Culture and Society
Insights from Brazilian Research through the Words of Tânia Braga Garcia
di Marta Guarducci | 03 02 2025
What are we talking about in this article?
The interview explores the contribution of Brazilian research to the international debate on the relationship between traditional textbooks and digital educational resources. This area of study, at the crossroads of tradition and innovation, has given rise to a community that involves not only scholars and experts but also teachers and students, who are the main protagonists of the educational experience.
Through an analysis of educational policies, school practices, and technological resources, the interview reflects on the possibilities of an inclusive, future-oriented education that can integrate both traditional and digital media to address the challenges of the present.
Field of Intervention
Culture and Society
From a long time, the sAu Research Center has been committed to valorising an idea of non-hegemonic knowledge but as the construction of a common good. That is / must be the result of a collaboration between socio-cultural and economic fields that – until now – have been kept strictly distinct.
The relationship between textbooks and educational media (printed and/or digital materials, designed to provide information to students and enrich their intellectual content, significantly contributing to the learning process) has been the focus of the XVII IARTEM Conference. For years, there has been an ongoing debate about the relationship between traditional textbooks and digital teaching tools. On one side, there are those who consider the textbook as the central, irreplaceable element of teaching, and on the other, those who hope for the possibility of its integration with other sources of information and documentation.
In your opinion, what is the added value of a teaching model that combines traditional textbooks with the potential of digital tools?
An apparently simple answer to that question would highlight the universe of possibilities that open up when printed books and digital media are integrated as technologies, resources or tools in the teaching and learning processes of the school syllabus. Certainly, the combination of resources produced on different media and in different languages stimulates richer, more diverse and complex learning. Taking the textbook as a central reference, we can remember Alain Choppin’s concepts about the satellites that traditionally orbit around it, such as maps, pictures, sets of letters and numbers, among other printed resources. Nowadays, satellites also orbit in virtual spaces and include complementary texts, images, simulations and videos, and they also offer access to museums, exhibitions and places that are physically distant from textbooks and students. The advantages of combining teaching resources should not hide the complexity of the relationship between printed and digital, a topic that has occupied the attention of researchers and educators at IARTEM conferences and other scientific meetings related to the educational field. Two points can contribute to analyzing the proposed question.
First, history shows us that a new technology does not always eliminate or replace the existence of another, older and less advanced one; for different reasons they can coexist over time, including the fact that old technologies can remain useful for certain specific or more basic functions – and are therefore considered necessary for the social life of certain groups. Printed textbooks (as old technology) and digital media (as new technologies) have their own specificities and therefore require specialized knowledge both in their production and in their use. The simultaneous existence of these resources available for teaching is an issue directly related to teacher training; they must act not only as readers and writers of printed texts, but also as subjects of radically new learning, an expression used by Roger Chartier when analyzing the digital revolution.
The second point that contributes to reflecting on the issue refers to the processes by which technologies are appropriated in different social spaces determined by the historical and cultural characteristics and the level of development of each society. The relationship between printed textbooks and digital media is conditioned by the technological asymmetries between countries and the inequalities in people’s access to these cultural products. The production and re-elaboration of teaching models for children and young people become a particularly complex and challenging issue in societies marked by processes of social (and thus, technological) exclusion, such as Brazil. Despite economic inequalities and the difficulties and limits of access to networks, the presence of digital media in social life is a global reality and this makes their presence in school life mandatory. It’s no longer enough to read printed books, that’s a fact; but the ways of establishing relationships between printed materials and digital media will be diverse, specific and appropriate to each society and its educational systems.
As the leader of the Didactic Group, School Practices and Educational Publications in Brazil (CNPq), can you tell us what contribution the Country is going to bring to the international research on textbooks and digital educational content?
In order to point out the contribution that Brazilian research can make to this topic, I need to highlight two elements.
First, in Brazil we live with technologies that have great social repercussions, such as the one that allows people to vote using electronic voting machines, even in communities where access is difficult, such as river communities deep in the Amazon; and we have equipment that allows highly complex medical procedures, mobile telephony, computer networks, among others; but at the same time, a significant part of the population is still far from the goods and products that are necessary for contemporary life, such as access to electricity and digital networks. These conditions set priorities for research, especially in educational research. The prioritization in the country does not cause scientific limitations in Brazilian production, but it does accentuate the relevance of the social dimension in the themes and objects researched.
