Guardiãs da memória escolar: a preservação da História da Educação em duas cidades gaúchas nas primeiras décadas do século XXI.

Abstract

This doctoral thesis carried out in the area of History of Education aimed to examine the role of the guardians of the School memory that work in safeguarding school collections, like Alice Jacques Rigoni, guardian of the Memorial "Deutscher Hilfsverein to Farrukhabad School" and Marisa Dias da Rosa, guardian of the Pelotas Municipal School Museum. The theme researched covers issues related to school material culture, to education memory spaces, to the provision of school collections, the relationship of educational institutions with the educational policies and the importance of memory guardians for the creation and maintenance of these spaces, reflecting on the disposal and safeguarding of school material culture. These issues were examined from the research in the collections of Pelotas Municipal School in Pelotas (Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil); the Farroupilha School, a private school located in Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil), and by analyzing administrative documents of these schools; conducting interviews, based on oral history and analysis of articles and book chapters written by one of the guardians. In this research it was used, fundamentally, the concepts of Cultural History, and the main categories of analysis of school material culture and its consequences. The time-lapse is concentrated in the last decade of the twentieth century and early decades of the twenty-first century, when it was influenced by the theories of the History of Present Time. The choice of these two institutions as research objects was due to the important references to the history of education in Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) and for being the first ones to constitute their memory spaces in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Therefore, I defend the thesis that the memory spaces, to be constituted as such, need – besides the institutional interest and specific public policies – the incentive coming from people that are responsible for their organization and guardianship, which I hereby characterize as guardians of the school memory.