Primary School Teachers who wrote Textbooks for their Students. Argentina, early XX Century

Abstract

This article brings together the first advances of a line of research that investigates primary teachers who, in addition to exercising in the classroom, wrote textbooks for their students during the first half of the twentieth century in Argentina. Numerous evidences were found that suggest that teachers, as literate agents, brought complexity to the classroom with teaching practices by writing materials for their students, among which we can mention manuals, reading books or literacy cards. In this article, textbooks are used as territories of symbolic imposition and institutionalization of relations between knowledge and power in the school (Martínez Bontafé as cited in Sardi, 2010, p. 91). First, the characteristic notes of the Argentine educational system of the period —in which these women taught and for which they produced their writings— are studied, since they are fundamental for understanding the subsequent analysis of textbooks.