Therefore, this is the first element to consider when evaluating the contributions of Brazilian research: we produce knowledge that addresses the Brazilian reality and seeks answers to the questions it raises.
The second element is related to the presence of textbooks and digital media in public schools as a State policy. In 1985, at the end of the Military Dictatorship, the Brazilian government created an official program to evaluate and distribute free textbooks to public schools, the PNLD (National Textbook Program), which has been maintained for three decades, but has been improved and expanded. The program established conditions for socially vulnerable groups to have access to textbooks for all school subjects, helping to face historical problems of school failure due to the distance between students and written materials. From the point of view of research, the existence of the PNLD is a factor that has instigated studies with different focuses and problems, addressing specific issues in different areas of knowledge, studies related to different modalities, educational levels and school communities. The country can therefore present to the international community contributions from researchers and groups located in different universities in the country, such as the HISALES group – History of Literacy, Reading, Writing and Schoolbooks, created by researcher Dr. Eliane Peres, at the Faculty of Education of the Federal University of Pelotas; the ALFALE group – Literacy and Lettering, created by researcher Dr. Cancionila Janzkovski Cardoso, at the Federal University of Mato Grosso – Rondonópolis Campus; at the Faculty of Education of the University of São Paulo there is a textbook library, created from the work of researcher Dr. Circe Bittencourt, a historian of textbooks in Brazil; at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte the PNLD Memorial was created in 2010 by researcher Dr. Margarida Dias de Oliveira, to make the PNLD textbook collection available and to carry out studies in particular on History textbooks.
Regarding the production of the group I personally coordinate at the Federal University of Paraná, I would like to point out that it is certified by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and has received financial support for two decades; this support allowed to develop projects, organize events and publications and train researchers, particularly on the subject of textbooks. The research group works in articulation with the Didactic Publications Research Centre (NPPD), which carries out teaching, research and extension activities on the subject of textbooks and educational media.
The PNLD has also acted as a catalyst for research carried out by the group’s participants in the different school subjects.
In a recent mapping of the group’s production, we recorded 138 master’s and doctoral research projects supervised by the nine permanent researchers between 2002 and 2023. I would particularly highlight the contribution of studies of a didactic and epistemological nature, whether from the point of view of the knowledge conveyed, the relationship with the formal curriculum, or even from the point of view of teachers and students about the use of textbooks.
I would also highlight studies that focus on teacher’s manuals and include works on general didactics, the didactics of natural sciences, history and music, among others. Our contribution can also come from studies on textbooks and other resources, including digital ones, carried out in schools in rural areas and indigenous communities. The diversity of contributions has been possible due to the presence in the group of researchers from the Education Sciences alongside researchers from different disciplinary fields, broadening the possibilities of approaches and of privileged research objects.
What are the best practices in the integrated use of textbooks and digital resources? And how do these practices promote inclusive education that values diversity?
An intense relationship with the printed book underlies the Modern School, a civilization project that is undoubtedly the hallmark of the way we understand the purposes of schooling. The form of the school, a concept used by Vincent, Lahire and Thin to explain the emergence of the pedagogical relationship at a given moment in the history of Western societies, established textbooks as an essential resource to fulfil the function of mass schooling: to spread reading and writing. Centuries separate us from the historical moment when teaching was located within a specific social institution (the school), organized in specific spaces and times to fulfil its function. Since then, printed books have circulated, been used, caused criticism, built identities, guided teachers and students along certain methodological paths, constituted and consolidated certain ways of teaching. They have often been accompanied by satellites that expand, enrich and complement school knowledge, initially only in a printed form, until a new moment, when doors were opened to a universe of sound and visual resources available on other media. These resources have gradually produced transformations in the ways of teaching, with different nuances, since in each context and at each time, school processes are adapted, reorganized and adjusted to meet social demands. Despite the permanence of some practices, such as the use of textbooks, schools have changed over the centuries. It can be understood, with the support of some historians of the book, that at this moment in the history of schooling, digital media are causing a rupture, not just a transformation.
For Chartier – if we understand the book as an object handled by the reader, organized in notebooks, with pages, in a sequence – we can speak of a revolution in the structures of the material support of writing and, therefore, in the ways of reading. I believe that this is a central issue to guide the search for school practices that situate teachers and students in the contemporary world, not just to consume printed or digital products, but to understand the cultural processes of production and consumption, in their possibilities and limits; to recognize their effects on the constitution of subjects and social communities and groups; to discuss their consequences in relation to the other dimensions of social life, including the political and economic dimension; to scientifically analyze arguments and the logics that organize discourses.
