A história da educação física e os primeiros cursos de formação superior no Brasil: o estabelecimento de uma disciplina (1929-1958)

Abstract

This thesis deals with the History of Physical Education (HPE) as a subject and its institutionalization in teacher education courses curricula in Physical Education (PE) between the years 1929 and 1958. The subject analysis through the courses curricula allowed us to establish connections with history teacher training in PE in Brazil by analyzing the relations between educational institutions and their curricula, with teachers and their productions on the subject. The objective is to understand, in a more expanded way, how the subject has established itself in an institutional and political context from the beginning of the 1930s and, in a more internal way, how this could be revealed through their contents and purposes in the compilations, books and education programs which could be considered as teachers practices at the time they taught the subject. Such analyzes had, as a starting point, Ivor Goodsons (1990, 2000) theoretical proposals on the social history of curriculum and subjects and André Chervels (1990) indications and his propositions on the genesis, function and operation of a subject. This theoretical framework, together with the sources, attempted to show the institutionalization process of the HPE, taking the educational institutions, their courses, subjects and teachers who produced it into account. Considering that the subject becomes part of teacher education by the insertion of PE in schools and the need for teacher training, HEF is established in relation to the production context of its teachers through their research career path. This movement of establishing institutional indicatives and revealing the subject contents through educational programs, books and manuals revealed that the subject seems to contribute to the establishment of theoretical support to educational processes in PE. Teachers productions showed that one of the great commitments of the subject was connected to the PE French Method legitimation in Brazil over the 1930s. Being a markedly theoretical subject, HPE has permeated all the analyzed courses curriculum, establishing a "foreign" reading in the history of PE as a way to legitimate pedagogical training for its role. From the late 1940s the subject has its themes expanded to national issues and that indicates the projection of future methods or national PE systems, in a way that it contributes to the construction of a place for the History of National Physical Education in their programs. HPE alignment with Universal History themes in a linear and chronological order, philosophical history as an antiquity debtor and the attempt of establishing a utility for HPE were constant in the course over the decades which were analyzed. The sources allowed the investigation of teaching concepts comprising the topics and contents which were at stake in this process, together with institutional actions developed by the New State through the Division of PE. There was a concern that the subject would occupy a place of apparent theoretical transition to "practice" in those curricula, coupled with their pedagogical sections. It was clear that, in this process, HPE could provide explanatory theories which were able to articulate the past corroborating the pedagogical intervention methods of the present.