Geography and school cartography: what do teachers from the initial series know and how do they teach?

Abstract

This text results from an investigation on knowledges and practices of teachers of the initial series of Fundamental Education and their use of the school municipal atlas. We have sought in this study to inspect closely the teaching practices of two teachers of the fourth grade of Fundamental Education in a state school of the city of Limeira, State of São Paulo. The article seeks to identify processes that structure and characterize the actions of these teachers with the use of theme pages and school maps of the municipal atlas, focusing particularly not so much on the forms of construction of knowledge with the atlas, but on the basis of the knowledge and on which knowledges help to structure the teaching situations promoted by the teachers with the use of these didactic materials in the classroom. Making use of methodological foundations of a qualitative approach to educational research, we reached the conclusion that the knowledges of these teachers about cartographical facts have their origins in the daily experience of their teaching work; they involve knowledges that come from the contact with other experienced teachers; from images and memories of the time when they themselves were students; and from the use of textbooks. We observed with the subjects of this investigation that the atlas gives rise in the school context to stimulating teaching and learning processes, in the sense of dealing with local problems experienced both by teachers and by pupils.