Entre o prescrito e o realizado no Grupo Escolar Yolanda Jovino Vaz (1961-1971)

Abstract

This doctoral thesis, linked to the research line of History and Historiography of Education of the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Uberlândia, had as its central purpose to reconstruct a fragment of the history of literacy in the Yolanda Jovino Vaz School Group, in Arcos, Minas Gerais, from 1961 to 1971. We defined the following general objective for the research: from the Oral History, to identify the reading and writing practices in the Yolanda Jovino Vaz School Group, in the period between 1961 and 1971. We based our study on the postulates Cultural History, which indicated the line of thought adopted in the text and built the logical and conceptual bases necessary for our argument. For this, we prepare the theoretical reference from the principles of the Annales School, Oral History, documental and iconographic sources, which constituted the methodological course of the research. Initially, we sought to find out if the 1st grade teachers followed the literacy method prescribed in the official teaching programs or if they opted for other methodological strategies to teach reading and writing, the guiding thread of our thesis. The decade under study marked the enactment of the first Law of Directives and Bases for National Education, resulting from an intense debate that began in the 1930s between New School intellectuals and conservative religious people.Through the methodology of Oral History, we analyzed the narrative of literacy teachers who taught in the 1st primary year of that school group. Oral reports revealed the modus vivendi and modus operandi of literacy teachers. The narratives also showed how literacy teachers teaching practices of reading and writing took place, as well as their representations and contributions to the construction of a school culture specific to the Yolanda Jovino Vaz School Group. The document review comprised the analysis of written, iconographic documents and artifacts from school furniture of the time: enrollment books, final result books, inventory, newspapers, among other materials. Illuminated by the theoretical reference, the analysis of the narratives took place dialectically with the other sources used in the study. We defend the thesis that, although the official guidelines prescribed the global storytelling method as the best strategy to teach reading and writing in elementar school, the teachers resisted and opted for another methodological strategy that they judged to be more appropriate in their literacy practices. Through oral reports, we pursued the evidence that led to the conviction that, among the literacy teachers, there was resistance to the global method of short stories. They chose to maintain the syllabic method in their teaching practices.