Una nueva manera de interpretar los cuadernos escolares: las escrituras al margen

Abstract

[EN]The Pedagogical Museum Center of University of Salamanca (CEMUPE) has an archive that contains approximately one thousand notebooks that have been classified according to different categories, the oldest one from 1868. Written materials that vividly show how schoolwork used to be and how it has evolved along the years. These school materials help us feel closer to past times, to everyday school practice when teaching children. They also allow us to get close to life outside the school, since they display all those components from the social, political or family sphere which students and schoolteachers found most interesting, and which were written on paper. From all these materials we are just going to make use of those pages which offer information directly related to two areas: one that is objective and rather formal, the explicit curriculum worked at school; and another one called subjective and sentimental. These two dimensions form the core content of this study which their authors have entitled “Jotted notes in the margin”. In short, an attractive task tracing life and feelings in the notes written by infant hands, sometimes expressed like statements, or as part of the content of the lesson, and occasionally notes that are jotted in the margin; that is to say, unconventional writing, which does not follow curriculum content completely, but instead it escapes from the network weaved by legislation and the schoolteacher’s habitus. Thoughts and feelings, these are the key issues. We will analyse, study and transfer a cultural background which is still valuable for present day school and the one to come in the near future.