We may not be able to think of teaching models to meet these needs, but we can outline some theoretical and methodological principles to guide educational actions that will contribute to a more inclusive education, accompanying and evaluating the movement of the ongoing revolution. There are difficulties and risks in establishing relationships between the old and the new. With regard to these risks, I have selected a piece of advice given by Gian Guido Giannini to bookbinders in his precious work entitled Il dilettante legatore di libri (1923), which could perhaps be useful when associating printed books with digital media in school teaching, and which I have freely translated here: we can look for the new, I admit, but not blindly; and if we don’t know the old, we can inadvertently run the risk of mixing the new and the old, and therein lies the grotesque.
Your research activity is characterized by a clear, strong cultural and social mission: to build an educational environment in which the student, such as the teacher, is an active builder of knowledge. This research involves scholars and experts, but, above all, those who will be the beneficiaries of its results. Could you tell us how the many projects you have conducted with schools – including in the remote areas of Brazil – align with this approach?
I’d like to mention some of the elements that shaped my training as a teacher, which help to justify the choices I made in developing the projects. Before starting my professional activity at university, I worked as a primary school teacher for two decades, teaching children and young people. During this time I also had the opportunity to analyze and elaborate materials for teachers, teach training courses for teachers, take part in technical groups to produce curricula, and propose and monitor educational projects. Despite this work, systematic academic research was not part of my remit, which seemed to me to be an unjustified limitation. I felt that producing knowledge about education and teaching should be the job of every teacher and that concrete conditions should be provided to make this possible. In this first phase of my professional life, I had access to studies based on Paulo Freire’s propositions about the relationship between school knowledge and local culture, as well as learning processes from a cultural-historical perspective, which have been widespread in Brazil since the 1980s; they have strengthened my conviction about the need for subjects to be actively involved in their learning processes.
The research training carried out at the University of São Paulo helped me to highlight the links between epistemology and didactics and to consolidate my position of refusing the distinction (in the sense given by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology) between primary school teachers and higher education teachers justified by the dissociation between teaching and research. So, when I started working at the university, I also positioned myself to advocate for research as a constitutive part of the teaching role at any level of education and, based on this position, projects were developed with the participation of colleagues who were also looking for forms of action based on the principles of collaborative knowledge production.
The Brazilian university is based on the principle that teaching, research and outreach are inseparable, so my career focused on projects in which all three functions were covered. The Recreating Histories project, which was carried out in municipalities surrounding the city of Curitiba between 1997 and 2014, is an example of a way of working in which university professors and students, together with students and teachers from the early years of primary school and the school community, investigated, systematized and produced knowledge in the field of history teaching, Understanding and connecting elements of history theory to the processes of teaching and learning historical knowledge at this stage of schooling. The general principles of these projects have recently been taken up in the preparation of a proposal to be developed in an indigenous village school in the north of the country, under the coordination of colleague Dr. Diego Marinho de Gois, teacher of the Federal University of Western Pará; the work is in the initial stages of organization in order to meet the demands of the school community and respect its specificities.
In the proceedings of the XVII IARTEM Conference, you co-authored the chapter titled “History of Grandparents: A Reading Book That Circulates in Guinea-Bissau”. Along with Professor Ró Gilberto Gomes Cá, you describe a study conducted on the textbooks circulated in Guinea-Bissau, which were valued as a “space of memory.” In what sense can the writing of a book be interpreted as a tool for preserving individual and collective knowledge?
The conceptualization of the school textbook as a space of memory is based on the work of Agustín Escolano Benito. For him, the importance given to the objects of school material culture by education historians has only occurred in recent decades, following the contributions of the New Cultural History, understanding that cultural production also materializes in the teaching programs, textbooks and other teaching resources of a given period. Textbooks represent valued images, forms of communication used by society, values, stereotypes and ideologies that make up the dominant way of thinking in a given period.
