A Escola Normal Regional Imaculada Conceição em Pelotas/RS: a atuação da igreja católica e dos poderes públicos (1955-1971)

Abstract

This research, developed alongside the Post-Graduation Program in Education at the Federal University of Pelotas, in the research line of Philosophy and History of Education, focuses on rural education in Pelotas-RS between 1955 and 1971. The study analyses the training of the rural normalistas, specifically at an institution: Escola de Normalista Regional Imaculada Conceição (ENRIC), maintained by the Sociedade de Educação Cristã (SEC), which in 1961 became Fundação Rural Educacional Cristã Rachel Mello (FRECRM), linked to the Catholic Church. At times, we used the term Society / Foundation as a way to better characterize this change in the institutional nomenclature. The research was conducted through a socio-historical approach and it is based on the analysis of written, oral and iconographic sources. We utilized Laws, Acts and municipal Decrees in order to elucidate the involvement of the municipality with rural primary schools in Pelotas. Meeting minutes, reports, correspondence, photographs, interviews and oral testimonies served to analyze aspects of the normalistas’ training. We investigated the catholic newspaper A Palavrato understand the specificities of the thinking about rural education published by the Diocese of Pelotas. For the analysis of the training of the rural normalistasin this city, we also considered the agreements that the Society / Foundation maintained with the state government of RS, observing here a relationship between the public and private sector that sustained normal rural schools in RS. Finally, we tried to verify the representations that the rural normalistasestablished from their experiences at boarding school, A Minha Casa Rural [My Rural Home] or at ENRIC itself. The theoretical basis took into account aspects of Pedagogical Ruralism and had Cultural History as theoretical reference. We concluded that ENRIC was an institution directed to girls who were from rural areas and neighboring cities of Pelotas, as well as from the community of Três Vendas, a neighborhood considered a rururbanaarea of Pelotas. This institution trained teachers for teaching career. However, it partially complied with the principles to settle women in the countryside since there were few teachers who taught during their whole lives in rural areas. In addition, the rural representation observed at ENRIC was more due to a convention established in society since the school maintained a boarding school for girls who came from the countryside. However, its curriculum counted more on practices directed to household tasks, to religious formation, to propaedeutic and didactic-pedagogical contents than to rural practices, constituting that way a peculiarity of ENRIC while other normal rural schools of RS had contents that oriented for agricultural and livestock training or for preparatory training. In conclusion, we pointed out that the Society / Foundation was led by the work of Maria Rachel Ribeiro de Mello teacher, who stood out as cultural mediator on that educational project.