Political and epistemological frontiers: grammatical books and Portuguese Language teaching at the Normal School of Sao Paulo between 1880 and 1900

Abstract

Throughout the 19th century, hundreds of Portuguese language grammatical works published in Brazil and Portugal reached the hands of Brazilian students. Starting from this scenario, I intend in this post-doctoral project, linked to the Thematic Project Knowledge and practices in Frontiers: toward a transnational history of education (1810 -...) in axis 1 Digital archives and libraries: history of books and reading, to investigate a circumscribed set of grammatical works that were selected to compose the collection of the library of the Normal School of Sao Paulo between 1880 and 1900, in order to develop an analysis of the content of these books and, above all, the relationship of this corpus with the Portuguese language teaching at that school, responsible for training future Portuguese language teachers in several schools in the Province of Sao Paulo. Although grammars were not part of the first titles brought from France, in 1883, by Paulo Bourroul, who started the history of this library, I found in its collection, now belonging to the School of Education of the University of São Paulo, 13 grammatical works from the 19th century. This project aims to investigate the moment of arrival of these works at the Normal School de Sao Paulo, investigating also the way in which Portuguese language teaching took place before the recurrent change of teachers that was related to the frequent party changes in the troubled scenario during the end of the Empire and beginning of the Republic. Therefore, based on Lauwers (2004), I will divide my analysis into discrete facts, those seen with the naked eye, and global facts, which can only be seen from the relationship between discrete facts, in order to understand how each of these spheres, library, teaching and politics, acted interdependently in the 19th century Sao Paulo educational context. (AU)