This printed or digital object also records methodological choices, strategies for teaching, selected resources and other didactic elements that allow the researcher to get closer to the school processes at a given period and place. Conventions and formal elements are also an expression of the society in which the textbook was produced and elements of the culture in which it circulates. Therefore, the textbook can be understood as a space of memory. Even if it is not produced intentionally to preserve individual and collective knowledge, the textbook materializes a selection made with the aim of focusing on and teaching certain content to the new generations, in other words, a selection that defines the cultural heritage to be transferred by the school. For this reason, the textbook is a source for understanding education and schooling in a given time and place.
In the particular case of the mentioned study, Guinea-Bissau, the textbooks published and reprinted successively from the 1990s onwards express mainly cultural elements derived from the presence of the Portuguese colonizer, considering that the country’s independence took place in the 1970s. The record of the printing and reprinting of these books in other countries allows the researcher to inquire about the existence of publishing houses in the country; the recorded print runs lead to analyses of the conditions of access to books by the school population; the presence of names, dances and stories makes it possible to locate elements related to local cultures in books written in Portuguese, the language of the colonizer. As well as expressing elements of the history of schooling in the country, which corresponds to a certain project of civilization, textbooks can represent a link between subjects of the same generation who have shared texts, images or even a specific type of teaching activity and keep memories of their relationship with this knowledge.
The Book
Disciplinary and trans-disciplinary knowledge and skills for an uncertain future
Are educational media up to it?
“scientia Atque usus” Research Center for Generative Communication is working on a project on Generative Writing, a form of collaborative writing that values the specificities of all individuals involved, in the perspective of carrying out a shared project. It is, therefore, a writing process that truly belongs to all participants and can be applied in the educational context, fostering collaboration between teachers and students for the self-production of texts. Do you believe that, in the contemporary educational context, this form of writing is being experimented in schools?
I have my doubts about whether there are many proposals like this circulating in school cultures, whether schools are experiencing ways of sharing writing in groups committed to common goals, nevertheless respecting the specificities of each collaborator. I see some similarities between this proposal and the ways in which we have worked on collaborative projects with teachers and students, in the sense that they have resulted in products written by different authors. But I understand that there are elements that were not present in our work and that make Generative Writing a precious and necessary project, especially in the face of the transformations or revolutions caused by digital technologies and online forms of communication.
Children and young people read texts and write messages on mobile phone screens very naturally and educators and researchers are wondering about the effects of these cultural practices on the cognitive, social and affective development of the new generations.
Project
Book “Generative Writing. What Communication for the Digital Text”
The volume – published within the editorial series “sAu Community” – redefines the concept of collaborative writing through the technique of Generative Communication to counter the spread of digital neotaylorism, which is based on a depressing mechanistic and assembly logic. In the volume, therefore, generative writing is discussed: collaborative, cognitive, creative and inclusive.
On the other hand, information management specialists are announcing the effects of new ways of keeping and accessing data, processes that are recognized as distinct from traditional ways of organizing physical collections and making them available to any interested people, which will enable authors to produce new forms of writing and, as a result, new ways of reading. The social practices of reading and writing take on new meanings and travel new paths. Readers are also navigators and writers are providers of routes for navigation, point by point, chosen from an ocean of possibilities. In this context, promoting collaboration between teachers and students in the production of texts, which is the aim of this project, can be a form of resistance to the process of extinction of our creative and inventive capacity, which is revealed in the complexity of a poem, the lyrics of a song, a novel or a chronicle and even in the surprise of an unexpected rhyme or in the construction of a scientific argument with absolutely no antecedent, which no Artificial Intelligence could produce.
The project on Generative Writing has opened up room for curiosity and hope in my reflections on the complex times in which we live. Perhaps it can create paths and show us escape routes starting at school, to avoid forgetting what we have learnt about writing and other forms of human communication over a long period of time.
Author
Marta Guarducci
Member of “scientia Atque usus” Research Center for Generative Communication.
Research assistant at Center for Generative Communication of University of Florence.
Interviewee
Tânia Braga Garcia
Dr Tânia Braga Garcia is Professor at the Master and Doctoral Program in Education at the Federal University of Paraná. She holds a doctoral degree in Education from the University of São Paulo (USP/ Brazil), is the head of the Research Center on Didactic Publications (NPPD/UFPR) and a board member of the International Association for Research on Textbooks and Educational Media (IARTEM). She has a research grant funded by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (Brazil). Her main research interests include didactics, textbooks and educational media, qualitative research in education, ethnography and collaborative research.