De “natürliche turnen” a “método natural austríaco”: itinerários de uma proposta pedagógica para a Educação Física no Brasil (1950-1970)

Abstract

The present study focus on the circulation and appropriation of what was called in Brazil Método Natural Austríaco [Austrian Natural Gymnastics] in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s in the context of Physical Education teacher training. In the search for the traces of that past, a few collections and libraries were accessed, among them: the Institut für Sportwissenchaft’s library at Graz, Austria, the Centro de Memória da Educação Física, do Esporte e do Lazer [Physica Education, Sports and Leisure Memory Center, in the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, Centro de Memória Inezil Penna Marinho [Inezil Penna Marinho’s Memory Center], in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Professor Germano Bayer’s Collection, in Curitiba, the Centro de Memoria da Educación Física del Instituto Superior de Educación Física [Physical Education Memory Center of Physical Education Higher Institute], in Montevidéu, among others. I have gathered a diverse set of sources, composed of books, manuals, teaching plans, newpapers reports, texts from specialized journals, photografies, movies, among others. For that investigative exercize, it became important to getting to know the subjects and the strategies used for promoting the circulation of the natural austrian gymnastics in Brazil, as well as comprehending the elements of the Brazilian contexts from the 1950s to the 1970s. It was also important to build approximations with the socio-cultural conditions that made it possible for Natürliche Turnen to be forged in Austria in the interwar period. The Austrian teachers Karl Gaulhofer and Margarete Streicher were the method’s promoters and have shared a sociocultural dynamics in which many movements that aimed at changes in the social structures have hatched in Europe. In that dynamics, they projected a Physical Education was based mainly in the children’s ‘natural movements’, being, therefore, important to respect her biological Development, coming closer again to nature, extirpate the precocious specialization and the strictly military goals. That pedagogical systematization was presented to the Brazilian teacher corpus in 1957, being announced by Gerhard Schmidt who, in that year, was still a young student of Physical Education and Natural History in Vienna’s University. It was received in our country at the same time several practices and methodological perspectives for Physical Education were put into circulation, both in short period intensive courses as well as higher education courses. Many subjects have participated in its circulation and appropriation dynamics, producing books, manuals, articles in specialized journals, giving lectures, courses and classes. Practices that made it possible to disseminate this method in Brazil until the end of the 1970s. In that movement, that comprised the production of “new” meanings and goals, that pedagogical proposal was being constituted and strengthen in Brazil with the denomination of Método Natural Austríaco.