As práticas de ensino de desenho na escola modelo Benedito Leite (1900 – 1920)

Abstract

In the early years of the 20th century, the Benedito Leite Model School served as an application school for future normal school teachers, whose training was carried out at the Normal School of São Luís, where through observation and exercise they began in the practice of teaching on its premises. Among the subjects indicated in the regulations of this school, Drawing was present. That said, this research aims to analyze the teaching practices of Drawing present in the professional performance of teachers of the first school years at Escola Modelo Benedito Leite in São Luís, Maranhão, within the chronological framework from 1900 to 1920. This time frame refers to to the period which historians of education point out as the intuitive teaching method in Brazil, which caused changes in the way of teaching knowledge, as it prioritized the use of the senses and the manipulation of objects. It is also worth mentioning that the year 1900 coincides with the functioning of the Model School Benedito Leite. In this sense, we seek to answer the following research question: What teaching practices of Drawing were developed by normal school teachers from Maranhão during the exercise of their professional performance at Escola Modelo Benedito Leite, São Luís (1900-1920)? This is a qualitative research with a historical-documentary approach, which takes as its main theoretical contributions Chartier (1990), Chervel (1990) and Julia (2001) to understand the concept of practices and the existence of a school culture, specific to the school. The listed sources involve legislation, decrees, laws, regulations, newspapers, pedagogical magazines that inform about the teaching of Drawing at the Model School Benedito Leite, researched in the following archives (physical and digital): São Luís Public Library, Artistic and Historical Museum of Maranhão, Josué Montelo Library, Public Archive of the State of Maranhão and Liceu Maranhense Archive. The analyses show that the Benedito Leite Model School was founded on May 6, 1896, through Law No. 155, but its operation actually took place in 1900. Founded to be an application school for Escola Normal students, it stood out for being a secular school, with a curricular organization in the elitist model, being a reference of modern education in Maranhão. The results found allow us to affirm that the teaching of Drawing was present in the school culture of Escola Modelo Benedito Leite, where the teaching practice of the normal school students was focused on drawing as a copy of the natural, which guided all other drawing practices, namely, memory, spontaneous, group objects and perspective. The object of this teaching was to achieve the purpose of educating the eye and the hand, indispensable for practical life. The practices involved in this teaching were related to the intuitive method. In order to comply with this method, the contents of the Drawing discipline, for each year, were taught from the simple to the complex, from the concrete to the abstract, based on observation, manipulation and reproduction of objects and beings from a real model, with such contents being presented to students gradually, successively and in progressing levels of difficulty.