Different possibilities of analysis of a school notebook

Abstract

This article, conducted in the perspective of cultural history, aims to discuss possibilities of analysis considering a real historical source. Considering schoolbooks as important products of the school culture that reveal the vestiges of school practices, three articles were selected from the “XV Seminário Temático – Cadernos escolares de alunos e professores e a história da educação matemática, 1890-1990” [XV Thematic Seminar - school notebooks from students and teachers of the history of mathematics education, 1890-1990] that used the same schoolbook as the research source. This is the notebook of former student Juvenal Rosa Nunes called “school diary”, produced in the year 1954 when she attended the 4th year of primary education in the Grupo Escolar Ramiz Galvão, located in Rio Pardo in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. The authors of the articles, in their analyzes, selected the content of divisibility and arithmetic problems. They compared this notebook with different documents, such as educational legislation, periodicals and pedagogical manuals of the period. The analyses of the notebook reveal not only aspects related to the student, but also traces of what the teacher emphasized in teaching, method, activities, tactics, as well as vestiges of the social and economic context where it was produced. The article reveals that even though the authors started from the same place, which is the interdisciplinary field of Mathematical Education History, the research considered different perspectives and vestiges that complement each other, composing an intelligible whole. This reaffirms the importance of the schoolbook as a research source for the history of education and allows us to state that other researchers, occupying different places, can explore the same schoolbook and unveil many other vestiges of school practices in this historical context.