Los modelos de renovación pedagógica en la escuela republicanauna aproximación desde los discursos del magisterio

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to analyse the models of pedagogical renewal that prevail between the teachers of the Second Spanish Republic, by means of the study of discourses and practices of active primary teachers throughout the country. To carry out this task, I use original sources: the documents preserved from the competitive public exams of candidates for the position of school headteachers held in 1932. During this selection process, applicants had to elaborate a report of their professional life, which could be supported by any kind of documents. These life stories, produced by teachers, offer testimonies and different materials about school culture and educational practice during the twenties and the thirties. Therefore, these files provide an unprecedented opportunity to study the construction of the professional identities of these teachers and their relation with pedagogical renewal movements. Through the use of these new sources, I address to answer three research questions: 1) Are competitive public exam files a valuable source for studying the school practices of teachers. 2) What were the models of pedagogical renewal of primary teachers of the Second Republic. 3) Did these models mean significant changes in the grammar of schooling during this period. The methodology used to analyse the documentation and answer these questions has been essentially qualitative, given the biographical nature of the sources. Mainly, discourse analysis techniques have been used, developed under the theoretical framework of the Grounded Theory. In this way, I have generated the explanatory categories in which the proposed renewal models have been built. The conclusions of the investigation are as follows. Firstly, I have proved the usefulness of the competitive exam files in order to study the school and professional culture of teachers. These sources offer us a very rich information about the daily practices and the ways of appropriation of the pedagogical discourses made by schoolteachers. Secondly, I have identified and described two models of pedagogical renewal that existed during the thirties and their practical translations in schools. The first of these is based on different levels of appropriation of the principles and methods of the New Education movement. The second is grounded in the pedagogical ideas of the regenerationism, which remained in use by teachers and were synthesized on the fin-de-siècle concepts of encyclopedism and graded school. Finally, it is concluded that the involvement of teachers in these models of pedagogical renewal did not imply, in most cases, a significant transformation of daily school practices, demonstrating the resistance of the grammar of schooling to the educational changes.