A ortopedia mental: contribuições de Helena Antipoff para a educação especial

Abstract

The mental orthopedics was used in the 1930s by the Russian psychologist and educator Helena Antipoff, to provide guidelines for pedagogical practices applied in special classes at schools in the state of Minas Gerais. The concept was created by psychologists and educators such as Alfred Binet, in the early twentieth century to appoint a set of exercises designed to stimulate and promote childrens development and organization of intellectual abilities: attention, memory, perception and others. The research presented here investigated the mental orthopedics method developed by Antipoff, focusing on its theoretical foundations. The sources for this research are Antipoffs texts on special education, published in two volumes of the Collected Works written by Helena Antipoff, and organized in 1992. The texts in theCollection which were analyzed were those focusing on mental orthopedics and the Bulletin 14 of the Department of Education and Public Health, 1934. Helena Antipoff came to Brazil in 1929, invited by the state government so as to help program the Francisco Campos-MarioCasassanta educational reform and direct the Laboratory of Psychology of the Belo Horizonte Improvement School, an institution for the formation of teachers and education technicians. Among the targets of the proposed reform there was the process driven towards thehomogenization of the classes. During the implementation of homogeneous classes held from 1930 to 1935, the Russian psychologist criticized the limitations of this sole action andconcluded that only the homogenization would not bring sufficient results for the students learning and development. The students should also be offered the teaching matching their development. And to reach this goal she endeavored to propose and train teachers to run programs that could provide children with an education that respected their particularities.One such program was the Mental Orthopedics, a technique used by Binet which the Russian educator adapted adding educational principles and techniques from several other authors such as: Alice Descoeudres, Maria Montessori, Édouard Claparède, among others. Antipoff considered mental orthopedics as a teaching method as it was composed not only of exercises to be proposed to the students, but also contained a series of guidelines driven to the teaching performance. These guidelines included aspects such as the selection of teachers for the courses, the posture to be followed in the implementation of the exercises and the need to build up involvement between teachers and students. Thus, using mental orthopedics the author valued the commitment and creativity that the teacher should have with their class when developing activities that will awaken the childrens interest and at the same time develop their mental capacities.