linguistic aspects but representing them with multimodal resources available by the groups. They were also encouraged to raise issues of global, local, citizenship, such as if that community was included or excluded from some public goods. During the process teachers were very motivated with the idea of connecting education and language in a critical way. However, as the students had more freedom to create their own narratives, less guided as they were used to in the previous years, teachers felt the necessity to measure their learning. One alternative we found was to distribute some field diaries so that students could register their feelings in the new process of learning. The two perspectives - teachers’ and students’ - were very different). Students demonstrated they were learning more, showing their authorship, non linearity and one aspect raised by most of them were: “at the end of this class, we were thinking...”. Even so, teachers took some time to change their safehouses from a more didactic to a more transformative practice. Interestingly, I interviewed one of the teachers one month ago and asked what a different class is for her. She replied that a different class was a traditional class and the ordinary class was when students had more freedom, working with the uncertainty, with multiple interpretations in meaning making.