Escolas multisseriadas na região arrozeira de São Lourenço do Sul/RS (décadas de 1970-1990).

Abstract

Within the history of education, multi-grade schools play an important role in the attempt to provide education for the children of rural workers who lived in the countryside, far from the municipality's headquarters. In the fifth district of São Lourenço do Sul / RS, rice region, the reality was unique, differing from all other districts, since, in this region, the public who attended school, from the 1970s to the 1990s, was formed by children who moved frequently. Such changes took place due to the condition of itinerant workers that their parents assumed, and therefore they were not owners of the land. They moved to where the job was offered to them, causing the reality of the school to vary considerably in relation to the number of students and even its location - which also changed according to the demands of the crops - and its role in the face of the community in which it was inserted. In this way, the intention was, in this work, to analyze the structure, functioning and role of these schools in the communities in which they were inserted. Using, for this purpose, the perceptions of people who were part of their history and the documents produced in these and for these institutions, aiming, thus, to understand which are the characteristics of the multi-grade schools in the aforementioned region. The research was materialized through interviews with teachers, residents and students from the region who experienced the historical moment analyzed. In addition, to compose the research, documents were sought from the municipality's education department that tell part of the history of these institutions. As results found, the issues of the precariousness of the structures and the difficulties in relation to the functioning were evident, in view of the structure, the deficient formation of the teachers and the excessive demands of a multi-grade school. However, despite all these obstacles, schools still constituted an important environment for parents, as they encouraged their children to attend them and to carry out the activities proposed by the teachers. In addition, the teachers themselves stood out as figures of a certain prominence in the communities, serving as a reference at different times in the lives of those residents. It is important to notice that the set of data collected shows results that enable the elaboration of a mental picture of the historical moment experienced during the last three decades of the last century, with all its challenges, needs and achievements, giving visibility to this institution and to the people who were part of its history.