Teacher education and the São Paulo Normal Schools: a study of the discipline of Educational Biology

• Main Author: Viviani, Luciana Maria
• Publication Date: 2005
• Format: Article
• Language: por
• Source: Educação e Pesquisa
• Download full: https://www.revistas.usp.br/ep/article/view/27971
• topic: Biologia educacional; Escola normal; História das disciplinas; Educational Biology; Normal School; History of the disciplines

This work presents results of a research on the history of the discipline of Educational Biology (1933 to 1970) within the Normal Schools in the State of São Paulo. The formulations of this discipline were part of projects of educational reform under way in the country since the 1920s, engendering specific needs for the education of teachers, and for their future professional practice. This process, as well as the social objectives and purposes of this discipline, were analyzed through the examination of the action of different groups of social, political, and professional interest. The study also focused on the forms in which the scientific knowledge available at the time was recreated to serve that education process. Theoretically grounded on the works of André Chervel and Ivor Goodson, this study assumes the creative character of school productions, taking into account their possibilities to reconstruct academic knowledges, and to form individuals and also a school culture, giving birth to standards that reach out into other social spheres. The investigation was based on the analyses of teaching plans and programs, didactic manuals, archive documentation, and teachers' testimonies. Several forms of organizing the contents were identified, with emphasis on the most successful pattern, based on the binomial heredity-environment, considered as a key to understand the human individualities and, consequently, to the work of the educator to prepare her students to maximum physical and mental efficiency. The study also recognized the construction of profiles of social action associated to children, mothers and housewives, as well as of an ideal of professional performance regarded as modern.