This article discusses contemporary school processes in order to understand the practices of socialization and cultural transmission as socially produced processes. For that purpose, we start by reviewing the literature concerning studies about curriculum policies in Latin America. We identified two trends relating to the the constitution of school knowledge. Articles published in five Brazilian journals over the past decade were then reviewed giving rise to "maps of the literature". A predominance of three perspectives was observed: policies of organization of school knowledge; school practices; and curriculum epistemologies. After examination of the selected articles, it was found that they present significant theoretical consistency, but still few empirical studies.
knowledge; curriculum; educational policies; literature review
